Review by Ed Quillen
Local History – September 1999 – Colorado Central Magazine
The San Luis Valley – Land of the Six-Armed Cross
by Virginia McConnell Simmons
Second Edition
Published in 1999 by University Press of Colorado
ISBN 0-87081-530-X
ON SOME PROJECT several years ago, I needed a lot of historical information about the San Luis Valley and bought a copy of the first edition of Land of the Six-Armed Cross. To my dismay, pages 119-150 were missing. Immediately I dispatched the book with a tart letter about the missing signature to the publisher, Pruett in Boulder, and expected a new and complete copy by return mail.
Instead I got a polite letter offering a refund, but no new book, because it was out of print.
University Press has rectified that problem by bringing the book back into print. Not only does the new version have all the pages it’s supposed to have, but the second edition also provides an appendix with an annotated list of place names in the Valley, which can be worse than confusing without some help.
For instance: well-known Alamosa, but also an Alamoso; three San Antonios, along with Antonio and Antonito; three San Franciscos and two San Josés; Capulin and Chama in both Colorado and New Mexico. For each site, the appendix gives location and a brief history.
That alone would make this a worthwhile book for local history buffs, but of course it offers much more than an appendix.
Land of the Six-Armed Cross is written for the general reader, even though it comes with welcome academic trappings like source notes and a bibliography, and it has a fine index, too.
Simmons begins the story with Zebulon Pike, the first American to report on the Valley, then backtracks to Indian and Spanish days. She carries the story to about 1975, and it’s quite a story.
The Valley was the northernmost extension of Spain’s interior New World empire. Spanish expansion stalled at the Valley partly on account of the Southern Utes, who also had to repel Comanche and Apache to keep it. The American traders and trappers who penetrated Spain’s domain often came through the Valley, and big land grants remain from its Mexican days.
It was a breadbasket for the pioneer prospectors and land speculators who founded Denver in 1859, and the surrounding mountains hosted several mining bonanzas. Throw in some railroads, ethnic tension, ranching, intensive market agriculture and related water struggles, and there’s plenty for a grand epic.
Simmons doesn’t write it that way — her style is more “just the facts,” organized sensibly and punctuated by some dry wit:
“And horses with webbed feet have been seen racing over the sculptured slopes when the moon is full” at the sand dunes.
“In 1973 Costilla County expressed its wish … to secede from Colorado and to re-establish its ties with New Mexico. The legislature in Santa Fé, enjoying the compliment, said that both Costilla and Conejos counties would be welcome. The governor in Denver merely replied `The best is yet to come.’ Probably the people in the southern end of the valley agreed, for things could scarcely get worse.”
Simmons writes with an unflinching eye, giving due attention to topics that other historians often avoid — for instance, the slave trade that lasted well into the 1860s.
But the history isn’t always solid — mistakes that marred the first edition (1979) remain in the second. For instance, she writes that Alfred “Packer was brought down to Saguache for safekeeping in the new jail, which today is part of a historical museum.” As anyone at the museum will tell you, Packer never spent a minute in that cell, which arrived in Saguache long after Packer was in the penitentiary.
Elsewhere, Simmons has Anza’s 1779 campaign “in pursuit of [the Comanche chief] Cuerno Verde,” and has Anza moving “up the west side of the Rio Grande, instead of taking the usual route through Taos” because it was “poorly equipped.”
Anza wasn’t exactly pursuing Cuerno Verde; he was maneuvering on a roundabout route so he could be waiting on the plains as Cuerno Verde emerged from the mountains after raiding pueblos near Taos.
Those flaws are minor but annoying. Overall, it’s a fine book, just like the first edition. The sweeping story of the San Luis Valley, everything from turquoise to potatoes, is told clearly and succinctly.
My only real beef is that as nearly as I can tell, it wasn’t revised or extended (no account of the AWDI struggle, for instance) from the first edition, aside from the addition of the place-names appendix.
But glory be, it’s back in print, and with a useful and informative appendix to boot.
— Ed Quillen
