An Analysis of Valles Caldera by Former NPS Director Roger Kennedy

TOWARD A VALLES CALDERA NATIONAL PARK AS A LANDSCAPE FOR LEARNING

A Memorandum from Roger Kennedy

It is time to “save the Baca” – again – and finish the job.

The Valles Caldera of New Mexico, the centerpiece of the Jemez Massif, is worthy of national
park status for its astonishing natural beauty, for its geological and archaeological wonders, for its
wildlife, for the history that was played out upon it or near it, and for the military and geopolitical saga inherent in its title deeds. The Valles Caldera contains grassy valleys at 8,000 feet punctuated and rimmed by volcanic mountains, including Redondo Peak, which is 3,000 feet higher. Beneath these meadows and forested mountains the geothermal world slumbers fitfully -- steaming, bubbling, and heating springs. A million years ago its great eruptions sent so much lava and ash flowing out and down the slopes of the Massif that the mountain collapsed into itself and produced a saucer-shaped valley into which silt eroded from the hillsides. Low places were filled by fertile soil until it lay as deep as a thousand feet. Volcanic dust had settled over the nearby countryside -- two hundred times more particulate matter than that exploded from Mount St. Helens. Some of the lava spewing directly to the surface from the deep interior hardened into obsidian -- volcanic glass – material for dart, spear and arrow points or for surgical instruments.

Today the Valles Caldera is prowled by eagles and peregrine falcons and grazed by as many as
3,500 elk. (There are about ten times as many elk regularly in the Valles Caldera as in the famous herd at Point Reyes, California, and about the same number as in Rocky Mountain National Park). Despite overgrazing and clear-cutting in the 19th and 20th centuries, it still provides habitat for fish, song birds, and animals, including several rare and endangered species.

Humans have known this wondrous place for at least 11,000 years, worshipping there, hunting there, finding and harvesting edible plants and, later, cultivating crops (see “Living on the Edge” below). 

Spanish armies arrived in the 1540s and Spanish settlers in 1598, but this was a province remote
from their bases at Mexico City or Vera Cruz, and they lost control of the region in the 1680s. After nearly twenty years of warfare, some Spanish settlement began again in a modus vivendi with the Pueblo people, though not with the Navajo and the Apaches. As the Spanish Empire depleted its imperial winnings and its supply of professional fighting men in perpetual religious and dynastic wars in Europe, it tried many devices to shore up its North American frontiers, including grants to chieftains and entrepreneurs such as Luis Maria Baca and his kinsman Bartholomé Baca. The Republic of Mexico became independent in 1821. Two years later the new government in Mexico City sent an army against the Navajo by way of the Valles Caldera but was only able to keep garrisons in a few places in the vast territory. When the United States cavalry of Brigadier General Stephen Kearny passed along the lower edges of the Massif on its long march of conquest from the Santa Fe to San Diego in 1846, it met little opposition from the Mexicans or the American Indians. The scholar-soldiers among its officers were free to take detours to explore ancient sites.

Fifty years earlier, Napoleon had followed Roman precedent in Egypt by coupling scholarship and
conquest. In the United States that tradition was renewed under the aegis of one of the greatest of its statesmen, Albert Gallatin. Though born in Switzerland, Gallatin he served in the Revolutionary War, became a senator, leader of the Jeffersonians in Pennsylvania, Secretary of the Treasury for Presidents Jefferson and Madison, and with John Quincy Adams was a godfather of the Smithsonian Institution.

Gallatin first came to know American Indians in the 1780s and sustained a scholarly and respectful
relationship to them throughout the Age of Jackson and the Mexican War. (His home, Friendship Hill, is now a unit of the National Park System.)

In the 1840s as American armies swept through ancient Indian lands previously claimed by Spain
and then by Mexico, Gallatin paid close attention. He published detailed descriptions of the people,
languages, antiquities, and agriculture of New Mexico and Arizona, establishing professional ethnology and archaeology in the United States. Before his death in 1849, he encouraged the army to make a partner of the Smithsonian, which explains why Kearny’s  cavalry sent accounts of the archaeology and the life of the Pueblos not only to the Senate but also to the Smithsonian. His information largely came to him from a correspondence with Kearny’s scholar-soldiers led by Lieutenants William H. Emory, James W. Abert, and William G. Peck. Gallatin augmented their reports to the Senate with commentaries grounded in their shared understanding of the importance of preserving antiquities. They had read accounts of the old world in Greek and Latin and when Emory, Abert, and Peck first came upon the ruins of the upper Rio Grande Valley in 1846, they took to greeting each other in quotations from Horace. So elegant and evocative were their reports, and so compelling was Gallatin’s support, that in 1849, when the army sent a cavalry troop and 56 pueblo volunteers under Lieutenant James Hervey Simpson
against the Navajo, he was given two staff artists, the brothers Richard and Edward Kern, to provide
images of ruins, occupied pueblos, and living Indians. Their route took them by way of the Jemez Valley, El Morro, Pueblo Pintado, Chaco Canyon, and Canyon de Chelly with only transitory military results, but it was an archaeological and ethnological triumph.

In 1848 Gallatin drew the attention of the Congress and the nation to the profusion of evidence of
ancient achievement in the Jemez region. He could not propose that it be preserved and protected as a national park, because there were none as yet. The Smithsonian collected objects and documents but not places. Gallatin was writing sixty years before the passage of the Antiquities Act and seventy years before the formal organization of the National Park Service. The Antiquities Act of 1906 has by now, broadened the nation’s consciousness of the significance of its ancient architecture, and the National Park Service has established -- as one of its chief responsibilities -- education about the depth, grandeur, and complexity of Native America.

The times are ripe for the Valles Caldera to become a national park, one that is the core of a
larger landscape for learning. This consummating action would be in the spirit of the Northwest
Ordinance which set aside portions of the public domain for educational purposes. It would fulfill
Gallatin’s dream while fulfilling the park-making process begun when George Washington selected the park land in the District of Columbia in the 1780s. As his accounts of his explorations of the mound country of the Ohio Valley show and the mounds built by him at Mount Vernon demonstrate, Washington was not only personally acquainted with American Indians as companions, but he venerated the achievements of their ancestors. The founder of our country and of our parks was even earlier than Gallatin in exploring the ancient architecture of Indians and respecting their traditions.

Since Gallatin’s time we have learned the value of wilderness, and we have also come to value
working landscapes. The Valles Caldera National Park should become the nucleus of a cooperative
educational mission of preservation and education with the neighboring Pueblos and villages, the
National Laboratory and city of Los Alamos, the National Forests, and Bandelier National Monument.

The reports of Emory, Abert, Peck, and Simpson, as illustrated by the Kern brothers and with
Gallatin’s commentaries, might have been composed into a good National Park proposal, but not until 1864 were the first western lands set aside as a park -- in the Yosemite Valley. In 1899 the United States House of Representatives solicited reports as to how the Congress should best create a “Pajarito 
National Park” for the Jemez Massif, including the Valles Caldera.

Today it is possible to finish the job begun in 1899 and to try to think as Albert Gallatin thought in
1846. A comprehensive vision for the Valles Caldera and Massif as a landscape for learning would
include geothermal science, industrial, agricultural and grazing history, archaeology, geopolitics,
ethnography, and conservation. The National Park Service is the agency to facilitate this kind of
education through teaching about place -- in place ---by place. The nation’s narrative agency has been devoted to public education as well as landscape protection since Franklin Roosevelt consolidated the national parks into a single National Park System and provided that system with a Service that included educators, historians, and scientists trained by the CCC.

When the Congress restored the Valles to “the commons” in 2000, it had been private land only 
since 1860. For the previous 11,000 years, Native peoples were present but none claimed it as an
exclusive possession. It was in the United States public domain for twelve years before 1860. From 1821 through 1848 it was Mexican public land. For the preceding three centuries, officials in Madrid mapped it within Spanish Crown Lands to be of common use by all citizens. The Pueblo of Jemez, along with the Pueblos of Zía, Santa Ana, San Felipe, Cochití, Santo Domingo, Tesuque, San Ildefonso, and Santa Clara, together with the Zuni, the Hopi, the Navajo, the Jicarilla Apache, and the Utes all honor it as a part of their heritage. They visit the Valles Caldera reverentially and traditionally, without asserting that they ever “owned” it. After the introduction of sheep and cattle, nearby Indians and Hispanic villagers grazed sheep and cattle there, joined by Anglo ranchers, sharing its vastness until about 1880. Only then were these neighbors shut out or treated essentially as share-ranchers by single owners. In short, the Valles Caldera has been nearly always what it is now once more -- common ground.

Today it is an inhabited landscape with nuclear scientists next door and cows competing with elk,
situated among neighbors having many appropriate interests to reconcile. For teaching and learning
purposes, these complexities are advantages rather than impediments. The Bicentennial Commission
now in the final stages of making its report on the National Park System is urging that the National Park Service fulfill its mission of preservation and education in cooperation with others. The Valles Caldera should be made a National Park exemplifying that cooperative style, with a broad mission and message.

Nearby jurisdictions can be drawn into reinforcing educational missions of their own. As one teaching element of such a living landscape, the Valles Caldera can be managed to fulfill proposals dating back to the 1890s that such a park include ranching – not primarily to generate income but to generate learning.

This is not wilderness; humans have been busy on the Massif for thousands of years, living, hunting,
farming -- and ranching since the Spaniards introduced sheep and cattle – and reintroduced horses -- in the 16th century.

The Valles Caldera can teach many things, including sustained and sustainable grazing,
scrupulous forestry, and also such themes as these:

A VALLES CALDERA CURRICULUM

Recapitulating the First Sight of the Great Plains and Other Environmental Lessons
As New Mexico Route 4 enters the Valles Caldera, there is a turn-off just after it leaves the shade
of the forest and emerges upon a bench with a view extending six miles across grassland toward the
slopes of the opposite rim of the Valles Caldera -- the High Plains of the continent in miniature. What a teaching place for a park with continental-scale lessons! We can imagine how the first humans saw the High Plains, the breath-taking transition of forest-living people coming onto the open places. The Navajo and the Apache had that experience, going southeasterly, as did the Sioux and the Cheyenne when, after living for millennia in the forests around the Great Lakes, they were driven from their homelands by traditional enemies who had been sold firearms by European powers. We may then think of their adaptations after they acquired firearms and horses – and how the newcomers became the most formidable light cavalry in the world. And the Route 4 transition recapitulates as well the later, classic Euro-American westering experience of leaving the forest for the prairie.

From Megafauna to Superpowers
Beyond the little mountain to the northeast from the Route 4 turn-off is the fenced boundary of the
Los Alamos National Laboratory. The juxtaposition of prairie, mountain, and fence reminds us that the Laboratory was built on the grounds of an environmental education school, dedicated to teaching both about nature and about human nature. The land once again provides its own memory- prompters for such studies: in a great valley near the plant where weapons-grade plutonium is now produced were the work sites where projectile points were chipped out of weapons-grade obsidian and chert. Such points have been found all the way to the Mississippi Delta (a 5,000 year-old Jemez obsidian atlatl point was recently found at Parker Bayou), to the Missouri River Valley of North Dakota, to central Texas, and to California. They reached these distant places in a period in which hunting and climate change brought to extinction mammoths, mastodons, super-bison, and indigenous horses (climate change is a recurring theme on the Jemez Massif). Thereafter, obsidian arrow points brought down deer, elk, and modern bison. The scientists at Los Alamos are assiduous in providing for the disposal of their wastes, whereas the makers of arrow and atlatl points left so much excess obsidian that after modern road construction ripped away an accumulated poultice of sod and silt, a dazzling avenue of black volcanic glass was revealed. In the sunlight, this glassway offers a display of black volcanic glass rivaled only by Obsidian Cliff in Yellowstone National Park.

Living on the Edge – Agriculture, Architecture, and Climate
In the three centuries just before the arrival of Europeans, people built pueblos on a vast scale
and laid out fields on the flanges of the Massif, just beyond the Valles Caldera. The climate was then
salubrious for high altitude field agriculture, and at higher elevations (below 8500 feet) they also lived seasonally in stone field houses of one to four rooms. Throughout the caldera, and even above 8,500 feet, scatters debris from tool-making and tool-use indicate camps and villages also occupied seasonally. In the 13th through the 17th centuries, most of the population was concentrated in more than forty very large pueblos, nearly thirty of them of 1,500 rooms or more, on the flanges of the Valles Caldera or along the rivers adjacent to the Massif. The ancestors of many of those pueblo builders had come to the Jemez region after erratic climate in the Four Corners Area to the north and west of the Jemez had made agriculture unpredictable. In the 13th century the large, walled villages and extensive field agriculture around Cortez, Colorado, and Mesa Verde had been largely evacuated. More pueblo-building occurred after the pueblo revolts of the 1680s and 1690s, though in smaller units. When all this construction was accomplished, the architecture of the Jemez Massif was as ambitious as that of Mesa Verde, though what we see of it today is more subtle, much of it eroded over more than three hundred rainy seasons, though some dramatic mesa-top ruins remain. As Lieutenant Simpson and the Peck brothers taught us a century and a half ago, the Jemez Massif belongs on the same itinerary as Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, and the ancient places of the Gila Valley.

And purely as a landscape, the Valles Caldera is as beautiful as Jackson Hole, and has
volcanism and antiquity to boot.

1851- 1863 -- Garrisoning the Frontier – Grants, Titles, and Surnames
The origins of the “Baca Grant” of the Valles Caldera offer in condensed form a geopolitical
history of the founding, exploitation, and ultimate loss by Europeans of empires in the Western
Hemisphere. In the last days of those empires, strange things happened – such as the circumstances of that grant. It arose initially from Spain’s last efforts to garrison the northern extremities of its Mexican holdings, though the Baca claim to the Valles Caldera came neither from a Spanish Royal Grant nor a Mexican government grant, but as the outcome of a weary resolution by the United States Congress of a competition between two sets of Spanish-Mexican frontiersmen.

In 1860 the lawyers representing the heirs of Luis Maria Baca in Santa Fe and Washington
managed to convince the Congress to award 100,000 acres of the public domain including the Valles
Caldera as “Baca Grant Number 1” -- without a cash payment. This vast prize would come instead in a swap for a property acquired as a Spanish Royal Grant in 1821 and affirmed in 1826 by the Mexican government. That other parcel included the site of the city of Las Vegas, though it was also granted to another group at the time. Baca’s competitors were armed, as he was, and they actually began building the town. The Congress kept the peace by leaving the urbanizers with Las Vegas and giving the Bacas their choice of five parcels they could select out of unoccupied and unclaimed public land. Among these, they chose the Valles Caldera, thereafter often called “the Baca”.  

Royal Grants like that swapped by the Bacas for the Valles Caldera were issued by colonial
officials who were sometimes, as in this instance, kinsmen of grantees, and often, as in this case,
speculators themselves. The granting official was Bartholomé Baca, who was at the time acquiring
grants of his own, including the entire valley lying east of the Sandia Mountains. The process may have been shadowy, but the precedents were Roman -- like so much else in Spanish practice. In its decline, 1,500 years earlier, the Roman Empire had sought to privatize the defense of endangered frontiers by granting exposed tracts to hardened soldiers to inhabit and defend. In medieval Europe this Roman custom was followed by Charlemagne, who entrusted “fueds“ – hence “feudalism”  -- fiefs” and  “marches” to  “marcher lords” given titles such as marquis and marqués. Feudalism had its final flowering in the Spanish empire -- Cortez, for example, was enfiefed with the valley of Oahaca and the title Marqués. Pánfilo de Narváez, already a duke, was granted most of the Gulf Coast through which Cabeza de Vaca passed as survivor, slave, and fugitive after the death of Narváez in 1528. As if to position himself as befitting that tradition, Luis Maria Baca extended his name to “Cabeza de Baca” in the 1820s, during the course of his negotiations with the officials of the Crown to imply descent from that explorer, asserting that he would be aided in defending his frontier post by seventeen young men – using a term subsequent historians have translated as “sons”. Since Baca had only four sons, a better term would be “vassals”.

The Cabeza de Baca grant was a late enfiefment, made during that period from 1808 through 1821
when the Spanish empire in North America was in a frenzied final phase of grant-making, garrisoning, and outpost-building, situating presidios and missions on frontiers (In California, San Jose in 1809, San Luis Rey in 1815, San Diego in 1808-13, San Antonio de Padua in 1813, Santa Cruz in 1813-17, and San Juan Bautista in 1812). A century earlier, the French had created “seigneuries” along Lake
Champlain, from which many Vermonters take their title deeds, and in the 17th century the Dutch had established patroonships along the Hudson, two of which became the famous manors of the Livingstons and Van Rensselaers.

The importance of surnames to the Bacas and Cabezas de Vaca leads to another chapter in
imperial history to be learned in the Valles Caldera. Patrick Dunigan, the last private owner of the Valles Caldera, was only the most recent person of Irish descent to put his stamp on its title-deeds. The grantor from the Spanish Crown lands to the Bacas was Juan O'Donojú y O'Rian (John O'Donahue-O'Ryan), the Viceroy of New Spain who negotiated the independence of Mexico at the Treaty of Cordoba in 1821. O’Donahue coordinated his granting with that done by Governor – later Field Marshal -- Alejandro O'Reilly (John O’Reilly) and with Governor Enrique White (Henry White) of Florida and Governor Condorcet of Louisiana, whose mother was Rosa Plunkett of County Louth. The Jemez Massif lay not so much on a national frontier for Spain, but on a social and doctrinal frontier. To the south were Catholic Empires assembled under Hapsburg and Bourbon kings. To the north were the rising protestant powers, including the English who had fought some of the Irish into submission and driven others – like these – into exile. The “Spanish officials” who made these grants were among the “Wild Geese” -- Catholic Irish exiles, who were ready to stand off the English – and Anglo-Americans -- anywhere they could – recruiting anyone they could.

The Bacas disappeared from the history of the Valles Caldera in 1899 just as the Congress was
beginning to take seriously making a national park of the Massif of which it was a part.

1899-2000 – Toward An Inhabited and Working Landscape as the Core of a New Kind of Park
This landscape has other stories to tell – among them the equally complex ways the government
of the United States has distributed its public lands and has or has not protected its national treasures over the last two hundred years. In 1899 the House of Representatives Public Lands Committee heeded the reports of archaeologists – especially Adolph Bandelier, the second Swiss-born scholar to make his mark on the American consciousness of antiquity. It sent out teams of inquirers to follow the routes of the army engineers and topographers who had corresponded with Albert Gallatin, and it solicited reports on how the Congress should best create a “Pajarito National Park”.  The ensuing 1900 proposal came in 
1901 to be known as “the Cliff Cities Park project”. In 1906 the Antiquities Act made respect for the
Native American past into national policy, and the Pajarito park proposal came closer to success. In 1916 Congress set aside Bandelier National Monument, reserving for later a larger vision including the Valles Caldera. That prospect has since remained before the Congress, despite chronic intra-agency jealousies. In 1919 the Senate received from the New Mexico delegation a new proposal: a “Cliff Cities National Park” -- much larger in extent than Bandelier National Monument. In the 1920s the National Park Association (now the National Parks Conservation Association) and the Smithsonian Institution renewed the Cliff Cities Park project.

The opportunities of the ensuing eight decades have been lost as several federal agencies
sought control, contending like dogs over a bone, and failing to join in an educational and preservation mission with the neighboring pueblos – or with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which often had its own ideas. The Jemez Forest Reserve had been set aside in 1905; the Park Service received management of Bandelier National Monument in 1932, and the Soil Erosion – later Conservation - Service had its opportunity to demonstrate landscape restoration on the Vigil Grant next to Bandelier in the early days of the New Deal. Soon thereafter, the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, espoused a two million-acre Jemez Crater National Park – which would have absorbed not only Bandelier National Monument but also much of the Jemez National Forest, the Vigil Grant, and, without consultation with their citizens, several small towns and several of the pueblos. In the 1940s the Los Alamos National Laboratory was established on the 800 acres of the Los Alamos Ranch School, and expanded to take within its fences important historic and archaeological sites– including the largest pueblo ruin on the Pajarito Plateau, Tsherigi, with more than 500 rooms.

The proposals offered from 1899 through the 1940s lacked a comprehensive, cooperative vision
of what might be learned and presented on the Jemez Massif as a whole, developed in cooperation with the people who lived there. The federal agencies never reached agreement on what should be done, and seldom sought the views of the pueblos. That was then. This is now. The National Park Service has learned about adaptive and cooperative management – and it is a great national education system – teaching in place about place.

Back to Common Ground
The Valles Caldera was purchased as a “National Preserve” by America’s taxpayers for 96.5
million dollars in 2000, subject to the requirement that it become self-supporting without further
overgrazing and over-timbering. It had been recently rescued by J. Patrick Dunigan, its last private
owner, from the worst practices in overgrazing and overlumbering of lessees of the previous owners and was still in fragile condition. (It has been said that as many as 200,000 sheep were set to seek food in the Valles Caldera in the summers early in the twentieth century). Practically speaking,however, there was no way for it to be squeezed of sufficient revenue to pay for its upkeep without returning it to the degenerative processes that Dunigan had managed to slow or halt. However, the return of the Valles Caldera to public land in 2000 kept it from being developed into ranchettes and from further environmental destruction of the sort that had threatened the Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone before they were rescued.

When the American nation began setting aside parks in the 1790s, it recognized that they might
generate income but need not support themselves. The Valles Caldera trustees were instructed,
however, not to attribute any value to it as a learning landscape. And it must be added in candor that
more recent history was misinterpreted: it was asserted that a proper analogue to the Valles Caldera
Trust would be that just established at the Presidio in San Francisco to guide real estate development on the former military base, though the situations in the city on the bay and the Valles Caldera had little in common. The Presidio already had 790 buildings, including three hospitals, a movie theater, and several churches on 1491 acres, and its Trust was expected to build many more. The Baca has 90,000-acres of open space, and (counting barns and sheds) less than forty buildings, of which barely a dozen would be habitable. The central assumption behind its purchase was that it would not be urbanized. As if instructed to heed only market forces and not civic values, the trustees of the Valles Caldera were instructed that it was to produce enough commodities or generate enough user fees to become what it had never been, a ranch self-supporting as a ranch – though restrained by science and sound sustainable practice. That might have been possible in 1880, but the land had until recently been overgrazed and nearly all the first- rate timber lumbered out.

The trustees have recently sought a large new appropriation, expressing the hope that after that
money is spent, the Valles Caldera could carry its costs without destructive over-grazing or non-
renewable lumbering. Under the circumstances, it is not strange that the Senate of the state of New
Mexico has concluded nearly unanimously that the experiment has not worked and cannot work.

This paper is written to urge that the National Preserve be revalued as a national asset, which,
like all national parks, cannot be expected to pay for itself. The Preserve can be as “self-supporting” as  Independence Hall or Yellowstone Park, with their money costs balanced by their educational benefits. The Valles Caldera should be placed within the responsibilities of the National Park Service, with provision for active participation by the neighboring Pueblos and communities, as an example of a park that includes the neighbors in its deliberations about educational programs and management policies.

The final rescue of the Valles Caldera should be carried out soon. It is the core of the Jemez
Massif perceived as a landscape for learning by Albert Gallatin, William Emory, James Abert, and
William Peck, James Simpson, the observant Peck brothers, John Wesley Powell, William Henry
Morgan, Edgar Lee Hewitt, Adolph Bandelier, Franklin Roosevelt, Stewart Udall, Pete Domenici, and Jeff Bingaman. Gallatin learned its particulars from Emory, Kearny, Abert and Peck, and, as founder of American ethnology, wrote in his final advice to posterity that it should not miss opportunities to learn from the “antiquities” of the upper Rio Grande Valley. Powell and Morgan sponsored Bandelier to follow Gallatin’s lead toward systematic understanding of Native peoples – not just their ancient architecture -- and Roosevelt put the first teachers and scientists to work on the Massif in the Emergency Work Relief system, the National Park Work Camps, and the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Bearing in mind the nobility of the end to be served, the grandeur of the place in which to serve it,
and the disappointment of previous hopes, we can now re-energize the teaching mission of the Valles Grande by institutionalizing that mission, by expanding its curriculum to include the full range of stories it can tell, and by expanding simultaneously the range of judgments, instruction, and participation by the neighbors.

There was much wisdom in the action of the Congress in 2000, and in the words of the first
chairman of the Trust, William deBuys. “In its broad commitments to the public and to the land” he wrote, 
the Preserve was “to be more than” a property. Though for expository purposes it might engage in “the  production of commodities [such a beef and hides] or in the generation of valuable human experiences [such as hiking and skiing], it would strive, first and foremost, to produce learning”. That should be the essential objective to be served by a Valles Caldera National Park, as it has been since Albert Gallatin first understood in the 1840s the teaching mission of the public lands of northern New Mexico.