Jeff Bingaman United States Senator from New Mexico

This list of seminal events in New Mexico history was compiled by the Office of the State Historian. My thanks to staff in that office for permission to use this information here.

1200-1500 C.E.: Pueblo Indians establish villages along the Rio Grande and its tributaries - The abandonment of Pueblo sites in the greater Southwest between the 1200’s and 1300’s can be attributed to a variety of factors including warfare, inter-Pueblo violence, disease, the collapse of social integration, resource depletion, droughts, arroyo cutting and unpredictable special distributions of rainfall. Some of these people migrated to the Rio Grande valley in New Mexico where they integrated themselves with people and life ways that were already established. The move from the more arid mesas and canyons of the four corners region of the Rio Grande Valley was precipitated according to Pueblo history by the need to find a place where they could live in peace with themselves and the environment that surrounded them.

April 30, 1598: Juan de Oñate takes possession of New Mexico - Oñate and the first New Mexico colonizers reach the Rio Grande after days without water in the Chihuahua, Mexico, badlands. A celebration is held that many New Mexicans consider this to be the first Thanksgiving. On April 30, 1598, following a long and arduous trip from Santa Barbara (San Bartolome) in New Spain, the colonists arrive on the banks of the Rio Grande, about fifteen miles below the modern city of El Paso . Following a solemn and formal mass, Governor Juan de Oñate takes possession of New Mexico in the name of the King of Spain. The poet-Captain Gaspar Perez de Villagra graphically describes the arrival of the Governor and colonists at the river: "the gaunt horses approached the rolling stream and plunged headlong into it. Two of them drank so much that they burst their swollen sides and died. Our men, consumed by the burning thirst, their tongues swollen and their throats parched, threw themselves into the water and drank as though the entire river did not carry enough to quench the terrible thirst."

c. 1609-10: Founding of Santa Fe - In late January of 1610, Don Pedro de Peralta reached New Mexico's first capital city, the Villa de San Gabriel, located on the west bank of the Rio Grande, opposite San Juan Pueblo. Peralta carried instructions to move the provincial capital to a better site. His charge from the viceroy was to lay out a new municipality for the colonists; to elect a town council, the cabildo, demarcate municipal boundaries, assign house and garden plots to citizens and select a site for the plaza and government buildings. Ultimately, Governor Peralta was to lay claim to this new capital, defend New Mexico and restore respect for Spanish rule, consolidate the natives if possible, and build for the future. The formal and legal founding of Santa Fe was carried out under the direction of Governor Peralta; he and his surveyor laid out a plan for the new capital with its several districts, and a public square for the casas reales or government buildings. According to Peralta’s instructions from the viceroy, the casas reales would contain offices for royal officials, a jail, arsenals, a chapel and the office and quarters for Peralta as governor.

1680: The Pueblo Revolt - According to Ralph Emerson Twitchell, the Pueblo Indians of Nuevo Mexico had made ineffectual attempts to free themselves from the yoke of Spanish tyranny for nearly half a century before they were finally successful in 1680. The Spaniards lived in continual fear that their expulsion was imminent and the most unceasing vigilance on their part was always exercised and was required to keep their tentative hold on the province. But finally the oppression of the Spaniards reached such a height that the Pueblos resolved to take it no longer and it was determined by consensus to rid themselves of the oppression forever. On August 10, 1680, the Pueblo Indians, mostly united in one vision, rose up and forced the colony of almost two thousand Spaniards and Christianized Indians to retreat to the southern most mission center of Guadalupe del Paso, now Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. During the revolt, significant numbers of settlers and Franciscan missionaries as well as Pueblos were killed and civil and ecclesiastical records were destroyed. The Spanish would have to wait more than a decade to reassert their control over the region.

1821: Trade with New Mexico on the Santa Fe Trail - In June 1821, William Becknell opened the Santa Fe trade when he advertised in the Missouri Intelligencer for "a company of men destined to the westward for the purpose of trading horses and mules, and catching wild animals of every description." Becknell’s intent was to trade with the Comanche and to trap for furs in the Rocky Mountains . He and four companions left Franklin, Missouri in September, moved westward on the Arkansas River and then south through Raton Pass, on the border of present-day Colorado and New Mexico . Somewhere along his route, Becknell was given word from New Mexican scouting expeditions that the territory was now under Mexican rule, and whether persuaded by them to go to Santa Fe or on his own volition, Bucknell arrived in Santa Fe on November 16, 1821. It is said that Bucknell was able to sell his merchandise at “a very handsome profit,” and shortly after his arrival, other groups were in and out of Santa Fe both trapping and trading.

August 3, 1837: The 1837 Revolution of Rio Arriba (otherwise known as the 1837 Rebellion) - Northern New Mexicans stage a full-fledged revolt, mainly in the Chimayo area, against the Mexican government in protest of unfair taxation and poor military protection. The revolt is led by the alcalde (mayor) of Santa Cruz , Juan Jose Esquibel and supported by a twelve member council referred to as El Canton de la Cañada. On the August 3, 1837 , the following plan or platform was promulgated by the leaders of the revolution:

Long live God and the nation and the faith of Jesus Christ for the principal points we defend are the following:

1st: To be with God and the nation and the faith of Jesus Christ.

2nd: To defend our country to the shedding of our last drop of blood to obtain the victory sought after.

3rd: Not to admit any plan of department.

4th: Not to admit any taxation.

5th: Not to admit the bad orders of those who are trying to affect it.

February 2, 1848: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo - The treaty was signed on February 2, 1848 at Guadalupe Hidalgo, a city to which the Mexican government had fled with the advance of U.S. forces. By a another treaty signed on Apr. 30, 1803, the United States purchased from France the Louisiana Territory, more than 800,000 sq miles of land extending from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains including Texas; but in 1819 Texas had been ceded to Spain in the negotiations for Florida. Two years later Mexico , including Texas , had become independent, and the United States made two unsuccessful attempts to purchase Texas from Mexico . The settlement of Texas by immigrants from the United States finally led to the secession of Texas and its annexation by the United States , resulting in the Mexican War, 1846-1848. The treaty ended the war between the United States and Mexico . By its terms, Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory, including parts of present day Arizona , California , New Mexico , Texas , Colorado , Nevada and Utah , to the United States.

December 30, 1853: Gadsden Purchase - James Gadsden had a dream to knit all Southern railroads into one system and then to connect it with a Southern transcontinental railroad to the Pacific, making the West commercially dependent on the South instead of the North. But, a fter engineers advised Gadsden that the most direct and practicable route for the Southern transcontinental railroad would be south of the United States boundary, he made plans to have the Federal Government acquire title to the necessary territory from Mexico . Gadsden was appointed U.S. Minister to Mexico by President Franklin Pierce and was given authority to buy from Mexico enough territory for a railroad to the Gulf of California . Meeting in Mexico City on December 30, 1853, James Gadsden and General Antonio López de Santa Anna, president of Mexico, signed the Gadsden Purchase whereby the United States agreed to pay Mexico $10 million for a tract of land in southwestern New Mexico and eastern Arizona disputed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty ultimately settled the dispute over the exact location of the Mexican border.

1863-1864: Bosque Redondo Long Walk - in a long history of conflict and tragedy, one of the most distressing and demoralizing episodes was the Long Walk of 1863-64. General James H. Carlton together with Kit Carson and an army of American soldiers, Hispano, Ute and Pueblo recruits was determined to roundup and sequester the entire Navajo tribe. They rounded up thousands of Navajo and Apache men women and children and forced them to walk more than 300 miles from northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to Bosque Redondo, an inhospitable and desolate tract of land on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico . Bosque Redondo was intended to be a reservation "to tame the savages," but it was in a virtual prison camp for the Navajo and Apache. Native and Anglo culture were at odds in irreconcilable ways but there were also profound differences between the various tribes and communities who were forced to live together on the reservation. Inhumane living conditions, both physical and cultural, were exacerbated by bad weather, bad luck and by 1865, tribal members were deserting the reservation in large numbers. By 1868, the experiment at Bosque Redondo Reservation was over, ending one of the most brutal chapters in New Mexico history.

February 24, 1898: The first motion picture filmed in New Mexico was filmed and released in 1898 prior to New Mexico becoming a state. The film was a black and white silent documentary of Indian children attending school. Titled Indian Day School and filmed on location at the Isleta Pueblo, Indian Day School , the film was produced by Thomas Alva Edison. Photographed from a single-camera position, the film shows the doorway of a building with a sign in front indicating it is the Isleta Indian School . Children less than ten years of age come out of the door of the school and pass in front of the camera.   

1901: Blackdom, New Mexico - Henry Boyer first came to New Mexico in 1846 as a wagoneer for the U.S. Army, in a unit headed by General Stephen W. Kearny. He was amazed and awed by the wide-open spaces and the vast available land in the New Mexico Territory . His son, Frank Boyer, who was educated at Moorehouse and Fiske Colleges and was aware of the Homestead Act of 1893 decided to try homesteading in New Mexico. Pursuing the dream of his father to establish a self-sustaining community, Frank Boyer and his student, Daniel Keyes, walked from Pellam, Georgia to New Mexico, “stopping just long enough, to work for food, clothes, shelter, and other necessities they needed.” They were sometimes given rides by friendly wagon trains for work they performed. Boyer and Keyes settled in an area near what is now known as Dexter in October of 1900. He and Daniel worked on ranches until they were able to send for their wives and children who arrived in 1901. Others also came; many for the land and others for health reasons. So began the all-Black community, Blackdom.

April 26, 1901: Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum was executed in Clayton, New Mexico - becoming the only person ever hanged under the territorial law that imposed the death penalty on train robbers. Thomas Edward Ketchum was born on October 31, 1863 in San Saba County, Texas. Tom and his brother Sam worked as cowboys on ranches throughout west Texas and New Mexico. In 1892, the two brothers learned that an Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe train was on route to Deming, New Mexico with a large payroll. The gang set up to rob the train just outside Nutt, New Mexico . The gang stopped the train, holding it up at gunpoint, and made off with about $20,000. This was the first of many robberies. Ketchum made a final solitary attempt at train robbery on August 16, 1899. He was injured when he miscalculated the circumstances and eventually would be captured. Although he was first taken to Trinidad, Colorado, he was later transferred to Clayton, New Mexico for trial. He pled innocent, but the judge found him guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging. The hanging was scheduled on April 26, 1901 at 8:00 a.m. The event turned into the town’s biggest attraction, with local lawmen even selling tickets to view the hanging. As he climbed the steps, Ketchum allegedly said to those around him: “Better hurry up boys, because I’m due in Hell for dinner.” When the trap was opened and Ketchum hit the end of the rope, his head popped off. The mortician had to sew it back on before burial. A photographer took a series of pictures of the execution.

January 6, 1912: New Mexico becomes the 47th State - On Saturday, January 6, 1912, at 1:35 p.m. in Washington D.C., a delegation including W.H. Andrews and two congressmen-elect from New Mexico gathered at the White House and proudly witnessed the making of their new state. President William H. Taft signed the proclamation making New Mexico the 47th state of the United States of America . After affixing his signature to the proclamation, President Taft turned to Delegate Andrews, Congressmen George Curry, and Harvey Ferguson and remarked: "Well, it is all over, I am glad to give you life. I hope you will be healthy.” The following month, Arizona was proclaimed a state on February 14, 1912. Almost sixty-four years after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the sister territories of the Southwest were finally brought into the union.

March 9, 1916: Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa leads an attack on Columbus, New Mexico - In 1910, Francisco "Pancho" Villa and his men came down from the hills to join Francisco I. Madero's revolutionary forces, making a historical transition from bandidos to revolucionarios. The charismatic figure was able to recruit an army of thousands, including a substantial number of Americans. Following Madero's short-lived victory and assassination, Villa remained in command of his División del Norte army in resistance—along with Coahuila's Venustiano Carranza and Sonora 's Alvaro Obregón—against the Victoriano Huerta dictatorship. Villa's forces were based in Chihuahua, and he became something of a folk hero in the U.S. but split among the revolutionary leaders soon pitted Villa against Obregón and Carranza. When the U.S. government openly supported the Carranza presidency, Villa retaliated by raiding U.S border towns, most notably Columbus , New Mexico . Despite his popularity, the combined forces of Carranza and Obregón defeated the Villistas in one battle after another. After two U.S. Army "punitive expeditions" into Mexico in 1916 and 1919 failed to route Villa, the Mexican government accepted his surrender and retired Villa on a general's salary to Canutillo, Durango . In 1923 he was assassinated while returning from a business trip in Parral, Chihuahua .

1920: New Mexico's legislature ratifies the 19th Amendment - Adoption of the l9th Amendment gave women the right to vote. Adelina Otero-Warren, the niece of the popular head of the state's Republican Party at the time, helped lead Mexican-American women into the political mainstream. Bilingual flyers and speeches in Spanish at public rallies brought support for suffrage among both men and women in the Hispanic communities. Otero-Warren enjoyed such a loyal following that she was chosen by Alice Paul to lead the state Congressional Union in 1917. Her mission was to bombard the New Mexico congressional delegation to win their support in the battle to pass the "Susan B. Anthony" (19th) Amendment. With her help the amendment passed through Congress and to the states for ratification. New Mexican women won full suffrage at last with the final ratification by the state legislature of the amendment in 1920.

1925: The Spanish Colonial Arts Society Founded - In 1925, at the home of Josefita Manderfield-Otero, Mary Austin secured financial backing from her friend Elon Hooker to establish a society for the revival of Spanish colonial arts. This meeting was auspicious in that it melded the capital of East Coast industrialist Hooker with the Oteros, leaders in the economic and social affairs of New Mexico . Wealthy financier William Henry Manderfield and partner Thomas Tucker bought the printing plant and The Santa Fe Republican newspaper, changing its name to The New Mexican, and later published The Daily New Mexican. Manderfield’s daughter Josefita married Eduardo M. Otero. Thus, Austin’s society for the revival of Spanish colonial arts was conceived in very elite company (A Spanish Colonial Arts Society pamphlet lists the original members in addition to Austin: Frank Applegate, Mrs. Ruth Laughlin Alexander, Mr. and Mrs. A. S. Alvord, Mr. George Bloom, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Cassidy, Dr. Kenneth Chapman, Miss Leonora Curtin, Mrs. Thomas Curtin, Senator Bronson M. Cutting, Mr. Andrew Dasburg, Mr. and Mrs. John DeHuff, Mrs. Charles H. Dietrich, Mrs. Lois Field, Mrs. William Field, Mrs. Alice Corbin Henderson, Mr. Wayne Mausy, Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus McCormick, Mr. George McCrossen, Mr. Preston McCrossen, Mr. John Gaw Meem, Dr. Frank E. Mera, Mrs. Alice Clark Myers, Mr. Sheldon Parsons, Dr. Francis Proctor, Mrs. Marie Robinson, Mr. H. Cady Wells, Miss Mary C. Wheelwright, and “others sensitive to Spanish Culture”). The organization was known as the Society for the Revival of Spanish-Colonial Arts until 1929 when it became the Spanish Colonial Arts Society.

1929-1942: The Great Depression and the New Deal in New Mexico - The prosperity of the 1920s ended with the economic catastrophe known as the Great Depression. By 1933, industrial production had fallen, thousands of banks were closed, and millions of Americans were jobless. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" aimed at promoting economic recovery and putting Americans back to work through Federal jobs programs for the unemployed. New Mexico was among the poorest states in the Union in the 1920’s and it went from bad to worse with the onset of the Depression. The New Deal programs administered throughout the country were especially needed in New Mexico, particularly in rural villages. The various programs attempted to give immediate relief to those who were in dire need of help but in the long run attempted to revitalize the economy and cultural production of the state. Various sectors of the economy were targeted with specific programs including ones aimed at reviving arts and crafts production, bolstering small scale agriculture and stock raising as well as gainfully employing the states youth. The Works Progress Administration (WPA), known later as the Works Projects Administration, was the largest and longest lasting of the Roosevelt New Deal programs though not the first. Many of the projects conducted in New Mexico were successful to greater and lesser degrees depending on their administration, funding, politics, and acceptance in the areas where they were administered.

July 16, 1945: The world's first atomic bomb was detonated at the Trinity bomb site in the central New Mexican desert - The bomb was the creation of the Manhattan Project (the code name for America’s atomic bomb program), a federally commissioned project led by Major General Leslie Groves. The Manhattan project pitted American science and technology against the scientists of Nazi Germany in a race to discover the secrets of nuclear fission and the possibilities of building a nuclear weapon for possible use in World War II. Science and American industry under the lead of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist at the University of California , Berkeley and Kenneth T. Bainbridge, a physicist at M.I.T created not only an atomic bomb, but also the momentum to use it against enemy nations. The bomb was designed over the course of a few years at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories, New Mexico . The use of nuclear energy for wartime purposes forever changed the cultural landscape and the consequences of that event continues to engender controversy on the world stage.

1951: The Salt of the Earth made in New Mexico - The Salt of the Earth is one of the most important films ever made. It deals with the 1950 Empire Zinc strike that took place near Silver City . The labor dispute was New Mexico 's longest and one of its most bitter. The Strike drew national attention when it was kept alive by miners' wives, mothers, sisters and children who took over picket lines and withstood tear gas, beatings and jail. The workers were fighting segregation at the mine, which placed Hispaño workers in underground, lower-paid jobs, and left surface work in the mill and shop for Anglos. The policy extended to company-owned houses. It was one of the first films to deal with the experience of Mexican-Americans living and working in the United States. The film takes the subject of suppression and discrimination of workers and peals away the critical importance that gender plays in these struggles, while also revealing the dignity of people. It portrays the courage of the people who stood up for their basic human rights. The addresses issues directly related to the racist attitudes of many Americans toward Mexican immigration and trans-border migration. The film also addresses the fear of the so-called communist invasion, the McCarthy era and attacks on the arts communities and the film industry in particular.

February 2-3, 1980: Prison Riot - “It was an inmate rebellion without a plan, without leadership and without goals. There were few heroes, plenty of villains and many victims.” Such was a description of the deadliest prison riot in U.S. history, which resulted in the death of 33 prisoners. On a cold February night, the riot began when prisoners overpowered four guards, grabbed their keys and broke into the long corridor connecting eight prison buildings. Within twenty-two minutes, inmates had control of the entire prison and held 12 guards hostage. In addition to the 33 deaths, ninety inmates were hospitalized. In the aftermath, hundreds of the penitentiary’s 1,158 prisoners were sent out of state. Forty-four inmates were charged with riot-related crimes. Less than a dozen were convicted; 28 others pleaded guilty to lesser charges. The Attorney General's Office spent months investigating and found the following: the overcrowded prison was mismanaged and run by too few guards, who were poorly paid and poorly trained. Prison security policies were inconsistently enforced. Prison discipline depended on an informant system, where rumor replaced fact. Inmates were physically abused. Predatory inmates were mixed with minimum-security prisoners. Incentives for inmates to behave, like education programs, had been cut to a minimum. Some changes occurred due to an inmate lawsuit filed prior to the riot, which forced federal oversight of New Mexico prisons for two decades under what was known as the Duran consent decree. The prison closed in 1997.

November 16, 1990: Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) - New Mexico contains an enormous array of prehistoric and historic Native American cultural sites. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) is a federal law, passed by Congress in 1990, that requires federally-funded institutions to return human remains and objects found in Indian graves to their original owners. It provides a similar remedy for remains and grave goods found in the future on federal or tribal lands. It makes the sale of illegally-obtained grave materials a federal crime. It also permits tribes to request the return of objects which, though they were legally acquired by museums or other institutions, are indispensable to a tribe, forming part of its cultural patrimony. Federally-funded institutions that possessed Indian remains and grave goods were given five years—until 1995—to inventory them and decide to whom they belonged. They were then obliged to offer them back to the tribes.

July 25, 2000: Valles Caldera National Preserve established - On July 25, 2000, the American people purchased approximately 89,000 acres of the Baca Ranch in northern New Mexico. The Valles Caldera Preservation Act designated these spectacular lands as the Valles Caldera National Preserve, a unit of the National Forest System. The Act also created the Valles Caldera Trust to manage the Preserve. The Valles Caldera Preservation Act established the Preserve to "…protect and preserve the scientific, scenic, geologic, watershed, fish, wildlife, historic, cultural, and recreational values of the Preserve, and to provide for multiple use and sustained yield of renewable resources within the Preserve," consistent with Valles Caldera Preservation Act. The stated purposes of the Trust are the following: 

Provide management and administrative services for the Preserve;
Establish and implement management policies which will best achieve the purposes and requirements of the Valles Caldera Preservation Act;
Receive and collect funds from private and public sources and to make dispositions in support of the management and administration of the Preserve;
Cooperate with Federal, State, and local governmental units, and with Indian tribes and Pueblos, to further the purposes for which the Preserve was established.