By Rick Hendricks The traditional view of trade with the commercial centers of Nueva Vizcaya and New Mexico is limited to the triannual mission supply caravan and some limited participation by New Mexico's governors. The reality is much more complex. Frontiers entrepreneurs from such communities as Parral and San…
By Arthur (Seligman) Scott In 1849, only three years after the Army of the West occupied and claimed for the United States present-day New Mexico from Mexico, my great uncle, nineteen-year-old Sigmund Seligman immigrated from Gau-Algesheim in Germany and traveled west on the Santa Fe Trail to Santa Fe….
On June 24,1997, U.S. Air Force officials release a 231-page report dismissing long-standing claims of an alien spacecraft crash in Roswell, New Mexico, almost exactly 50 years earlier. Public interest in Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, began to flourish in the 1940s, when developments in space travel and the…
It was in 1881 that the small town of Alamitos started its upward trend. During this year the railroad was built through this place, and since Alamitos was about midway between Albuquerque and Gallup the railroad company decided upon Alamitos as their coaling-station, which led to the building of…
By Pablo Mitchell Life changed in many ways in New Mexico after the railroad arrived in 1880. One of the most profound changes occurred in burial practices. For growing numbers of New Mexicans, burial practices became more professionalized and market-oriented as trained morticians and undertakers increasingly made a living…
6 27 1835 By Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint As author Frank Waters so aptly put it, "the Fred Harvey system introduced America to Americans." And yet, Fred Harvey, called a "civilizer of the West," was an Englishman. Born Frederick Henry Harvey in London in 1835, he immigrated…
By Kim Suina Peoples of the Southwest and Mexico used the Camino Real corridor for trade and as a communication network for hundreds of years before the arrival of European settlers. Indian trails encompassing the Camino Real linked the Aztec Empire and other Mesoamerican civilizations with the northern Chihuahuan…
In the 1920s automobile travel and the tourist impulse engaged the American public's imagination in a way that would open up the country and hark back to the statement made by Charles F. Lummis to “see America first.” To accommodate this technological and cultural movement, the U.S. Congress modified…
12 6 1836 A native son of New Mexico, Nicolas T. Armijo was born in Los Gallegos, Bernalillo county, on the 6th of December, 1835, being, as before stated, a descendant from one of the oldest and most distinguished Spanish families in the Territory. His father, Juan Cristobal Armijo,…
The prosperity of the 1920s ended with the economic catastrophe known as the Great Depression. By 1933 industrial production had fallen, thousands of banks were closed, and millions of Americans were jobless. The horizon of prosperity looming "just around the corner" seemed to fade from view. While the Depression…
