The Ditch - Later Contributions

Irrigation improvements, like the settlement of the Santa Cruz valley, did not stop when Juan de Oñate was recalled in 1607 and Pedro de Peralta moved the colony to Santa Fé in 1610. However, it’s difficult to recover the history.

Official sources that survive in México are probably distorted by the legal expectations that governors and alcaldes ensure adequate water resources for land grants. If the 1681 Law of the Indies decreed they provide a "good and plentiful water supply for drinking and irrigation," then that was what would be in the record.

The reality may have been different. San Gabriel was not self sufficient by 1601 when a Franciscan, Juan de Escalona, wrote the viceroy all the corn the natives "had saved for years has been consumed, and not a kernel is left over for them. The whole land has been reduced to such need that the Indians drop dead from starvation wherever they live; and they eat dirt and charcoal ground up with some seeds and a little corn in order to sustain life. Any Spaniard who gets his fill of tortillas here feels he has obtained a grant of nobility."

He also noted, without more support from the viceroy, "it will be impossible to live here or remain in ths land, for it is very sterile and cold." He didn’t know the years from 1598 to 1601 were "exceedingly dry years" with unusually severe winters. Good rains didn’t appear until 1609.

When you look at the backgrounds of the settlers and soldiers who came with Oñate in 1598 you wonder who among them would have had any idea how to establish a farm, let alone an irrigation system. The roster lists used by Angélico Chávez to compile his Origins of New Mexico Families didn’t give occupation, beyond military status, but they did often list place of birth.

Of those born in Europe, twelve came from Anadalucía, but only one from an agricultural area. Six were from the Basque and Galician north; four from the Estramadura, which was cattle country, and four from the area of Madrid and Toledo, which also favored cattle. In addition, five came from the Canary Islands where there are no rivers for irrigation.

The others whose origins could be identified were from Mexico City or Zacatecas. José Rivera and Thomas Glick think the last may have been the most important because "they brought with them their rich and diverse experiences with irrigation development in Mesoamerica and the Islamic-Iberian Mediterranean world."

Oñate’s father, Cristóbal Pérez de Oñate arrived in México City in 1524 from the Basque region of Álava. In 1525 he was given the encomienda of Culhuacan by Cortés and in 1528 the tribute from Tacámbara. After the conquest of New Galicia he was given more land in the area where he founded Zacatecas in 1547 after silver was found.

The mine town imported its food, corn for the Indians and mules, wheat for the Spanish and mestizos. The nearest sources were river valleys on high plateaus where irrigation was possible. Later observers noted that crops in New Galicia were sown in the fall for spring harvest with irrigation, while crops sown in the spring required no irrigation.

The younger Oñate could have learned a great deal about the acquisition and distribution of food from his father, but very little about its production.

After he left, the food supply for the mining towns became more reliable, but also more distant. Records for 1635, the first year for which they are available, indicate Bajío had become the major supplier of wheat, which required irrigation to grow. Landholdings in that area had been consolidated to justify the cost of labor for irrigation. Large suppliers included the Carmelite farms in Salavatierra and Augustinian ones in Celaya and Michoacán.

Almost all religious members were from Europe where concepts for water management had been evolving. After some technological advances in 1570, the Netherlands began massive wetland reclamation projects with improved dikes and canals. Skilled Dutchmen were sought by the Prussians, Swedes, Danes, and French. Anyone interested in advanced farming in those years would have been studying their work.

The most likely diffusion route for new irrigation ideas into the Santa Cruz valley was probably the one group Chávez didn’t mention because they founded no recognized families: the Franciscan friars who were closely associated with the Carmelites in México. It only took the implementation of a few new ideas, like long distance transport and distribution grids, to form the acequia system people remember.

Notes:
Bakewell, Peter John. Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700, 1971.

Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition; the ones who came after 1598 were primarily military, those who came with Oñate in 1600 and escorts with the supply trains.

Escalona, Juan de. Report to the Viceroy Regarding Spanish Rule in New Mexico, 1 October 1601, included in George P Hammond and Agapito Rey, Don Juan de Oñate, Colonizer of New Mexico, 1595-1628, 1953.

Himmerich y Valencia, Robert. The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521-1555, 1991, on Oñate senior.

Rivera, José A. and Thomas F. Glick. "1600 - The Iberian Origins of New Mexico’s Community Acequias," Economic History Congress, 2002; quote Law of the Indies.

Scurlock, Dan. From the Rio to the Sierra: An Environmental History of the Middle Rio Grande Basin, 1998, on tree ring and climate history, including quotations.

The Ditch - Origins

[I originally wrote this in February 2012, but never posted this series on the local ditch]

Impoundment dams like the one on the Santa Cruz river may have been an Anglo introduction to the area, but the ditches have a more cosmopolitan background.

When Juan de Oñate arrived at the confluence of the Chama with the Río Grande on 11 July 1598 with 130 soldiers, their families, some Mexican Indian servants and eight Franciscans, he came with an awareness he needed to build an irrigation ditch. In August, he announced his intent and expected the pueblo he called San Juan to provide the labor.

The Tewa speaking group was divided into two groups, the winter people at Caypa to the east of the Chama who were responsible for hunting, and the summer people at Yunque to the west who were responsible for farming. The ones he called San Juan were the winter people.

When his plans failed to materialize, Bradford Pince says Oñate moved into Yunque with its 400 rooms, and forced the two moieties to share the same space. José Rivera and Thomas Glick suggest all he had to do at Yunque was "reconstruct an irrigation ditch sufficient to irrigate the fields to be cultivated in the fertile valley between the two rivers." The San Gabriel ditch still exists as the Acequia de Chamita.

Local people were already irrigating the land. However, according to Dan Scurlock, they were flooding their fields directly from the creeks rather than building long distance delivery systems with their grid of laterals and head ditches.

Before they planted in the spring, farmers would bring water through wide, shallow canals. When they needed water later in the season, they would construct temporary dams of brush and logs to back water into the canals.

The methods were adequate for their populations in good years. When there was a short drought, they might make a temporary shift. When the drought lasted more than three years, they began moving to new locations. With the migration of new people into the area, the methods probably weren’t up to the increased demands on the available water.

Rivera and Glick say people commonly look to Spain for the source of local ideas about irrigation. After all, many of the most important conquistadors, as well as some of the original settlers, were from the Estremadura where the Romans built two aqueducts at Merida to support a colony of retired soldiers of the Fifth and Tenth Legions in 25bc.

However, after the Moors conquered the city, Merida was virtually abandoned until the 1500s when people were migrating to the New World. During the Moorish occupation, the area had become more dependent on pastoralism than agriculture.

Moorish irrigation was concentrated in Valencia and Murcia, in the southeastern part of Spain. A number of Oñate’s forces came from Andalucía, but mainly the port cities of Cadiz and Cartaya. The only one from Murcia was Juan de Escarramad.

The more important Moorish contribution was the body of laws governing water, including the idea that water must be made available to everyone, that there were limits on how much people upstream could take, and that communal groups determined the distribution of water through their selected leaders.

When Christians drove Moors from an area of the Iberian peninsula, the rulers usually decreed that people should continue to "irrigate in accordance with ancient custom" or as "established and customary in the times of the Muslims." The word acequia is derived from the Arab word "sagiya."

One would guess that under threat of starvation the settlers blended their memories of what they had seen from a distance in México and Spain with the techniques used locally.

Alvar Carlson found construction methods remained primitive into territorial times. An ox was used to begin a ditch by pulling a wooden scraper. Men deepened it with hand tools, dumping the dirt onto the embankments. Dams were made of logs and brush, flumes from hollow logs. Rather than remove large trees, men routed ditches around them and trial and error usually defined the final paths.

It was enough so long as the population remained small. When settlements outgrew the existing resources, the solution was always to send groups looking for new land, first up the Santa Cruz, then along tributaries to the Chama and Río Grande. From Santa Fé they moved south.

Notes: San Juan is now called Ohkay Owingeh.

Carlson, Alvar W. The Spanish-American Homeland, 1990.

Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition, on number and characteristics of men who came with Oñate.

Prince, L. Bradford. Spanish Mission Churches of New Mexico, 1915.

Rivera, José A. and Thomas F. Glick. "1600 - The Iberian Origins of New Mexico’s Community Acequias," Economic History Congress, 2002.

Scurlock, Dan. From the Rio to the Sierra: An Environmental History of the Middle Rio Grande Basin, 1998.

Santa Cruz Dam History - Part 3

As built by Texas contractors, Chris J. Veesaert says the Santa Cruz dam was "unstable seismically." In a ten-year-type flood, the spillway would have been overtopped and the dam would likely have failed in a more serious flood. The Bureau of Reclamation redesigned it to be overtopped safely and built a "stabilizing arched buttress against the downstream face" to prevent failure from "erosion of the intensely-fractured granitic supporting abutment rock."

They couldn’t do anything about the silt that has accumulated at the bottom, reducing the capacity by 34%. When the district releases 8' of water for irrigation, the lake’s fishing dock is no longer usable. The irrigation district has been trying to increase the height of the dam to the level approved in 1929.

In 2000 Congress allocated $100,000 to study the sediment problem. John McCain protested it was an intolerable earmark.

In 2010 the Corps of Engineers awarded a $291,773.00 contract to the URS Group of Dallas for plans and specifications for the dam restoration project.

When I attended the local ditch meeting a few years ago, the majordomo was optimistic it would soon be shovel ready, waiting for funding.

He also reported on the potential problems caused by Chimayó’s tainted ground water. People in the audience began volunteering information that people up there had put their new well next to the dam and was sucking 60% of its water from the dam they still refuse to pay for.

The 1938 Rio Grande Compact between Colorado, New Mexico and Texas limited even more the amount of water people here could use. The dam is no longer simply a source for irrigation water. It’s now part of the regional network that controls the amount and quality of water flowing to Texas.

Whatever its faults and costs, it has to be maintained.

Notes:
US Department of Interior. Bureau of Land Management. Santa Cruz Lake Recreation Facilities Rebuild, Environmental Assessment.

Veesaert, Chris J. 2002. "Addressing Hydrologic Inadequacy" in Dam Maintenance and Rehabilitation edited by J. A. Llanos, J. Yague, F. Sanz de Ormijana, M. Cabrera and J. Penas.

Photographs:
1. Santa Cruz Lake, 14 February 2012; the boat ramp is in the left center.
2. Santa Cruz dam face, 16 February 2012; the buttress addition is on the left.

Santa Cruz Dam History - Part 2

[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.]

It’s a fact of life in northern New Mexico that there’s only so much water. Once it was allocated, and it was allocated very early, the only way left to increase agricultural production was to improve the efficiency of the acequias. In 1925, 25% of the water was lost through seepage.

In the 1930's, the Department of the Interior found the Santa Cruz ditch was poorly constructed and required 25 days every summer to maintain. If the Llanos ditch had been straightened, it would have added a square mile to the irrigated land, but landowners, who were spending 45 days a summer on maintenance, weren’t interested. The Puebla ditch was the worst, built though porous soil, weakened by a nearby arroyo, and requiring 30 to 50 days each summer to repair.

If the ditches couldn’t be improved, John Block reasoned the delivery system could. In 1925, he organized the commercial growers of the Española area into a conservancy district and proposed a dam. With approval guaranteed through his friendship with Tom Burns, who controlled the Rio Arriba county board of commissioners, he got a favorable engineering report from the state.

Based on 8,000 irrigated acres and a 166' dam that would hold 18,000 acres of water, they calculated it would cost $30 an acre to build. The initial tax was $0.69 an acre. They got enough people to join the conservancy to issue bonds for $250,000. Only Chimayó refused en masse, which reduced the number of acres to 5,200.

As commodity prices stayed low in the 1920s, economic conditions deteriorated for both Frank Bond and the people indebted to him. The money for the ditch tax could only come from the cash they got selling their produce to local merchants, and many were too in debt to have any. Bond moved to Albuquerque to find better opportunities near the railroad there. Louis Nohl remained in charge of the local store. W. P. Cook was a trusted assistant.

The investment broker, Sutherlin Barry Bonding Company in Los Angeles, kept 5% of the bond money for themselves, and managed to sell the bonds through their New Orleans office. It was the 1920s and everyone believed the successes of California’s inland valleys could be replicated.

The contractor, Ajax Construction of El Paso, began work in 1926, spent the money in 18 months, built about half the dam and declared bankruptcy. Two other companies put some time into the project, and each of them went bankrupt. By 1928, the annual tax was $2.69 an acre and there were some delinquencies. After some wet years, the summer of 1928 had been hot and dry.

To finish the dam, the conservancy had to issue another $250,000 in debt, sold mostly to the same investors. The tax rate for 1929 went up to $8.36 an acre, just as the national economy was crashing. A severe winter in 1928 had killed half the sheep; floods damaged land in the fall of 1929. Delinquencies soared.

Anderson Brothers of El Paso began work. The bond holders sent a representative who reported $6.00 an acre was the most they could expect the land owners to pay. They began losing money of their investment.

When the dam was completed in 1931, it cost $6,000 more than the contract. It was only 131' high and had one third the projected capacity, 6,000 acres. It had cost $95 an acre to build.

The 1929 and 1930 seasons had been wetter than normal; excess water had damaged irrigation systems. The winters of 1931-1932 and 1932-1933 were severe enough to kill livestock while the summers were so wet flooding was a problem. $40 an acre was later calculated to have been the maximum land owners could afford.

The Conservancy couldn’t pay its debts and went into receivership in 1933. Before the Reconstruction Finance Corporation would intervene, all back taxes had to be paid. The federal bank told the bond holders they would get $.25 on the dollar for their original investment, with no interest. An extended drought had begun in 1932.

At this point, Hugh Calkins’ history of the dam gets vague. Some unidentified entity called the Santa Cruz Real Estate and Land Company appeared with Mr. Cook as its agent. When he couldn’t collect the unpaid taxes, he had landowners sign agreements that he would pay their taxes for them, in exchange for rights to their land.

When all the taxes were paid, the RFC took over and sent in its financial people who reported the financial affairs were "pretty much of a mess." The land company owned 397 acres of land taken from 92 individuals who often "were unaware that their lands had been sold from under them."

The land company had resold 180 acres to men from Oklahoma and Texas, but it was "doubtful if the money from those sales ever reached the bondholders."

Once the RFC was in charge, the annual tax was set at $1.00 an acre in 1935 and $2.90 in 1936. Delinquencies dropped. 1934 had been another drought year, but those who still had their land believed enough water had flowed to water the gardens that fed them.

Still, the drought continued and the economy worsened. The government was employing men on its project to clear the Río Grande malaria swamps, but only Leadville was hiring temporary help. A few men went into CCC camps. According to the Department of the Interior, 51% of the men around Española were or had been on relief.

The fortunes of the Bond company faltered. According to Richard Cook, the government price for sheep was half what Bond paid for them. Both Bond and Cook senior were so heavily in debt, they offered their lands to a bank that didn’t want any more unsellable assets. Bond died in 1936, and the family sold the assets and liquidated his holding company. Cook had recovered enough to buy the Española store.

Normal rains returned in 1937.

Notes:
Calkins, Hugh G. The Santa Cruz Irrigation District - New Mexico, 1937; best history of the dam.

Santa Fe New Mexican. "Provider or Destroyer," 26 April 1998; includes quotation by Richard Cook.

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 1930s.

Photographs: Local ditches, 2012; the top three are different segments of the first ditch to run in the spring, the one that feeds parts of the village; the fourth shows a lateral to the left, and the diversion to the property to the right; the bottom is a ditch in a farm field with the dam at the back.

Santa Cruz Dam History - Part 1

[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.