THE SPANISH ENTRADA … Maybe it was my classical training in the early Sixties at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic junior seminary, where the Sulpician educator priests followed Cardinal Newman’s belief, as he espoused in his Dublin lecture series The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: “[E]ducation should aim at producing generalists rather than narrow specialists, and that non-vocational subjects – in arts of pure science – could train the mind in ways applicable to a wide range of jobs.” …
As a young man I was steeped in European history — particularly the Greek and Roman story of the world (we had to study Ancient Greek and Church Latin). And when I made it out of California to Colorado in the Eighties, I researched Telluride’s history as a 19th Century mining camp. Faithful to the principles of the Bioregional Movement to reinhabit a place by learning about it before trying to change it, I wrote a history column for the local paper I called Mining the Gold for a half-dozen years. And then, as a county commissioner (1996-2016), I got appointed by Governor Roy Romer to Colorado’s State Historical Fund Advisory Committee …
So, when I came across Phil Carson’s “Across the Northern Frontier: Spanish Explorations in Colorado” (Johnson Books, Boulder, 1998), I was intrigued. Reading it made me realize the colonial history of Colorado is a lot deeper than I knew or expected. By way of example, look at this quote from New Mexico Governor Don Diego de Vargas on July 7, 1694: “I left this place [Taos] and took the road leading to the land of the Yuttas.” …
Nueva España’s Province of New Mexico was founded in 1598. It “included all or part of the modern-day U.S.’s states of New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas and points beyond.” This enchanting history takes us back to the earliest days of the story of the American Southwest, from Cabeza de Vaca’s unbelievable ordeal, Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s vain search for Cibola (the city of gold), and López de Cárdenas’s exploration of the Grand Canyon on through Don Pedro de Peralta’s founding of Santa Fe, Popé’s Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Spanish reconquest, the shifting alliances and raiding of the 1700s and the many expeditions into “El Norte” like the one of Dóminguez and Escalante.
The book takes the reader right up to the American entrada that changed Nueva España irrevocably. I believe it should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the roots of the clash of cultures that made the American Southwest what it is today…
One significant fact that struck me, living on the northern periphery of the San Juan Mountains, was the original name the Spanish gave to these high peaks: “Sierra de las Grullas” – Mountains of the Cranes.
DON’T QUOTE ME, BUT … The late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone once said, “If we don’t fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don’t really stand for them” …
As my Nevada City poet pal
Doc Dachtler wrote me,
“Facebook has an ugly face
and is not a book”
SPEAKING OF WELLSTONE … On Oct. 25, 2002, incumbent U.S. Democrat Senator from Minnesota Paul Wellstone was campaigning for a third term when he died in a controversial plane crash. The accident occurred just 11 days before the election with the 58-year-old Wellstone ahead in the polls. His seat went to his Republican Party rival, and that tipped the scales for a GOP majority in the U.S. Senate. Wellstone was one of the last spirited anti-war progressive populists on the scene. He opposed the first Gulf War in 1991 and, in the months before his death, spoke out and voted against the government’s threats to go to war with Iraq again.
PAWNEE BUTTES … Below is an excerpt from the late Mike Adams’ full poem, which appears in the online anthology, Warrior Poets and in Dennis Fritzinger’s Bearshit on the Trail: Essential Poems of Earth First!
Under the juniper I dream the song
of a new America
where two-legged, four legged,
winged and swimming
all find voice
America —
her great prairies unfenced —
her rivers quick and clean —
Where bison roam across the hills
and the wolf’s howl runs once more
in our blood.
SPRING CREEK PASTURE … has been home to the Southern Ute Tribe’s bison herd (numbering
about 100) since the early 2000s, according to the award-winning Southern Ute Drum. Down
along Salabar Draw in Montezuma County where water quality specialist Dylan Ruckel has
spearheaded the team restoring streambanks, planting willows and improving habitat for the
endangered New Mexico Meadow Jumping Mouse (and to note, fertile soil for local fungi as
well, mycophile that I am) …
As young scientist Aran Johnson, head of the Tribe’s Wildlife Division said, “These projects are benefitting the bison, and by extension the tribal membership that recognize the herd as an important source of spiritual power and healing, as well as a source of healthy protein through our bison meat distribution program.”
ELDER OR SENIOR? … I prefer “elder” to being called a senior, as the latter has some negative connotations, like diminished capabilities. I like to think that, having turned 80 last year, I’ve gotten wiser and sharper than I’ve ever been. A three-day hike in the high country this summer into Telluride, from Columbine Lake to Bridal Veil Falls, had me convinced that I wasn’t diminished, but invigorated by age – twelve miles or so, two nights camping, a 30-pound pack, 3000 ft. up and 3000 ft. down.
Old Age
taking itki*
easy’s
almost enough
to make the sunset
years glow
remembering
labore est ludere
strenue
dure
*itki is a neologism I use in place of “it” as Robin Wall Kimmerer has suggested, utilizing a suffix from her Potawatomi tradition meaning “from the living earth” to help correct English’s objectification of the natural world. She has been advocating a change to our use of the third person neuter pronoun “it” for things that are very much alive for animists and deep ecologists.
