Review by Ed Quillen
Local History – February 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Anza and Cuerno Verde: Decisive Battle
by Wilfred O. Martinez
Second Edition
Published in 2004 by El Escritorio
ISBN 0-9628974-9-3
LATE IN 2001, retired Pueblo educator Wilfred Martinez used the first edition of Anza and Cuerno Verde to announce his discovery of the site for the 1779 battle between two great leaders: the Jupe Comanche chief Cuerno Verde (Green Horn) and Lt. Col. Juan Bautista de Anza, governor of New Mexico.
Previous histories had all theorized that the battle, in which Cuerno Verde was killed, took place on Green Horn Creek — after all, the name fits and there’s even a marker. But Martinez (a descendant of Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, the mapmaker for the campaign) couldn’t make that site fit Anza’s journal, and so he began searching for a place southwest of Pueblo that would fit.
Eventually, he found it — others had been misled by a bad translation of zanja. They thought it meant “bog” or “swamp,” when it fact it’s an arroyo. Armed with that information, Martinez is now “ninety-nine point nine percent certain” that he’s found the site.
There’s much more in this 138-page book, including a quick general history of both the Spanish empire and the Plains Indians.
The first edition (reviewed in our December, 2001, edition) of Decisive Battle was a surprising pleasure for me, and this one is better. The written history of our part of the world starts with Anza, and this is a good place to start reading about Anza.
