Letter from Virginia Simmons
Place Names – January 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Ed:
You mentioned in your review of a new book, San Luis Valley Place Names by Ron Kessler, that you would like to know the source of the name for Mishak Lakes. A ranch family from Oklahoma and their descendants owned land around the lakes west of Moffat in the 1900s. Actually, the “lakes” are playas, comprising Colorado’s largest natural shallow-water wetland system, so “Mishak Playas” might have been a more appropriate name. These playas offer habitat for migrating shorebirds and waterfowl in the spring but normally dry up during the summer. Since The Nature Conservancy acquired the site in the 1990s, it has been designated the Mishak Lakes Preserve.
How did Streator become Mosca? Actually, Streator never was Mosca. Streator was a cluster of farms owned by families, including the Streators, a couple of miles northwest of present Mosca. Streator had a post office, called by that name, located at a farm. There also was/is a Streator Cemetery in that area. When the Denver and Rio Grande built its narrow-gauge Villa Grove extension south from Poncha Pass to Alamosa in 1890, one of the stations was named Mosca, and an active community, with a mill, hotels, etc., came into existence there. The post office at Streator closed when Mosca’s opened in December of 1890. The name of Mosca, meaning “fly,” refers to the fact that Mosca Pass, with a toll road crossing the Sangre de Cristos, lay directly to the east of this station. The station offered a transportation link to that area, and some wishful thinkers even hoped for an extension across Mosca Pass.
You are right, of course, in your corrections of statements about the Baca Grant in Kessler’s book. His version that this grant was made by a Spanish king in 1823 gets high marks for imagination but low ones for history. The Spanish crown never made land grants anywhere in what is now Colorado, although some grants were made in present-day Colorado, including the San Luis Valley, by the Republic of Mexico after Mexican independence from Spain in 1821. The so-called Baca Grant near Crestone is an exception to even these. It was a tract set aside by the United States Government in 1860, after the heirs of Luis Maria de Baca were allowed to select five 100,000-acre tracts, called “floating grants,” as compensation for loss of the Baca Grant near Las Vegas, New Mexico. Thus, the tract in the San Luis Valley became known as the Baca Grant Number 4, one of five “floating grants” selected by Luis Maria de Baca’s heirs.
Virginia McConnell Simmons
Del Norte