< PREVIOUS ] [ 1995 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
One of Colorado's abiding mysteries may be solved -- the
origin of the word Poncha,
as in 9,019-foot Poncha
Pass between the Arkansas and San Luis valleys, the Poncha
Hot Spring and the town of Poncha Springs.
Colorado references offer these origins for Poncha:
1) It is a Spanish word for gentle,
and it got
the name from Juan Bautista de Anza, the New Mexico
territorial governor who made the first recorded crossing
in 1779.
The problem is that no Spanish dictionary I've seen
lists poncha
for gentle. Nobody I know who speaks
Spanish can think of any such locution. Further, Anza's
journal complained about the difficulty of getting his 800
soldiers there 2,400 horses through a very narrow canyon
with almost inaccessible sides
which cost us
considerable work to conquer.
Those are hardly the words of a man who would christen
that pass gentle.
2) It is a misspelling of pancho, a Spanish word for belly or paunch, and the sag in the mountains at the pass inspired the comparison.
In that case, wouldn't there be a Pancho Pass somewhere else in the West? Wouldn't this one show up somewhere as Pancho? It has been spelled a lot of ways -- Puntia, Punche, Poncho, etc. -- but I've never seen it as Pancho.
So that doesn't make much sense, either.
3) Some plant supposedly grew around the pass once upon a time. It was an herb that the Utes smoked instead of tobacco, and they called it Poncha.
If so, why no mention of this plant in books about the Utes? Why isn't there a poncha herb listed in any guide to native plants of the Rocky Mountains? Most persuasively, why didn't any counter-culture type in 1969 mention smoking poncha? I remember hearing about mountain mushrooms, morning-glory seeds, jimson weed, various nightshades and alkaloids -- but never any poncha.
It is my firm belief that if there was any smokable substance called poncha, then mountain hippies would have been burning it 25 years ago, our General Assembly would have by 1972 made its sale or possession a felony, and the DEA would to this day be dispatching black helicopters over selected rural areas to spot and eradicate poncha plants -- if there ever had been such a plant.
So this explanation doesn't hold up, either.
I asked a Poncha resident if there were any local
theories, and he said there was only one. Every spring,
we say it's from an Indian word for 'place where the wind
rips the flesh from your bones,' but that's probably just
folklore.
As I've noted, Poncha has been spelled many different ways. This suggests that the term was originally a Ute word, which Spanish and American chroniclers struggled to write in alphabets that weren't designed for Ute sounds.
For instance, we have the town and county of Saguache,
and the highest Rockies are found in the Sawatch Range.
Both Sawatch and Saguache are pronounced the same -- the
spelling differs because different people tried to write
down the Ute term for blue place
or green
earth.
(Both are reasonably accurate translations; the Ute spectrum, I have been informed, uses the same term for blue and green and all shades in between.)
So I pursued the Ute angle, and called Jeanne Englert, now of Lafayette. She used to live in Durango, and worked in Ignacio, where she edited the Southern Ute Drum about 20 years ago. Jeanne can't speak Ute, but she can read it -- she was around Southern Ute tribal headquarters in the late 1970s when the language got put into writing with a dictionary and grammar compiled by a professional linguist.
I can't think of anything in Ute that would sound
like Poncha,
she said, but I'll ask around.
She called back about a week later after talking to a friend in Ignacio, Annabelle Eagle.
We figured it out,
she told me. It started as
poo-paca [the pronunciation is something like 'pou'
followed by a sneeze].
The first word means path or trail, and the second
refers to a foot, hoof or shoe. So literally it is a
'footpath,' and that makes perfect sense -- most place
names that come from the Utes are descriptions, like
Saguache.
She went on to explain that Ute is a language that
assembles nouns to add words. English does this to some
degree with words like boardwalk
or
waterwheel,
and German does this with a vengeance --
what's a Sunday afternoon walk
in English is all one
word in German.
That explanation makes good Ute sense, Jeanne assured me. As for historical speculation, it's easy to imagine some conquistador or American officer venturing toward the pass, and asking his Ute guide what lay ahead.
A foot path
was the answer, except the explorer
heard something like Poncha
and recorded it in his
journal as Poncha, Puncha (Gunnison in 1853), Puntia
(Kansas Pacific Railroad plans in 1870), Punche (Fauntleroy
in 1855), Poncho (the town was founded in 1880 as Poncho
Springs), etc.
Without a time machine, we may never know for sure. But the footpath explanation makes more sense than any other, and I'm pleased to present this solution to the mystery. Now, if I can figure out where the Reynolds Gang buried all that gold in 1862 ...
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1995 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >