Chaco Canyon and the Trampling of Hooves

At the turn of the century (1900), a man named Richard Weatherill ran a horse ranch right next to Pueblo Bonito inside what is now Chaco Canyon National Historic Park. Rarely mentioned in park presentations and books, Weatherill’s ranch had a major impact on the Chaco Canyon environment.

He had a house, living quarters for hired hands, corrals and a trading post. Some say he had a hotel there also. He excavated Pueblo Bonito’s ruins for artifacts which he sometimes sold, or had shipped to eastern museums, just as he had at Mesa Verde years before. If you talk to archaeologists or experienced National Park Service rangers at Chaco, they will tell you about the Weatherill trading post at Chaco and that’s all. His horse ranch has vanished from history.

Mostly, they will tell you about the Weatherill trading post and his sometimes-contentious, sometimes friendly relationship with the many Navajo people he traded with, including the Navajo who shot him at Chaco in 1910. (Richard Weatherill’s parents had exceptionally friendly relations with the Ute people near Mancos, Colorado where Richard grew up.) Horse ranches have major environmental impacts, yet Weatherill’s is forgotten despite the fact that it stood right next to the most important archaeological site in the Southwest.

Photos of the Weatherill ranch in 1905, show the Chaco Canyon floor nearly barren of vegetation. The deeply incised gully through which the Chaco River flows likely resulted from overgrazing by horses and sheep. Now a National Historic Park, managed by the National Park Service, Chaco Canyon continues to suffer severe sheet erosion because of past grazing practices. This erosion threatens the integrity of the ruins and artifacts. Chaco Canyon is a World Heritage Site.

These bits of history are sometimes found in obscure books gathering dust on the shelves of libraries, and in people’s homes.

My father collected books about the Southwest and kept them where I could look at their spines (or read them) from when I was a small child until I finally inherited his book collection in his last years, decades later. I got so familiar with the covers of these books that I almost stopped seeing them. I had read few of them until recently when I pulled one with a dull sounding title off the shelf and started to read. My attention was pulled back to 1902 and I learned things about Albuquerque, the Navajo country, and Chaco Canyon that shifted my view in completely unexpected ways. I will never cross the Rio Grande near Albuquerque again without thinking of Joseph Schmedding, author of Cowboy and Indian Trader (UNM Press, 1955).

Joseph Schmedding was born in German in 1887. Somehow, before he was 20 years old, he made his way to El Paso, and worked on a ranch as a cowboy near there for many months before making his way to work on another ranch near Carrizozo, New Mexico. Eventually he was hired by Richard Weatherill to help run the horse ranch at Chaco Canyon called the Triangle Bar Triangle Ranch.

Schmedding was more than a cowboy. He was a world traveler, and a trusted financial agent for Richard Weatherill and eventually a trading post owner. He was an able writer (despite minimal formal education) who recorded life in a remote place where he had extraordinary experiences which he relates in a characteristically understated way.

As a professional outdoor guide, I have taken many people from Santa Fe to Chaco Canyon for day tours of the ruins. Today the trip from Santa Fe to Chaco Canyon National Historic Park takes 4 hours one way, depending on weather. If you want to travel the route Weatherill’s cowboys traveled when they took horses to sell in Albuquerque in 1905, you drive from Bernalillo up the Jemez and Rio Puerco Valleys toward Chaco Canyon. For them the trip was at least a week-long aboard wagons pulled by teams of mules.

In 1900, 8,000 people lived in Albuquerque. Schmedding would drive herds of horses from Chaco Canyon to buyers who would load them onto the railroad in Albuquerque and send them to the Midwest. Then, he would load wagons with supplies needed at Chaco, have a drink, and prepare for the return trip. The horses mostly came from Navajo breeders and Schmedding and others would break them.

Leaving New Town Albuquerque (the area by the railroad station), they would ride out and camp next to the Rio Grande a short distance away. They would spend the next day pulling the laden wagons across the river, up the sand dunes on the other side, one by one with combined teams of eight to twelve mules on each wagon. (Four mules would pull each wagon long distances to Chaco.) With no bridges, a full day of struggle to cross the river would find them only a mile from where they had camped the night before and still within view of the town of Albuquerque.

The trip from Albuquerque to Chaco was no less of an adventure. They would follow faint tracks through the desert and hobble their horses and mules at night while they slept under the wagons. Sometimes their stock would be missing in the morning, driven off by Navajos. The thieves would come into their camp later in the morning and offer to help look for the horses for a fee. Sometimes this scheme succeeded because Weatherill’s employees needed to cultivate good will among the scattered community of Navajo, and they needed to get back to the ranch.

Schmedding wrote that they would have to camp far from the village at Cabezon because the people there would rob them without fail.

Schmedding also describes the lush grass in the Rio Puerco Valley on the way towards Chaco Canyon. Today this area is severely overgrazed the has been deeply eroded because of the loss of native grass cover to a century of livestock pressure. Likewise, he describes grazing many horses on the mesas above Chaco Canyon. Today those areas are virtually barren of grass and support little if any wildlife as a result. Horses must have trampled many a significant archaeological site.

Snake Dance at Hopi

He traveled to Second Mesa at Hopi to watch the Snake Dance at a time before there were roads and when people rode horses from long distances to see this strange ritual. He described the Hopi catching many rattlesnakes and placing them in a pit in the plaza of their village. Dancers pulled the snakes from the pit, put the between their teeth and danced around the plaza. At length the snakes were set free in the desert and the dancers drank an unknown liquid that caused them to vomit. This liquid protected them from the venom as most of them had been bitten by the rattlesnakes but suffered no ill effects.

Witnessing the snake dance before modern tourism touched these remote places was an extraordinary experience and many people traveled long distances to see the dance on horseback.

Schmedding went on to run two trading posts in Arizona for about 25 years. He operated the Keams Canyon Trading Post and he built a new trading post at Low Mountain, which is no longer there. Running a trading post was an intricate process, like being both a businessman, a mayor and a doctor for people over a wide area. This gets a bit into the weeds, but anyone interested in the history of the Southwest would find these details enlightening about what they say about the Navajo and the people who cared about them.

Speeding Through Modern Times

Next time you drive Highway 550 through Cuba, New Mexico, and on toward Bloomfield, think about how easy life is for us. Barring a break down or an accident, we enjoy the scenery and miss most of it driving at the speeds we travel. We rarely camp out in the landscape and listen to the coyotes or learn the details of the land on our long-distance trips. Our cars are rolling shelters and bridges cross even minor washes. In centuries past, travelers were exposed and intimately challenged by the features of the landscape and the distances between human settlements.

Old books open our eyes, not only to events obscured by time but to the advantages of our current life. One book will spark interest that leads to three others and before you know it your view of history is transformed.

I think I’ll worm around in my father’s library some more.

-Tom Ribe