< PREVIOUS ] [ 2008 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Organizing events is not one of my strong points; it's
work enough to organize words. Nonetheless, for most of the
past 14 years, I've been more or less in charge of Anza Day
in Poncha Springs, Colorado. Actually, it's such a small
event that it should be called Anza Two Hours,
but
it still takes some work.
On Aug. 27, 1779, Ju an Bautista de Anza camped there with an army of 800 soldiers -- 200 of them Ute warriors -- and at least 2,000 horses on a military campaign that left the first written record of this part of the world. In a sense, I suppose, you could say that our history began then, if you define history as a written record of the past.
Anza was one of the most capable and energetic of
Spain's colonial governors, back when this was la
frontera del norte,
rather than the western
frontier.
He is fairly well known in California, at
least to history buffs, since he located the Presidio of
San Francisco in 1776, taking the route of what is now the
Juan Bautista de Anza
National Historic Trail.
In early 1779, he arrived in Santa Fé as governor of the Spanish province of New Mexico, which made him its military commander, too. The pueblos and farms in the Taos area were suffering from raids by the Jupe Comanche, who would ride in from the Great Plains, take horses, crops, and women, then ride back over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the plains.
Previous Spanish governors had tried pursuing the Comanche, without success. Anza came up with a new plan. When his scouts advised that the Comanche were coming, he fortified local villages, then raised an army and headed north into what is now the San Luis Valley of Colorado. He marched at night, so that any Comanche scouts would miss his cloud of dust.
Eventually he met the returning Comanche southwest of
present-day Pueblo, Colo., and killed their war chief,
Cuerno Verde -- Green Horn
in English, whose name is
now on a mountain that overlooks the battle site. Anza
returned to Santa Fé, and a peace was negotiated a
few years later.
Anza fascinates me for many reasons, but one is that he
illustrates the complexity of history. We tend to think of
Indians
as a monolithic group, but of course they
were not. The Spanish had promised to protect the Utes and
Pueblos of the upper Rio Grande valley from the Comanche (a
Ute term that means something like enemy
or
people who fight us
).
Clearly there were divisions, and that became clear when Anza's army encountered some Ute warriors camped near present-day Saguache, Colo. When the Utes learned that Anza planned to battle the Comanche, they wanted to ride along.
Anza Day got started in 1994 when I ran across Phil
Carson, who was working on his book Across the Northern
Frontier: Spanish Explorations in Colorado.
He said he
had a presentation about those explorations, and he'd love
to put it on sometime in Salida. A few weeks later, I was
standing in line at a picnic with John Engelbrecht, then
mayor of nearby Poncha Springs. I mentioned Carson's wish,
and noted that Anza had camped at the site of the town 115
years earlier. Engelbrecht said he would proclaim Anza Day,
arrange for the use of the town park and town hall, and get
the town to pay for a motel room. My job was to hustle some
money for an honorarium.
So it has gone in most years since then. I find a historian or history buff to talk, and we've heard about Anza from many perspectives. One year we had Wilfred Martinez of Pueblo, who has found the battle site, and whose great (six times) grandfather was Don Bernardo Miero y Pacheco, cartographer for Anza as well as the 1776 Dominguez-Escalante Expedition to Colorado's Western Slope.
Patty Limerick of the University of Colorado always gives great talks, and her 1997 Anza Day pr esentation was no exception. An environmental historian, Tom Wolf, talked about the ecological pressures -- horses were supplanting bison on the Plains -- that pushed the Comanche toward raiding along the Rio Grande. We've also heard from Don Garate, historical ranger at Tumacacori National Historic Park in Arizona, who impersonates Anza and is working on a three-volume biography. Since this was a military campaign, it seemed appropriate to get the perspective a military historian, and we got on e in 2007 from Lt. Col Chrisopher Rein, who teaches military history at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
This year, the speaker is Vincent C. de Baca, professor of history at Metropolitan State College in Denver. He edited the award-winning anthology La Gente: Hispano History and Life in Colorado, and he'll be talking about the conflicts between Hispanics and Comanche in the 18th century.
Anza Day starts with a potluck at 6 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 22, in Chipeta Park in Poncha Springs, followed by the presentation at 7 p.m. in the town hall across the street. It's free and open to the public, and if you're in the area then, I hope you'll drop by. Poncha Springs, at the junction of U.S. 285 and U.S. 50, is so small that you shouldn't have any trouble finding the event.
Over the years, I've enjoyed hearing many perspectives on Anza. And one of these years, I hope to get a Comanche historian, because I'd like hear their side of an important, if obscure, military campaign. That will add to the rewards that come from the work of organizing an event, even one as small as Anza Day.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2008 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >