[In February of 2012 I realized I didn’t know much about the local ditch, and so started hunting for it more systematically. Only the pictures are dated.]
The Santa Cruz dam was a consequence of the Denver and Rio Grande railroad opening a station in 1881 in an area west of the Río Grande it called Española. It introduced men looking for economic opportunities into an area where local Spanish-speaking settlers saw land as their only source for food.
Surpluses moved between villages at different altitudes with different growing seasons. Truchas raised wheat, Santa Cruz grew fruit, Chimayó supplied chili, Colorado provided beans and potatoes. What cash existed came when men went to the mines in Colorado and Utah or worked as sheep herders in Colorado or Wyoming or section hands in Colorado and Arizona.
One man who followed the railroad from Pueblo, Colorado, was Frank Bond, a Canadian immigrant who had failed in the wool business there. In 1883, he bought land from the railroad for a stock shipping facility. He also opened a local store where people could pay for goods by raising sheep for him. Within a few years, most were indebted to him.
Another was Johann Block who arrived from Kansas around 1890. His father, Jacob Block, was a West Prussian who had migrated there with his family. John married Sofia Vigil Valdez and became a local landowner. His cousins, Heinrich and Jacob Jantz-Johnson, also moved here; Henry was a bee-keeper, Jake a dairy man.
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, England could no longer import food from Russia and Germany. Prices rose in this country, even in the Santa Cruz valley. W. P. Cook came in 1915 and started work for Frank Bond as a stable boy.
Prices fell as soon as the war was over, and stayed depressed through the 1920s. Commercial farmers like to think the war years were the new normal and the present was an anomaly. One way to address it was produce more, and over-production throughout the decade kept commodity prices low nationally.
The new men weren’t deterred by the fact the easiest land to farm was taken. They believed all you had to do to make dry land productive was add water. In 1919, the commercial farmers petitioned the courts to revisit the distribution of water.
They didn’t understand demand for that water was already increasing. 1917 and 1918 had been dry years. The local population hadn’t been able to send its young to settle the frontiers after the United States took control of the land east of the Sangre de Cristo. Chimayó was taking more of the water before it could reach the valley. The court ruled in Chimayó’s favor.
Then, a man named Conger wanted to bring more land into production by building a 14 mile ditch from the Río Grande. The years between 1920 and 1925 were drought years in the state. When the ditch was completed in 1924, farmers turning chili into a commercial crop in the Mesilla Valley in the southern part of the state successfully protested the diversion of common water.
Notes:
Calkins, Hugh G. The Santa Cruz Irrigation District - New Mexico, 1937; best history of the dam.
Scurlock, Dan. From the Rio to the Sierra: An Environmental History of the Middle Rio Grande Basin, 1998.
US Department of Interior. Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975; best source for social and economic conditions in the Española valley in the 1930's.
Photographs: Santa Cruz Lake, 14 February 2012, with boulders placed around the parking area.
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