The Land Of The Zuni

The Zuni Indian Reservation lies on the western edge of New Mexico. The western boundary of the reservation is at the Arizona border. There are also two, small, non-contiguous segments in Arizona, in Apache County, northwest of St. Johns. These two, small areas are about 30 miles southwest of the main reservation in New Mexico. The smaller of these two, disjunct parcels, is bisected by U.S. Highway 180 and is only about 200 acres in size. The other, unattached portion of the Zuni Reservation is about one mile north of the small section I just mentioned. This area is not on a highway and is only accessible by a primitive, dirt track. This area is bisected by the Zuni River and the Little Colorado River. I have heard that this area is extremely sacred to the Zuni Tribe. North Mountain and South Mountain lie at opposite ends of this piece of the Zuni Reservation. The Zuni River flows between the two mountains and the Little Colorado flows south of South Mountain. About three miles west of this scetion are is the point where the two rivers converge. This section of the reservation is roughly six miles long and three miles wide.
  The main reservation, in New Mexico, is also bisected by the Zuni River. The Zuni River begins in the eastern part of the reservation at the confluence of the Rio Pescado (Fish River in English) and Rio Nutria
(Beaver River). I believe that the Rio Pescado is the principal stream here and is actually the upper reaches of the Zuni River, but known by a different name. The Rio Pescado is longer than the Rio Nutria, so that is why I believe it to the the main stream. The Zuni River is extremely sacred to the Zuni Tribe and flows through the heart of Zuni Pueblo, the reservation's biggest town and the reservation capital. The river also flows along the southern edge of Black Rock, the second biggest town on the reservation and just one mile east of Zuni Pueblo.  These two towns contain the majority of the Zuni Indian Reservation's population.  The other towns on the Zuni Reservation are Pescado, Upper Nutria, Lower Nutria and Ojo Caliente, but they are merely villages with only a handful of people.

A:Shiwi A:Wan

  A:Shiwi A:Wan is what the Zuni people call themselves, in their language. The Zuni Tribe is considered to be one of the Pueblo Tribes that live in much of northern and western New Mexico, and yet, their language differs from all the others. The Zuni language is not classified into any language group and is considered to be an isolated language. It is not compared with any other language. Much of the language is still unwritten. In other words, it is mostly a spoken language. However, some of the tribal members are taking steps to convert the spoken portion of the language into written form.
  The other Pueblo languages are called Tiwa (or Tigua), Tewa and Towa, with Towa being the least common. The Hopi Tribe of Arizona is also considered to be a Pueblo Tribe and they are closely related to the Zuni. Many Zuni surnames and place names I have seen bear a striking resemblance to Hopi names.
  Of all of the Indian Reservations I have visited, the Zuni Reservation is one of my favorites. The Zuni are a very traditional people that cling tenaciously to the ways of their ancestors. I guess all Indian tribes are traditional, but the Zuni are even more traditional than others that I have seen or even read about. I have long had an inner desire to spend a few months doing humanitarian work on an Indian Reservation and, every time I think about this, the Zuni Reservation always comes to the forefront along with the Hopi, Pascua Yaqui and
Tohono O'odham Reservations in Arizona; Laguna, Acoma, Sandia and Isleta Reservations in New Mexico; the various Sioux Reservations in North and South Dakota; the Ysleta del Sur Reservation in Texas and a smattering of other Indian Reservations that I have researched. I guess I would also have to include the Navajo Indian Reservation, which covers parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, on that list since I have alot of Navajo friends and I have spent alot of time on the Navajo Reservation simply because it is so big
(about 27,000 square miles) that it is hard to travel anywhere in northern Arizona without going through at least a portion of Navajoland.

Abandoned and Forlorn

Ramah is a neat and tidy little town that I absolutely love! Mormon towns that I have been to usually have a neat and orderly look to them. A drive around Ramah will reveal pleasant, tree-lined residential streets and well cared for homes and yards. It is sort of an anomaly in this part of New Mexico in which the majority of the area's towns have a "rough-and-tumble" appearance to them.
  On my most recent visit to Ramah, I noticed a new high school, actually a combination high school and middle school, had been built. I am not sure how old it is, but it was built after 2003, my last visit. The football stadium next to it predates the high school by a few years. The current Mustang Stadium opened for the fall 2002 football season.  It was built at the foot of a mesa a mile south of town next to a dirt road. The last time I was in Ramah, I saw the new stadium. It took me awhile to find it because I had assumed it was built in town, but, finally, I saw the light poles of the new stadium and drove towards them.
 After this stadium was built, the old stadium in town became a practice field. When the Ramah Mustangs played in the old stadium, they had to play in the afternoon because it didn't have any lights. Also, at the time, the Mustangs played 6-man football instead of the conventional 11-man  game. In New Mexico, 6-man football is for schools with 75 students or less. A 6-man football field is shorter and narrower than a regular football field. A regular football field is 100 yards long and 53 yards wide. A 6-man football field is only 80 yards long and 40 yards wide. When it came time to make the move up to 11-man football, there was no room to lengthen or widen the field in the old stadium. It was designed for 6-man football and there was no room for expansion, so a new stadium was built. The old stadium only had stands on one side of the field because, on the other side, there is only about five feet of space between the sideline and the chain link fence that parallels the street, barely enough room for the team to stand. The current stadium is also one-sided, meaning it only has stands on one side, but it was designed that way. There is room to put stands on the other side, but the scoreboard would have to be moved if they do.
  In November of 2001, I watched the last game played in the old Mustang Stadium and it was a classic! It was the state championship game for 6-man football and the Ramah Mustangs beat the
Lake Arthur Panthers 101-76!  6-man football has a tendency to get extremely high scoring although breaking 100 points is not very common. Since I lived in Arizona at the time and Ramah is only about 35 miles from the Arizona border and I am a sports nut (college and high school sports), I decided to attend the game. I spent that night in a motel in Gallup, about 50 miles northwest of Ramah.
  On my most recent trip to Ramah about three weeks ago, I  noticed that the old high school is just sitting there abandoned. It seems like such a waste that it is just sitting there abandoned like that. Seems like they could at least use it for a middle school. The tennis courts now have knee-high weeds growing up through cracks in the surface. For the most part, the tennis courts seem to be in playable condition. The old football stadium is just sitting there, abandoned and forlorn. Even after it became simply a practice field, the grandstands and scoreboard were left in place. I don't know what the reason for this was, but, when I was in Ramah recently, I noticed that the grandstands are scoreboard are still standing, ten years after the last game was played in the stadium. The old Mustang Stadium has recently taken on an abandoned and forlorn appearance. There is a tree growing up through the metal bleachers now, finding its way to sunlight by twisting and turning between two rows of bleachers. Another small tree, or sapling, has taken root on the football field, near midfield. Both trees are growing in silence in an abandoned stadium that used to be filled with grunts, cheers and screams on Saturday afternoons in the not-to-distant past. The grass on the former football field is now mostly weeds of several different varieties. I took a few photos of the abandoned stadium, but I was disappointed when I saw them because the shots look like I was farther away than I was. I could not discern the tree growing up through the bleachers of the sapling that has taken root on the football field.
  The parking lot at the old high school is starting to be reclaimed by weeds although the parking space stripes are still readily apparent.  The windows of the school are boarded up. I would like to have taken a peek inside the gym. I am guessing that it is still fully intact, albeit in an unmaintained condition, because of the way the just walked away from the football stadium and tennis courts. I am guessing they just locked the doors and walked away. It is a poignant scene.
  Meanwhile, the gleaming new high school must be about five or six years old, although it looks brand new. Judging by the condition of the field at the old stadium, it is obvious that the team has not practiced on it in quite some time. Also, with the unkempt appearance of the old high school, it is definitely not a recent abandonment.
  The road to the new stadium and new high school is no longer a dirt road. It is now paved, although the pavement ends a short distance south of the current football stadium.

A Little Town In The Vale

  In the western part of New Mexico is a charming little town called Ramah. Ramah is one of the towns that were settled by Mormon pioneers under the direction of Brigham Young in their effort to colonize a "pathway" from Salt Lake City all the way down to Mexico. The Mormon Church settled fifty towns in New Mexico Territory in the 1860s and 1870s. Today, only four of them remain. Ramah is one of them. The other three are located next door to each other just west of Farmington in the northwest corner of the state. They are Kirtland, Fruitland and Waterflow. Kirtland is by far the biggest of these towns with about 6,000 people.
  Ramah was named after a chapter in the Book of Mormon. Although maps tend to show Ramah on an Indian Reservation, it is not. Some maps place it on the Zuni Reservation while other maps place it on the Ramah Navajo Reservation, which is a disjunct portion of the much larger Navajo Indian Reservation that lies mostly in Arizona, but also occupies a considerable part of New Mexico and a smaller portion of Utah. Ramah is located on a small strip that lies between the Ramah Navajo and Zuni Indian Reservations that is four miles wide. This strip is also thirteen miles long, from north to south.  This strip is bounded by the Ramah Navajo and Zuni Reservations on the south, at the point where they two reservations join, and the Cibola National Forest on the north.  One mile east of Ramah is the boundary of the Ramah Navajo Indian Reservation. This point is also the boundary between McKinley and Cibola Counties. Ramah is in McKinley County. McKinley is the poorest county in New Mexico and one of the poorest in the nation. Cibola is also one of New Mexico's poorest counties. I believe it is the fourth poorest, after McKinley, Luna and Guadalupe. 
  The first time I ever went through Ramah was in the mid 1990s and I instantly fell in love with the town! For several years, I made it a point to go through Ramah on my vacations. The first time I went through there was because I wanted to take an alternative route eastward instead of the heavily traveled Interstate 40. After going through Ramah every year for about six or seven years, I did not go through it in the fall of 2002 but then went through there again a year later. However, my recent trip through Ramah was my first visit to the town since 2003, eight years ago.

An Early Highway

There is an east-west street in Tucumcari called Smith Avenue that is the original routing for U.S. Highway 54. At some point in the fairly recent past, the 1980s I think, highway 54 was re-routed one block south to Main Street. This was because an overpass was built on First Street to carry the street over a busy railroad yard. The overpass starts just a few feet north of Main Street, so that means Smith Avenue, or Old Highway 54, has been  chopped into two pieces. 
  For two blocks east of the overpass and three blocks west of the overpass, Smith Avenue still looks like it was once a busy street. It still has concrete, divider islands down the middle and is striped for 4 lanes of traffic with turning lanes at the intersections. The pavement markings are faded, however.
  Two blocks east of the overpass, Smith Avenue no longer looks like it was once a busy highway. Instead, it looks like a typical residential street. I remember once seeing a map of Tucumcari in a phone book that showed highway 54 running along Main Street, but then angling northwest to run along Smith Avenue. The first time I went to Tucumcari, I remember thinking that the highway must have been re-routed recently because I noticed that Smith Avenue dead-ended on both sides of the overpass. The street signs along the street still say "U.S. Highway 54." Two blocks east of the overpass is a city block that is mostly a park, but there is one small building on the east side of the block, a glass company. I am thinking that is where highway 54 used to angle upward from East Main Street to East Smith Avenue.
  What is really strange about this very wide street with no traffic is the way it just dead-ends into a concrete wall on both sides. There is very little reason for the city to continue to maintain the street because the buildings that still line the street are abandoned. The portion of the street west of the overpass was being reconstructed the last time I was in Tucumcari. I am not sure what the plans for it were, but it looked like the concrete, divider islands were being removed.
  This street that once carried alot of traffic, but now carries very little, became imprinted on my mind the first time I saw it because it looked so odd to me.