Richardson Rambles

As we prepare to leave New Mexico, we’ve decided to visit some iconic places that we have yet to see.  Abiquiú (pronounced Ab-i-cue) is one such place. 

Map of north-central New Mexico showing Santa Fe, Abiquiú, and several Indian Pueblos.

Fifty-three miles north of Santa Fe, Abiquiú is nestled in the Piedra Lumbre Valley along the Río Chama and surrounded by iconic mountains, such as Cerro Pedernal, and several stunning sandstone and gypsum rock formations in bands of beige and red.  With a population of only 150 people, you might think there isn’t a lot going on here, but you’d be wrong.

View of Cerro Pedernal.

Pueblo Indians settled New Mexico some 10,000 years ago and are still present in the State, many living on tribal lands and continuing to produce the fine crafts that their ancestors perfected centuries ago.  European settlement of New Mexico began in the 1590’s when Spaniards began building settlements here.  Relations between the Spaniards and the Pueblo Indians were naturally tense as Spanish colonists erected settlements, purchased Native slaves, mined the land, and tried to convert the Natives to Christianity.  Nonetheless, with the exception of one bloody uprising, the 11-day Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which resulted in the Spanish being temporarily driven from New Mexico, the Spanish remained in control.  Spanish settlement was again threatened in the mid-1700’s as Comanche, Apache, and Navajo warriors entered the region to conduct raids, killing settlers, taking captives, and stealing cattle and horses.  To protect the more southern settlements at Santa Fe and Albuquerque, the Spanish began to offer land grants to groups of “genízaros”, previously enslaved Native Americans.  The land grants were conditioned on the grantees’ establishing settlements to buffer Spanish settlements from the Native aggressors.

Built on the site of a 13^th-16^th century Tewa Pueblo, Abiquiú was first settled in 1742 by 24 Tewa families who had previously been driven from their ancestral New Mexico lands, likely by lengthy repeated droughts. They were accompanied by a Roman Catholic priest.  After a Comanche raid in 1747 in which 23 women and children were taken captive, the Tewa abandoned Abiquiú.  In 1754, 34 Tewa families returned, having been issued a land grant by the Spanish authorities. In the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War, the victorious U.S. agreed to recognize the New Mexico land grants.  However, of the 282 original land grants issued to Indian Pueblo groups, Spanish settlers, government officials, and military officers, only 22 were eventually recognized as valid.  In 1909, the U.S. Court of Private Land Claims recognized the Abiquiú land grant of 16,000 acres, thereby ensuring its survival.

Georgia O’Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929, when she was 42 years old.  A native of Wisconsin, she was by then living in New York City with her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer and art dealer.  Becoming enamored with New Mexico, she began spending the summer months there.  In 1934, she visited Ghost Ranch, just west of Abiquiú. 

She came for a night and ended up staying for the summer.  Some years later, she purchased a home and seven acres from Ghost Ranch’s owner, Arthur Newton Pack, a noted environmentalist from a wealthy family, and his second wife, Phoebe.  More on the Packs and Ghost Ranch later.

This is the cottage that Georgia O’Keeffe rented when she first came to Ghost Ranch.  It is available for overnight stays.

Although she loved her Ghost Ranch home, in 1945 she purchased a 3-acre site in Abiquiú overlooking the valley and the mountains to the north. 

The view north and east from her Abiquiú home.

The site benefited from guaranteed access to water, a large garden, and a single adobe wall, evidence of the home that once graced it.  Soon after acquiring the deed, Alfred Stiegllitz died, and Georgia returned to New York where she spent the next three years settling his estate.  Her friend, Maria Chabot, a rancher and patroness of Native American art, oversaw the construction of the O’Keeffe compound during those years.  The detailed, friendly, and sometimes heated correspondence between the two women was published in a book entitled “Maria Chabot – Georgia O’Keeffe: Correspondence 1941 – 1949.  One of their big disputes arose over the location of the studio structure, which included Georgia’s bedroom.  Maria prevailed and the studio was built to the north of the house with a spectacular orientation that inspired many of O’Keeffe’s later works. 

Georgia O’Keeffe’s studio at Abiquiú.

Georgia’s bedroom, right off the studio. The walls are a rich, soft gray adobe from a deposit she found when wondering the Abiquiú area.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s living room where she would sit endless hours listening to classical music and enjoying the view of a Tamarisk tree that she planted in her garden.

The Model A Ford that Ms. O’Keeffe tricked out to accommodate her paints and easels for plein-air painting.  A notorious loner, rumor has it that she would hide underneath the car to avoid strangers.

The home and studio are open to the public and are Abiquiú’s biggest claim to fame.  More info here: https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/homes/

Ghost Ranch, where we stayed for two nights, is the other local attraction in the Piedra Lumbre Valley. 

Oddly, the only research I did prior to booking a room there was on the Ghost Ranch website so I really had no idea what we were getting into.  It’s a quirky place, currently owned by the Presbyterian Church and run as a sort of downscale dude ranch and wellness/spiritual/educational center.  To say the accommodations are rustic and the meal service low-key would be an understatement!

This restored log cabin is much nicer looking than the accommodations!

Despite that, we had a great time hiking the Box Canyon Trail, so named because it ends in a rocky dead-end, visiting the on-site anthropology and paleontology museums, and dining on simple but delicious vegetarian fare at the cafeteria that resembled a food hall at a kid’s summer camp (but not of the exclusive type).  The highlight, by far, was the docent-led history tour of Ghost Ranch. 

Encompassing 21,000 acres, Ghost Ranch is part of a land grant made in 1766 and “homesteaded” in the 1880’s by the Archuleta brothers.  I put the word in quotation marks because the brothers were infamous cattle rustlers who had no intention of settling down there, but they liked the series of easily defended box canyons where they could stash their stolen cattle when angry owners and/or the law came looking for them. 

The Box Canyon Trail ends here.

The land also had extensive views toward the valley, which gave the brothers and their gang plenty of time to drive said cattle into the canyons. 

Valley view over Abiquiú Lake, the happy result of damming the Río Chama.

Cattlemen passing through were known to disappear after a night of the Archuleta’s hospitality, and the gang would be seen sporting the cattlemen’s clothes and riding their horses soon after.  At the time, the ranch became known as El Rancho de los Brujos (“Witch Ranch” or more accurately “Sorcerer’s Ranch”) due to claims that people could hear the dead cattlemen’s screams, claims of unexplained sightings, and other strange phenomena.

Eventually, one of the brothers killed the other in a dispute over buried gold.  The surviving brother kidnapped the dead man’s wife and child threatening to kill them unless they revealed the location of the gold.  Braving the cold desert night and wandering spirits of the dead, the mother and child escaped and notified the authorities.  A local posse assembled and descended on the ranch where they hung the murderer from a cottonwood tree that still stands before the ranch house.  In no time the house was renamed “Ghost House”.

Ghost House and the hanging tree.

In 1928, serial gambler LeRoy Pfaffle won the deed to the ranch in a poker game, but his wife, the conservatory-trained daughter of a well-off Boston family, having tired of her husband’s shenanigans, had the deed recorded in her name and divorced the bum.  She renamed the property “Ghost Ranch” and turned it into a dude ranch for city slickers wanting to rusticate in the western U.S.  Carol Bishop Stanley Pfaffle rented a casita to Georgia O’Keeffe upon the latter’s first visit in 1934 (image above).  In 1935, Carol sold Ghost Ranch to Arthur Newton Pack and his wife, Eleanor, nicknamed “Brownie”.

Arthur and Brownie moved to Ghost Ranch with their three children and the children’s tutor.  Evidently, the tutor’s charms proved irresistible to Brownie, and she ran away with him.  In 1936 Arthur married Phoebe Finlay, and they remained on the ranch with their two children until 1946, at which point they began to spend more time in Arizona.  In 1955, Arthur decided it was time to leave Ghost Ranch for good, and being a wealthy conservationist, he began to scout for potential grantees who would serve as good stewards of the property.  He eventually reached an agreement with the Presbyterian Church, and the Church owns the property to this day.

Ghost Ranch is home to one of the most important Triassic period (230 – 200 million years ago) fossil sites in the U.S.  In 1947, the first Coelophysis skeleton was discovered there.  Coelophysis is North America’s oldest fossil.  It is the progenitor of the Raptor family, which includes the now well-known Velociraptor.  Standing about 3 feet tall, reaching a length of 10 feet, and weighing only 40-50 pounds, Coelophysis is New Mexico’s official State Fossil.

Source: https://images.dinosaurpictures.org/Coelophysis_Animatronics_model_NHM2_eb56.jpg

We came away with a strong sense of the Piedra Lumbre’s historical, artistic, and geological value and are so happy we “fell” into it.  Perhaps the spirits were calling.