I've Been to the Mountaintop

Monday afternoon I arrived in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and have enjoyed the city with my own personal tour guide, Aunt Susie.  She and Uncle Terry have lived in Las Cruces for about four years after living nearly all their lives in the midwest, and it will not surprise anyone who knows my mother's family to learn that Aunt Susie has thrown herself completely into her new community.

Since Tuesday morning, we have helped a City Councillor with some computer problems, visited museums, hiked to the top of Picacho Peak, and met with an FBI agent.  That doesn't count eating and watching movies and talking, which we've done a lot of.

First, I got to meet Olga Pedroza, who represents the 3rd City Council District in Las Cruces.  She was wearing a Chicago Cubs sweatshirt (she was raised in Chicago) so we got along fine.  Aunt Susie and another woman were helping Councillor Pedroza access some documents from the League of Women Voters (which seems to be very active here), and that didn't take long so then we chatted for a while.  Their City Council is much more liberal than the Fort Wayne City Council (granted, a low bar) and it was refreshing to be in the home office of an elected official who had a file folder labeled "Citizens United" along with library that did not appear to include a copy of Atlas Shrugged.

Wednesday we planned to go on a hike in the mountains but it was pretty chilly in the morning so instead we went to the Museum of Art, the Museum of Nature and Science (which is new), and the Branigan Cultural Center, which are all in a complex downtown.  They were each good museums; the Branigan Center is their local history museum so as you might imagine that is the one that most interested me.

Las Cruces was founded in 1849.  It was one of several towns settled in the Mesilla Valley along the 1,500 mile Camino Real (pronounced Ray-all; it means Royal Road and stretched from Mexico City to San Juan Pueblo north of Santa Fe.)  Las Cruces grew when the railroad came through in the late 1870's.  The neighboring town of Mesilla passed up the opportunity for the railroad to stop there due to a variety of economic and political problems, so the trains went to Las Cruces instead. 

Mesilla now is mostly a historic area, with a small plaza and some shops and a couple of good restaurants.  We ate at La Posta (built in 1840; it is the only remaining station on the Butterfield Stagecoach Line; Billy the Kid, Kit Carson, and Pancho Villa are said to have taken shelter here over the years. I have to keep remembering that this was part of the Wild West.)  We enjoyed very good Mexican food along with a bright atmosphere. 

Those parrots are just decorations.  These parrots are real:

(No, the one is not sitting on my shoulder; he's in the cage along with his friend.)

There's obviously a lot of history of the Las Cruces area.  Here are some items that interested me:

• Albert Fountain who, along with his eight-year-old son, disappeared in 1896, under circumstances that make foul play seem likely.  The men arrested for the murders were acquitted in eight minutes.  The accused were represented by one Albert Fall.  At the time he was simply a local attorney, but he later went on to fame as New Mexico's first Senator and then infamy as President Warren Harding's Secretary of the Interior caught up in the Teapot Dome Scandal.  Fountain is the subject of a new movie.
• Francis Boyer, who in the last years of the 1890's walked from Georgia to New Mexico (something like 1,500 miles - coincidentally the same length as the Camino Real) after having been threatened by the KKK, in order to pursue homesteading.  Boyer was a college-educated farmer with a dream of creating a self-sustaining community of African-Americans, free from the prejudice and terror of the Jim Crow South.  Blackdom, his town, lost its population of several hundred in the late 1910's when the community was beset with water problems.  Boyer went on to become a successful farmer in Vado (NM) and some of the area's families followed him there.  Although not a movie, Blackdom is the subject of a PBS documentary.

Francis Boyer and his family

• Las Cruces College was founded in 1888 in a two-room adobe building and offered elementary, college prep and business education.  Its first president was Hiram Hadley of Indiana.  (I like the Indiana connection).  Eventually the college merged into New Mexico State University, which my aunt says has the largest campus in the country (based on acreage.)
• Picacho Avenue, a street in Las Cruces, was nicknamed "Little Oklahoma" during the Great Depression.  Families from Oklahoma migrating west to escape the Dust Bowl would stop there to sell their belongings in order to finance the rest of their trip to California.  That history is credited with a legacy of second-hand stores along Picacho that continues today.
• Shalam Colony was a utopian community established in 1884 and lasting until 1907. 

Lots of interesting tidbits, too many to list here.

I also went to the Farm and Ranch Museum which is just outside of town.  This is a state museum which is primarily focused on New Mexico's agricultural heritage.  It was really nicely done and had so much information that it was overwhelming.  And so, some pictures:

There are 47 acres that comprise the museum property

 

Mogollon Pithouse - from 1,300 years ago

Chuckwagon

Here's something else I learned at the Farm and Ranch Museum:  New Mexico has 40 official state symbols which literally range from A (Anderson-Abruzzo International Balloon Museum - New Mexico's Official Balloon Museum) to Z (Zia - the sun symbol that is on the state's flag, which was adopted in 1925, 13 years after New Mexico became a state).

In between there are the kinds of things you expect (Official State Flower - the Yucca) and those that border on the weird (yes, Austin, I said "weird.")

New Mexico, I learned, is the only state with an Official State Question.  What is that question, you ask?  The question is, "Red or Green?" and I will let you think for a minute to see if you can figure out what it refers to.  This Official Question was adopted by resolution of the New Mexico Legislature in 1996 and by statute in 1999.

Okay, give up?

The Official State Question is the question asked in a restaurant about whether a patron wants red or green chile sauce.

Honestly.  I can't make this stuff up.

Of course, there are people who can't let an Official State Question go unanswered, and apparently some of these people are in the New Mexico Legislature.  In 2007, they adopted their Official State Answer:  "Christmas."  This means a combination of both red and green.  Very politically correct.

I didn't think there was anything that could make me feel better about the Indiana General Assembly, but this did.  (On the other hand, Hoosiers would probably be better off if a few of the more, um, "out there" legislators started drafting Official State Questions rather than hateful and discriminatory amendments to the State Constitution and ridiculous laws about teaching creationism.  But that's just my opinion.)

Elizabeth Garrett was a blind musician who wrote O, Fair New Mexico in 1914, which is the Official Song of New Mexico.  She was Wild West lawman Pat Garrett's daughter.  I don't know why I am continually fascinated by all this Wild West stuff, but I am.

And in case you were curious, New Mexico also has an Official State Aircraft (the hot air balloon) and an Official State Necklace (the squash blossom necklace) - shown here with the Official State Gem, turquoise.

There were other exhibits at the museum, too, including a beautiful display of woven art and a John Deere exhibit.  The John Deere exhibit consisted of 15 to 20 vehicles, ranging from toys to full-size and modern to horse-drawn.  Most of these vehicles were lent to the museum by local farmer and John Deere enthusiast Norman Ruebush.

On the way out I bought some pistachios which are grown near here.  Yum.

This morning Aunt Susie and I hiked up Picacho Peak, which seemed like a mountain to me.

You can sort of make out Las Cruces in the background

Made it to the top!

Contest: can you see my car from the summit?

You may still be wondering about the FBI agent.  Following our hike and lunch, I accompanied Aunt Susie and another lady to a couple of meetings for a Church Women United program they are planning for March to raise awareness of human trafficking.  (Particularly given Las Cruces' proximity to Mexico, this is a significant problem in the area.)  One of those meetings was with an FBI agent who is going to speak at the event.  Yeah, that's not a particularly exciting way of meeting an FBI agent - and that's okay.  The Driveabout is not that kind of adventure.