​by Joyce Gunn, manager
​San Luis Valley Museum-Alamosa

Many years ago, when I started working at the San Luis Valley Museum, I read a lot about the history of the Valley. I learned about the Spanish History from one of the Board Members, Dolores Chavez. As I read I asked many questions of her. She shared with me all of the many changes the Valley has gone through citing history and her own life.
 
I read about the Spanish Inquisition, explorers in the New World, the cities of gold and Onante’s travels north from Mexico City to New Mexico. He led families north to find new homes in a new land with promises for a new future. What a massive undertaking!
 
A gentleman stopped at the Museum and shared with me his knowledge of the Onante events. He said that the Mass of Thanksgiving took place August 19th, 1598 or 23 years before the Pilgrims. It made me want to learn more because I realized that the “First” Thanksgiving was NOT with the Pilgrims but with the Spanish. The Spanish had been exploring the Americas for years. Without their exploration and the stories going back to Europe, Europe would have probably never gotten involved in the “New World”.  (Side note: St. Augustine, Fl is the oldest city in the US, around 1547, settled by Spain.)
 
My desire to have and celebrate the “First Thanksgiving” is to share history, not lost but overlooked. None of us can afford to diminish or set aside history of another group especially when it affects all of us. Our beginnings in the Americas are not the pilgrims, or the trappers or Jamestown. It is part of the history of Spain. They chronicled the Native Americans, the lands from the eastern seaboard to California. Understanding their history is like filling in several holes in our own European history. It is past time to learn, share and sometimes even agree to disagree but let us do it with tolerance, respect and understanding. So let us share the day, the family stories, the laughter and the smiles. We will all be better for it!
 
We will celebrate the “Frist Thanksgiving” on July 14th, 2018. Lunch will be served at the American Legion on 4thSt starting at 12:30 PM with a few words about our shared history and our prayers of Thanksgiving for having this time together. After lunch, at the San Luis Valley Museum we will have music by Los Cancioneros Del Valle. They will perform from 2:30PM to 4:30PM. Enjoy the music, dance, have dessert, tour the museum or visit with Geronimo Olivas, who creates santos and will have many on display. At 6 PM we will say goodnight to new and old friends. Please come and join us! 
 
FRIDAY July 13th, 2018. The San Luis Valley will host Dennis Lopez. He is known for his vast and accurate knowledge of the history of the San Luis Valley. The Museum is so honored to have him share this knowledge with all of the people who live here in the Valley. The program will begin at 6 PM. Come, renew your knowledge, learn something new and share with others the Spanish history of the Valley. See you Friday night!

By Seth Boster (seth.boster@gazette.com), the Colorado Gazette

LAKE CITY • The day is finally here.
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I’m visiting with the mayor, who has the look I’d expect of this mountain town’s mayor — shorts, T-shirt, white beard and ponytail poking from ball cap — when the town clerk comes in with an important message.

“They’re dropping the railroad car now.”
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Down the street, some of the 400-odd residents have gathered around a mechanical crane.
Some wonder: Has such a thing happened here? At least not in recent memory. How strange to be looking up at something other than the mountains! The law here is that nothing can rise more than two stories, else the views be obstructed.

Now wary eyes look up, only making quick glances down at the pamphlets that a little old lady has distributed to provide more information about “Hinsdale County Museum’s most ambitious renovation project.”

Slowly, the crane lowers the car onto the tracks that men worked so hard to build: Beside the museum, they had to fill the gravel base, drive spikes into the timber ties, cut narrow gauge steel and weld it to the existing tracks, expanding to make room for one more historic car.
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Applause breaks out. Success! People wrap their arms around each other for pictures with the car, its splintered wood body and metal wheels intact after a long trip over two mountain passes. It has returned safely to its original home, the sole town of this county that considers itself the most remote county in the Lower 48.

Let the visitors have their day on their rented ATVs. They zip down the Silver Thread Scenic Byway, the only paved stretch through town that leads to the high country glory that is the Alpine Loop. But on this gravel side road, the townies rejoice over this momentous event.

Grant Houston smiles for pictures and takes them, too, for the surefire front page story coming to the next weekly edition of The Silver World. He’s the mustachioed, bespectacled editor of the paper and also the go-to source for history in Lake City, a community staple who’s been around for 63 years, longer than most.

“I love the history, and after a while, it becomes who you are,” he tells me. “I adopted it.”

So do the others who settle in Lake City. Take, for example, Harvey DuChene, the historical society’s VP who has been taken by the area’s great, ancient rocks. His “Geology 101” lectures have gained quick popularity.

He and his wife were lifelong city dwellers until their move in 2003. “She always said she wanted to live in the mountains,” he says. “This is the best I could do.”

The Silver Thread starts off U.S. 50, crosses the Blue Mesa and ribbons through open sage fields and then forest. Follow a shimmering stream and look ahead to the sharp monoliths in the sky, and know you’re close to Lake City, “a peak experience,” reads the welcome sign before the first off-roading outfitter.

Prone to paradelike lines as they rumble west, the OHVs are fairly new to town. Voters on multiple occasions declined to let that noise and dust infiltrate their residential premises. But they relented a few years ago. No longer could they deny the tax dollars to be had by the Alpine Loop’s four-wheel allure.
Mayor Bruce Vierheller is like most, conflicted. “But it’s working,” he says.

The town could use the money, after all. The school, with a K-12 enrollment of about 100, still doesn’t have a gym. Though that hasn’t kept teens from winning state track titles — what better training grounds than out the back door? And that certainly hasn’t kept families from moving for the school with consistently good marks from the state. That’s to do with the student-teacher ratio, parents say, and maybe also to do with the lack of distractions.

“My kids have been on a bike since they were 6, and they just go and explore,” says mother Kristie Borchers. “And you don’t have to worry.”

Hinsdale County is 96 percent public lands, including four wilderness areas, keeping away the neighborhoods and commercial chains that would threaten the timeless character adored by Lake City’s devotees.

But for all of its remoteness, visitors are plenty in the summer. For three months or so, it is “North Texas,” the century-old homes flying that state’s college colors.

The Texas migration is far from a recent development. Houston — the last name “pleases our visitors to no end,” he says — would have nostalgics know that the seasonal bustle is deeply ingrained in Lake City’s history, arguably more than mining.

Why, there’s even a record of the first Texans to town: the Wuppermans, arriving in the 1920s. In diaries, they described Lake City as “a town full of widows,” as the mines were no more and the black-lunged men gone with them.

The Wuppermans, after their haul from the lakes and rivers, would enjoy scenic fish fries. “See, the Wuppermans invited their friends,” Houston says. “That began the shift in the economy.”

Houston’s father was tapped Lake City’s first game warden in 1955 amid concerns of the Texans depleting trout populations. His mother opened a gift shop, and over the years more opened, decorating the main street that is also today not without ice cream parlors and galleries.

This is the touristy basecamp for the growing masses of Colorado peak baggers; they pick from five fourteeners along the Alpine Loop. Recreation has bred older traditions, too, such as Vickers Ranch.

“People will badmouth Texans, but I say they put me through school,” says Paul Vickers, the fifth generation of his family to run the town’s oldest outfitter, renting cabins and hosting horseback rides and big-game hunts in the hills.

His great granddad won a wager for the land. That’s the story he’s been told anyway. He’s more familiar with the wily ways of his dad, who ran the ranch while also sitting as county judge, Bobo the Australian shepherd his trusted adviser in the courtroom.

Lake City’s courthouse claims to be the longest operating in the state, though Fairplay also contends that. There the town’s darkest tale is told, that of Alferd Packer the cannibal. The chairs in the room still are arranged as they were in 1883 when Packer was sentenced to be hanged until he was “dead, dead, dead.”
Packer was near a stream “as pure and beautiful as ever traced by the finger of God upon the bosom of the earth,” the judge said. “Your every surrounding was calculated to impress upon your heart and nature the omnipotence of deity and the helplessness of your own feeble life. In this goodly favored spot you conceived your murderous designs.”

The history is kept, and those romantic descriptions of the land continue. Vickers can’t think of a prettier place to be than here near mountain-framed Lake San Cristobal, the state’s second largest natural lake.
He reflects in a rocking chair at the ranch. “Out of college I worked in retail management, and people were in those stores because they had to be there, not because they wanted to be there. What’s kept me going here? It’s a happy occasion. People are here because they want to be here.”

People want to be in Lake City because it’s an escape from everything else. Once people came and went by trains, and now they come and go on scenic byways, and all the while Houston and others stay put, making sure their town is as focused on what it was, what it is and what it wants to be.

Houston leaves the railroad car drop with another story to tell. There’s always something to add to the next Silver World, he says. “I can’t fit it all in!”


​https://gazette.com/life/colorful-colorado-lake-city-s-identity-lies-somewhere-between-scenic/article_2cc0486e-8060-11e8-bea7-b74a03971766.html

The Rio Grande County Museum will host a program: Trails, Trappers and Traders-Old Spanish Trail- Geology and Volcanic History SLV and San Juan Mts on Saturday, July 21st, starting at 8:30am.
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A special historical program is being held at the Rio Grande County Museum on Saturday, July 21, beginning at 8:30am in conjunction with the La Vereda del Norte Chapter of the Old Spanish Trail Association.

The program coincides with the opening of the “Trails, Trappers, and Traders” exhibit. Informative short presentations will be made on the early pioneers travelers, and trails of the area by Louise Colville; a brief history of the Old Spanish Trail by Doug Knudson, followed by an overview of the geology of the San Luis Valley, the volcanic history and features of the San Juan Mts. and the Summer Coon Volcanic center due north of Del Norte by Steve Nicolais, retired geologist.
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Following the presentations, a half day geologic road tour/field trip led by Steve Nicolais, is offered to those interested in seeing the remnants of the deeply eroded Summer Coon Volcanic center, an 8 to 10-mile diameter volcanic complex, just six miles north of Del Norte. Space is limited to 10-12 cars. Carpooling has worked well in past. A Donation of $10 is requested which will be split between the Museum and the La Vereda del Norte Chapter of the Old Spanish Trail.  

Call museum @ 719- 657-2847 early to reserve a spot on the tour.  There are no attendance limitations on the museum exhibit and talks.  Check the Museum’s Facebook page and local news media for more details on the field trip. 

After four and a half months of cleaning, sorting and building repairs, Rio Grande County Museum is pleased to announce that we are open.  Exhibits are being worked on for the upcoming season and a calendar of events will soon be available.

The museum staff would like to thank the following people who gave their time to the museum during this disaster: The Rio Grande County Road and Bridge crew, the Rio Grande County Custodial Staff, Steve and Mark Nicolais, Alex Colville, Gene Glover, Karla Shriver, Roni Wisdom, Mike Hurst, DeAnn Jacobs, Lil Davis, Mark Niederquill, David Yoder.  The all waded ankle deep, cold water to move and protect the artifacts and fixtures. Fellow museum directors, Sue Getz, Jane Rhett and Peg Schall came to the museum as advisors to help start the clean-up process.  We know that there are others who have given their time and support during this process.

 During the last four months Kyndra Powell sorted, boxed and labeled the clothing, quilt, cultural blankets and linens collection.  Steve and Mark Nicolais and Steve’s grandson, Braden Whitehill have placed shelves into the appropriate areas for the boxed artifacts, moved boxes and cleaned up the museum rooms to ready them for the exhibits.  The High Valley Community kids are volunteering time in the mentoring program to assist with the next phase of getting the exhibits in place and the collections in order.

It has been a community project to get the museum up and running.  We are looking forward to a fun and successful year.  The museum hours are Tuesday - Friday from 10 - 4 and Saturday from 10 - 3.  For more information, please contact the museum at (719)657-2847 or at rgmuseum@riograndecounty.org.  Follow us on Facebook for weekly stories and more information.

Much later these families decided to go to different parts of the Valley.  The Atencios went to what is now known as Los Valdezes or Seven Mile Plaza.  There they undertook to construct what is known as the Atencio ditch, three years after the Silva ditch.  Part of them went to what is now known as Swede Lane, which was first founded by Agapito Lucero and his family.  Still others moved up to what is now known as San Francisco Creek, which is where my paternal grandfather applied for a homestead, which was granted to him, of course, in 1897.  This was the place where the settlement built a grist mill, which was called the Blue Mill because the mill stones were made of a real dark blue stone and the principal meal that they did grind was from a blue kind of sweet corn that they had brought from New Mexico and which they grew there to make their flour.
 
At that time, I can remember my grandmother talking about the different classes of flour that they had grown in those days, after the grinding in the Blue Mill.  She always talked about it as "el Molino," which was the mill, and which the flour was ground in and which it was graded.  The first grade was always called the floor or the best of the meal, the second was the "semeta," which is pretty fair and the third, which was the poorest grade, was the "salvado," which would make a kind of a course biscuit or cookie.
 
​My mother went to school up there on San Francisco Creek, as did all the other thirteen children in the family.  I remember Mother mentioning that her teacher, Mrs. Wood, dropped by for them in her buggy and picked up all the children and took them to the little school up there on San Francisco Creek. Then she'd drive them home in the evening because of fear of rattle­ snakes.
 
There was always plenty of game, fish, deer, etc.  So, they had a good life.  They had plenty to eat, especially with the mill and with the irrigation project that they had.  It was pretty good for awhile.
 
They decided to leave San Francisco Creek because of the trouble that they had, due to a fact, that they were diverting waters that they shouldn't have.  So they decided to leave San Francisco Creek and come back to the Valley.
 
However, they did raise livestock and they did have their crops of corn and so on up there.
 
About in 1872 when they came down here to La Loma, where the grandparents and ancestors lived, Jesus Maria or J.M. Alarid, as he was known, who had come from New Mexico and was the professor, began teaching the children of the settlers, ranging in ages from ten to twenty.  This was before any school district had been formed.  He taught in an adobe building, which was built right next to where they lived, which is now known as the old Sylvester Ranch.  Of course, he did not get any pay, but he did get grain, potatoes, meat, and other rations, I presume, from the children that he taught.
 
I remember my grandfather saying, that at La Loma de San Jose they had their own burial grounds.  At one time they had all kinds of tombstones that they had made out of carved rock and wood.
 
My ancestors on both sides of my mother's family are buried there, as was the Martinez family, Jose Bonefacio and Manuel Martinez families, which, of course, were related to my mother through her mother's family.  In other words, it was a very clannish deal.  They were all intermarried and they were all related."

Geronimo Olivas to featured at the San Luis Valley Museum-Alamosa on Friday, January 26th starting at 6pm.

Geronimo Olivas received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Foreign Language/Spanish and a minor in Art in 1993 from Adams State University.

His first crucifix was created in 1988 while attending a workshop instructed by Master Santeros from New Mexico. It was then that Geronimo realized he had a gift to carve holy images out of wood. Thus, began his life as a santero.
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Geronimo received a Master-Apprentice grant in 1992 from the Colorado Council of the Arts under the mentorship of Master Santero Rubel Jaramillo. In 1993 was a featured artist for the “Young Audiences” Artist in Residence Program for the Colorado Council of Arts. In 1994, he became a Master Santero for the Master-Apprentice Program sponsored also by the Colorado Council of Arts.

Having participated in numerous art shows, gallery exhibitions, and presentations throughout Colorado including: Adams State University’s Salazar Rio Grande Del Norte Center in the Luther Bean Museum; San Luis Valley public schools, Lifeway’s of the San Luis Valley, Colorado State Veteran's Center; Colorado State Fair, numerous traditional functions, and museums. Some of his santos are part of the permanent collection of Tomas J. Steele, S.J. “The Regis Collection of Santos” Dayton Memorial Library Regis College and private collections of Bishop Arthur N. Tafoya and Fr. Patrick Valdez.
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His unique style derives from research of traditional santos of Colorado and Northern New Mexico and centers around Hispanic heritage; particularly the Morada de Nuestro Padre Jesus in Lobatos, Colorado and history of Catholic saints. The rivers and forest produce an abundance of resources available to him. Geronimo searches for many types of wood native to the San Luis Valley:  pine, aspen, cedar, and cottonwood root. Using carving tools, gesso, rabbit skin glue, pine pitch, natural and manmade pigments, and a cheese cloth method for creating garments. The final product is created in accordance with tradition.