Why does the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803-06 get so much national attention, while other ventures are generally of interest only to my fellow history buffs?
This came up Friday night, when some of us gathered in Poncha Springs to celebrate the start of our local history (if you define history as a written record of the past) in August 1779.
That’s when Juan Bautista de Anza, governor of the Spanish province of New Mexico, led an army north from Santa Fe into the San Luis Valley, over Poncha Pass to the upper Arkansas Valley, east across the south edge of South Park to emerge on the plains near Colorado Springs, then south to defeat the Jupe Comanche who had been raiding pueblos in the Taos area.
Anza’s journal is the first written account of this part of the world, making it the start of our history. And we celebrate it most years by inviting a historian to talk at Anza Day in Poncha Springs, where his army of 800 Spanish soldiers and Ute warriors camped on Aug. 27, 1779.
This year, the speaker was historian Mark Gardner of Cascade, who’s been pretty busy this year with the bicentennial of Zebulon Montgomery Pike’s expedition of 1806-07 – the second written account of this part of the world.
Gardner noted some big differences between the trips – Pike had a small, ill-equipped party, while Anza had a big force equipped for the job – as well as some similarities between the two leaders. Both were career military men named for their fathers, who were also career military men.
And both, he pointed out, are pretty much footnotes in textbook American history. Colorado is celebrating the Pike Bicentennial with some gusto, but “once you get out of Colorado, nobody pays much attention to Pike,” Gardner said.
As for Anza, in 1776 he did establish the Presidio of San Francisco in California, before he was assigned to New Mexico, so he gets some attention in the Golden State with the Anza National Historic Trail.
But in Colorado? In Colorado Springs, there’s a park where he camped on Aug. 30, 1779. It was called Confluence Park, and a couple of years ago, it was improved to “America the Beautiful Park.” It contains no mention of Anza’s campaign. Perhaps it’s because he rode for the wrong empire, or else it is politically incorrect to mention warfare with Indians (even though 200 Utes joined Anza’s campaign because they wanted to fight the Comanche).
That’s one of the delights of history: Events don’t fit into convenient slots. Anza was fighting one Indian nation to protect the Utes and Pueblos of northern New Mexico who had allied with the Spanish. And if he hadn’t forced the Comanche to come to terms, they might have pushed the Spanish down the Rio Grande clear to El Paso.
Regarding Pike, Gardner argues that his trip was of far more consequence than Lewis and Clark’s. Their journal was not published until 1814, when many trappers and traders were ascending the Missouri River; Pike’s came out in 1810, and informed America about the still-mysterious realm of New Mexico.
Pike inspired American efforts to trade with Santa Fe when he wrote that cloth that cost pennies in St. Louis was selling for silver dollars in New Mexico. As Josiah Gregg put it in “The Commerce of the Prairies,” his 1844 book, “The Santa Fe trade attracted very little notice, however, until the return of Captain Pike, whose exciting descriptions of the new El Dorado spread like wildfire throughout the western country.”
Spain attempted to prevent trade between Mexico and the United States; when Mexico became independent in 1821, it opened trade. In this case, the flag followed commerce, with the Mexican War of 1846-48 and the acquisition of northern Mexico by the United States.
And without a Mexican War, there might not have been an American Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, whose election provoked Southern secession, had campaigned on “no expansion of slavery to the territories” – that is, the land taken from Mexico.
So you can draw a line from Pike to the Santa Fe Trail to the Mexican War to the Civil War, the big pivotal event in American history. You can draw another line from Anza’s campaign to the chili peppers that now roast in Colorado, along with the continuing commercial and cultural links between Mexico and the American Southwest and modern immigration controversies.
You can’t get nearly that much from Lewis and Clark, even if they got commemorative stamps and a three-year national celebration.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
