Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument

After getting a slow and late start to this morning, we drove into Mountainair to explore the town and find the Farmer’s Market.   We realized we had been here last spring. We drove across NM and spent the night in a commercial RV park next to the railroad tracks and we remember this because the trains ran by about every 15 minutes all night long!

Almost every building in this town displays some sort of art work.  One building has a mural of the Santa Fe Train, several have mosaic murals and some have decorated interiors .  The one I found most interesting is Pop Shaffer’s Concrete Fence at the Shaffer Hotel made of concrete with imbedded stones and sculptures.

In the 900’s up until the 1300’s the Pueblo and Anasazi cultures dominated the Salinas area.  The natives lived in pit houses covered with pole and mud frames  and then started building on top of them to create stone and adobe pueblos.  The Spaniards came into this area in the late 1500’s looking for gold and to establish this part of the country for Spain. In the 1620’s Missionaries came here to try to convert the natives to Christianity by building churches and helping them with agriculture, developing pottery or baskets to trade for shovels, axes and plowshares.  But the natives found it hard to give up their own ways of worship in the Kiva, or round underground ceremonial pits and the Spanish church didn’t like the Indians still using their old ceremonies so they ordered the Kiva’s destroyed. By the 1670’s, due to drought and famine, slavery, Apache raids, and discontent with the Spanish, the pueblos and churches were abandoned and the native peoples had moved on to other parts of the country.

We visited three missions in various stages of excavations.  Some of the churches had survived better than others.  The rock walls are still standing but any wood or thatch has long since rotted away.  The churches would have shown the Spanish influence in their construction and the layout of the rooms and sanctuaries. The Abo Ruins are mostly just the church with evidence of a city surrounding it. The city would have had about 1200 residents.

The Gran Quiver Ruins is the largest.  There are ruins of two churches, the largest one was incomplete.  There are also large hillsides with rock walls where the people would have lived, stored goods, created pottery, rugs and blankets, ground maize or napped arrowheads.  Several kivas of various sizes were seen and we were told that some of the rooms would have had a secret ceremonial area or Kiva hidden away from the churches eyes. It is estimated that 1500-2000 people lived here.

Quarai Ruins seemed to be the best preserved.  The church had 6-foot wide walls built on a 7-foot deep foundation and a tiles floor (the others were dirt floors).  There was also a square Kiva on the church grounds and the foundation of a small earlier church.  Even though it has the largest church only about 400-700 people lived here.