Fall 2015 – El Palacio

Two horses pull a covered wooden wagon carrying two people on a dirt road in front of old-fashioned buildings. [gen-ai]

223 Years of Colonial Mail in New Mexico

BY HENRIETTA MARTINEZ CHRISTMAS If not for the colonial postal system, communications with Mexico and Spain would not have been sustained in the vast frontier we know as New Mexico. The governmental system of transporting mail, loyalty to the Spanish Crown, and the yearning for news beyond what was happening at a local level helped to sustain the colonial towns and villages of New Mexico.

By Henrietta Martinez Christmas

Categories: New Mexican cultures, New Mexican history, Southwestern history

A man on horseback leads pack animals carrying goods up a hill, with a wagon and people near a round stone tower in the background under a clear sky. [gen-ai]

Reflections on the Three Trails

BY RICK HENDRICKS Hosting the Three Trails Conference in Santa Fe provides an occasion to reflect on how this rather remote, small city came to be the hub of such historically significant transportation arteries. It also makes for an appropriate time to contemplate the trails themselves and how we have chosen to commemorate them. (more…)

By Dr. Rick Hendricks

Categories: Featured

Portrait of a middle-aged man in formal 19th-century attire, with light hair, pictured in an oval frame with a gold border. [gen-ai]

J. Paul Taylor: Tales from the Trails

WITH JACK LOEFFLER “Many are the stories and songs about this trail that describe lives both saved and lost during that period when westward expansion followed in the wake of Manifest Destiny.” (more…)

By Jack Loeffler

Categories: Featured, Interviews

Ruins of adobe structures stand in front of leafless trees with arid, rocky hills rising in the background under a clear blue sky. [gen-ai]

Bloodlines

BY MACHAEL ROMERO TAYLOR We are all descended from adventurers who traveled in search of opportunities and new lands to settle. This itch for travel has always been in our genes. Millennia before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, countless American Indian roads and trails existed, and many still exist. [wonderplugin_slider id="97"] (more…)

By Jack Parsons and Michael Romero Taylor

Categories: Featured

Black-and-white photo of an adobe house with corn cobs spread out in the foreground and several people sitting among the corn; handwritten notes appear along the top edge of the photo. [gen-ai]

El Camino De Agua

Traditional Agriculture Along El Camino Real BY MICHAEL MILLER Native people of the Southwest and Mexico have used the corridor known as El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (The Royal Road of the Inner Province) since prehistoric times. Before the arrival of the Spanish and other European settlers, this important trail system served as a communication and trade network, which was a link to the Aztec Empire and other indigenous civilizations in Mesoamerica.

By Michael Miller

Categories: Featured

Colorful illustrated map of Santa Fe, New Mexico, featuring cartoon landmarks, buildings, people, and southwestern landscape elements with playful details and a bright sun in the corner. [gen-ai]

Exotica Sells!

New Mexican Popular Promotional Cartography since Statehood BY DENNIS REINHARTZ The topographic and related cultural symbols on the popular promotional cartography of a state in the form of actual maps, as well as those on postcards and other souvenirs, reflect the state’s self-image—how it hopes to be seen by and to be attractive to outsiders. [wonderplugin_slider id="99"] (more…)

By Dennis Reinhartz

Categories: Featured

Two elderly women in coats and hats stand outside on a wooden path, looking at and discussing a large rolled-out paper or blueprint in front of a log building. [gen-ai]

Searching For Mary Colter

BY MEREDITH DAVIDSON AND KATE NELSON While we developed Setting the Standard: The Fred Harvey Company and Its Legacy, the New Mexico History Museum’s addition to its main exhibit, Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now, Colter’s influence seeped into our souls. [wonderplugin_slider id="100"] (more…)

By Kate Nelson and Meredith Davidson

Categories: Featured

A colorful antique map of the Americas, featuring illustrations of ships, sea creatures, and figures, with labeled regions and oceans in Latin. [gen-ai]

Those Long Lonesome Roads

BY TOM IRELAND When I was nineteen I’d heard rumors of a vast continent west of New York City, but the farthest west I’d ever been was Fort Lee, New Jersey. My college buddies and I planned a motorcycle trip to the West Coast, and when they flaked out on me, I decided to go alone. (more…)

By Tom Ireland

Categories: Editor's Letter

Archaeological excavation showing large stones and a label identifying the site as San Miguel Church, southeast corner, dated August 9, 2013. [gen-ai]

A House for Fray Alonso

The Search for Pilabó Pueblo and the First Piro Mission, Nuestra Señora del Socorro BY MICHAEL BLETZER One spring day in 1626, Fray Alonso de Benavides, head of all Franciscan missionaries in New Mexico, stood in the plaza of a pueblo at the foot of a small mountain range just west of the Rio Grande. [wonderplugin_slider id="101"] (more…)

By Michael Bletzer

Categories: New Mexican cultures, New Mexican history, Southwestern history

Three covered wagons, each pulled by horses, travel through a grassy landscape and cross a shallow stream in a rural setting. [gen-ai]

Trail of Hard Knocks

BY DANIEL KOSHAREK When Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail,” he could have been talking about the early days of the Santa Fe Trail, which eventually left a track from Missouri to New Mexico. (more…)

By Daniel Kosharek

Categories: Framework