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On Friday night, we'll be celebrating Anza Day in Poncha Springs. This might inspire some questions: Who was Anza, and why is there an Anza Day?
If by history
we mean a written record of the
past,
then the history of a big chunk of Colorado
begins with Anza, for he was the first to provide a record
of the territory between Alamosa and South Park.
Juan Bautista de Anza was an 18th-century officer in the Spanish colonial army of North America. He is best known to history as the founder of the Presidio of San Francisco. He was a good frontier officer; he led a party of 240 colonists north on a difficult trek from Sonora to San Francisco, and arrived with 242 -- one woman died en route, but three babies were born.
He thus established one of America's great cities in
1776. But as Patty Limerick once observed, Anza's bad
timing insured he would be little known to American
history. When it comes to paying attention to events
that occurred away from the eastern seaboard, in the 1770s
and 1780s, most American historians will claim that they
have a prior engagement,
she wrote.
Anza came to our part of the world in late 1778 when he arrived in Santa Fe to take office as Governor and Commander of New Mexico.
He faced an immediate challenge. The Jupe Comanche had been raiding settlements in the Taos area, as well as the Utes whom the Spanish had promised to protect. Previous commanders had just chased the Comanche, but once they got to the plains, the Comanche could easily escape the Spanish.
So Anza devised a different plan. When his scouts reported an imminent Comanche invasion, he would take an army north through the San Luis Valley and across Poncha Pass over to the upper Arkansas valley before heading east. If he timed it right, he'd stop the Comanche as they came out of the mountains. They'd have to fight his kind of pitched battle, rather than their hit-and-run tactics.
It worked out that way in the late summer of 1779, and
the Comanche chief Cuerno Verde (Green Horn
in
English) died in battle on Sept. 3. A nearby summit, Green
Horn Peak, highest of the Wet Mountains, commemorates the
battle.
Anza kept a journal, and it's the first written account of this part of Colorado. It was something I knew about in the summer of 1994, when I encountered Phil Carson, a writer then living in Pueblo.
During our conversation, he said he had a presentation about Spanish expeditions into Colorado, and for a small honorarium, he'd love to do it in Salida sometime.
Some weeks later, the Colorado Glider Association convened here, and Mark Emmer put on a picnic at his house. He invited many friends who did not glide, which is how I ended up standing in the food line behind John Engelbrecht, then the mayor of Poncha Springs.
He joked about how other mountain towns seemed to have festivals every other weekend, and maybe it was time for Poncha to try one. I told him about Carson, and by the time we got our grilled brats, the wheels were turning.
Engelbrecht soon used his powers of office to proclaim Anza Day and provide the town park and town hall. I twisted some arms for Carson's honorarium and hustled some publicity. Poncha Springs, where Anza camped on Aug. 27, 1779, had its first Anza Day 215 years later, on Aug. 27, 1994.
Thanks to the cooperation of the Poncha town government and the generosity of the people I hit up for contributions to pay the speaker, Anza Day has been held most years ever since, on the fourth weekend in August, since that's the closest convenient date to the anniversary of Anza's visit.
We've had a variety of speakers. Carson came back after
his book Along the Northern Frontier
was published.
Ron Kessler of Monte Vista praised Anza as one of America's
greatest frontiersmen.
Tom Wolf, then teaching at Colorado College, explained how horses threatened the Comanche's bison-based economy. Celinda Reynolds Kaelin of Florrisant talked about possible Anza routes across South Park and how the Utes rode with the Spanish army.
One memorable night we heard a great talk from Patty Limerick. She followed Don Garate, a Park Service ranger from Arizona who impersonates Anza. And we had a monumental thunderstorm.
This Friday, we'll hear from Dr. Wilfred O. Martinez of
Pueblo, who recently published Anza and Cuerno Verde:
Decisive Battle,
with his explanation of the likely
battle site southwest of Pueblo. As he observes in his
book, It would have been more interesting and relevant
to history classes in school if Anza and Cuerno Verde had
shared equal billing with the likes of Paul Revere.
He speaks at 8 p.m. Friday; there's a potluck picnic in the town park at 7 p.m., and it's all free and open to the public. Drop by if you're in the neighborhood, but don't expect a major production. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing about Anza Day is that it started small, and it's stayed that way -- a low-key small-town celebration of the start of our history.
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