Settlement of city to be discussed by panel of experts
When Don Pedro de Peralta was ordered in 1609 by the viceroy of Spain to establish Nuevo Mexico’s first capital, it would have made sense to lay the new town out on the south side of the Santa Fe River.
After all, it was higher ground, less marshy and easier to build on. And settlers wouldn’t have to ford the river to get to government offices.
Unfortunately for Peralta’s official efforts, there was already a settlement on the south side of the river, so the designated founder was obliged to move to the north side.
At least, that’s the fairly informed opinion of Cal Riley, a retired archaeologist and ethno-historian now living in Las Vegas, N.M. Riley, educated at the University of New Mexico and for many years a professor at Southern Illinois University, claims Franciscan friars had already settled the south banks with their convento and some devout families. It was the friars who created the Barrio de Analco for Mexican Indians they’d brought north to be servants of the new Franciscan complex. Riley thinks they were here shortly after Don Juan de Oñate led the first European settlers to the banks of the Chama river at or near Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo (formerly San Juan) in 1598.
“There’s considerable evidence of an earlier settlement, although there’s relatively little known about it,” Riley told the Journal recently. “Oñate was never going to keep his settlement at Ohkay Owingeh as the capital — that was against Spanish law. So there was always a perceived need to create a capital, and given that, a settlement on the larger river was a likely place.”
That explains how the Santa Fe Plaza ended up being across the river from the first church. It’s a query that’s almost more visceral than cerebral for humans: “How did this place get to be here?”
Riley’s evidence and other history from Santa Fe’s earliest days will be considered at a panel discussion at 7 p.m. Wednesday at St. Francis Auditorium. The discussion is one of the inaugural events sponsored by the History Task Force of the city’s 400th Anniversary Committee. It will be free, although donations to the 400th Anniversary commemoration coffers will be welcome.
The other panelists for “From Intrusion to Becoming Neighbors: The Early Settlement of Santa Fe in 1608” include architectural historian James “Jake” Ivey, archaeologist David Snow and historian Tom Chavez.
Chavez, formerly director of the state Palace of the Governors museum, has done extensive research into Santa Fe and northern New Mexico’s earliest settlement, searching records from New Mexico to Mexico City to Spain. It is he who helped fix the 1608-1610 period as the official founding of the capital city. Snow, a longtime archaeologist in Santa Fe, has been a leader on several digs around the old Palace of the Governors and in other central Santa Fe areas.
Ivey is an architectural historian (and archaeologist) primarily studying historical land use for the National Park Service. “I work in space,” he joked to the Journal. “I started with small dug spots and have just moved to bigger and bigger artifacts.
One of Ivey’s fascinating artifacts is the set of official orders through which the Spanish court authorized Peralta to formally establish a capital city. Those orders specified the size of the allotments per family, stating that allotments of the King’s land should be set aside for 30 families to start with, and that the equivalent of six family allotments should be retained for government use. Since these were farming allotments, they were four-square-league parcels, or about 5.2 miles on a side, Ivey said. All in all, Peralta was entitled to use about 25 square miles of the king’s land, he said. Coupled with Riley’s guesstimate that much of the favorable southern riverside would already be in the hands of the church, Peralta pretty much had to move to the northern side to get enough contiguous King’s land.
“He wouldn’t have laid it out in a square pattern,” Ivey said. “The obvious thing would be to stay beside the river as much as possible, so it would have been a platted area longer than wide. And the normal thing when you’re laying out a town like that is to extend it in directions that will include what you want to include — fertile land, water — and pull away from land you don’t care about or can’t defend.”
Ivey also confirmed that the Plaza — one of the requisites in the founding orders — originally was rectangular rather than square, running roughly from the sidewalk in front of the Ore House restaurant to the sidewalk in front of what is now the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis. Ivey said he wasn’t sure just when commercial buildings began cutting the original Plaza in half, although most of the current buildings there were constructed in the 19th century and later, after the arrival of Americans.
“We can’t blame the Americans, though,” he said. “I’ve seen a drawing purported to be of the Plaza in the 1760s, 160 years after the town was first laid out, and although it was rectangular, there was some incursion then.”
These and other subjects are certain to be batted about in Wednesday’s talk, Riley confirmed.
If You GO
WHAT: “From Intrusion to Becoming Neighbors: The Early Settlement of Santa Fe in 1608,” panel discussion sponsored by the History Task Force of the Santa Fe 400th Anniversary Committee
WHEN: 7 p.m. Wednesday
WHERE: St. Francis Auditorium, Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace
HOW MUCH: Free; donations accepted
There is a link on the city of Santa Fe’s Web site to archived profiles of Santa Fe’s Founding Families, prepared by genealogist and author Jose Antonio Esquibel and sponsored by La Herencia magazine. Esquibel’s ongoing work is called the La Herencia Parientes Series, and can be found at www.santafenm.gov
