My Tiny Vegas: Las Vegas, New Mexico News, Stories, Photographs, and More!

Civil War Weekend at Pecos National Historical Park

by Birdie Jaworski


The Glorieta Memorial on I-25

The Sangre de Cristo mountains loom between high desert and open plains, protecting a circular valley that once housed quiet ranchlands, an important stage stop on the Santa Fe Trail. Today the land is marked with blood, the site of the Civil War's "Gettysburg of the West," the Battle of Glorieta Pass. Travelers driving down Interstate 25 might notice a dirt drive housing a hand-painted red, white, and blue memorial, covered in eclectic messages.

In the agony of a nation at war with itself, the Confederate invasion of New Mexico Territory in 1862 was a relatively minor drama. The Rebels dreamed of access to the Santa Fe Trail and the treasure-filled gold mines of California and Colorado. They dreamed of changing the course of the terrible war, of turning the tide in the South's favor, and fulfilling their own personal manifest destinies of a mighty Confederate nation bounded on both sides by pure ocean waters. The Union Army, however, had other plans.

On the morning of March 26, 1862, a group of exhausted Union volunteers from Colorado left Camp Lewis on a reconnaissance mission to scope out the location and size of the Confederate forces, a rowdy cadre of Texans. They found them at Glorieta Pass, armed and ready with short swords and Colt Navy pistols. The battle was swift and vicious. In this most westernmost campaign of the entire Civil War, 4,000 Union and 3,000 Confederate soldiers engaged in combat, with the Confederacy winning tactical victories with every major battle but still returning to Texas empty-handed, defeated by the harsh New Mexican countryside and the Union's determined people. More than 280 men died at Glorieta with their dreams, making the battle the central event that shattered the western dreams of the Confederate States of America.

Three days over this weekend, Pecos National Historical Park will host a Civil War extravaganza, meant to commemorate the bloody battle, 146 years to the week after the event. A three-dollar entrance fee for persons over the age of 16 allows one to experience the sights, sounds, and memories of the war's biggest New Mexico battle. The weekend begins 9:30 a.m. Friday, with a Battlefield Clean-Up. Volunteers will meet at Kozlowski's Trading Post, where transportation will be provided to the battlefield. Helpers are asked to bring work gloves if they have them.

Civil War re-enactors from the First Colorado Volunteer Infantry, the Artillery Company of New Mexico, and the 1st Louisiana Special Battalion will speak on the grueling, deadly life and times of Civil War soldiers both Saturday and Sunday. Both Union and Confederate re-enactments will occur. The realistic plays will be interspersed by black powder demonstrations where weapons from the time period will be displayed and discharged.

Several experts will provide research, information, and discussion on the war, its place in our country's history, its impact on New Mexico landscape and populations. Local author Don Alberts will speak about the Glorieta Battlefield Unit of Pecos National Park. Park volunteer Dr. Bob Mallin will speak about Civil War surgery. Local author Jim Taylor from New Mexico will speak about the history of the Civil War in the Southwest.

Two hour van tours of the Battle of Glorieta Pass will be available all weekend. Advanced reservations are encouraged for these tours, which cost two dollars per person. Vans will skirt the battlefield, as tour guides point out and discuss landmarks and locations.

For more information, schedule, or to schedule a van tour, please call the Pecos National Historical Park at 505-757-7241.

The Steps of the Faithful

by Birdie Jaworski


Los Hermanos Penitentes drag heavy wooden crosses during Holy Week in 1904. Photo courtesy of the Las Vegas CCHP.

Holy Week begins Sunday, begins with an event chronicled in all four Gospels - Palm Sunday, a remembrance of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when people lining the road pressed their best cloaks, pressed branches of small trees into the dry earth before him in a gesture of admiration and respect. Today, Catholics hold stark green blessed palm fronds, or boughs of native trees, during Palm Sunday Mass as they participate in the Lord's Passion, a recital of Jesus' last steps before death and resurrection.

This year, Holy Week begins after a forward-thinking declaration from the Vatican. Pope Benedict XVI, through his steadfast Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti - the Vatican's specialist on sin and penance - has brought the seven deadly sins up to date by adding seven new ones for the age of globalisation. The list, published this week in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's newspaper, came as the Pope deplored today's "decreasing sense of sin" and warns the faithful that causing environmental devastation or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos will book a sure trip to hell.

Las Vegas, New Mexico, has seen many Holy Week observations in its centuries of history. A hundred years ago, school children filed onto the Plaza the day following the blessing of palms, books left to gather spring wind dust, for several full days of prayer and fasting. They rotated past a carved wooden state of Christ kept in the churchyard, his feet dark from the oils of supplicants' hands and lips, each child kneeling, offering secret prayer and intention as they intoned Latin chants.

For many decades, Las Vegans weren't allowed to conduct business, chop wood, even start a car from Wednesday through Easter. Old grandmothers cautioned the tempted with warnings that chopping wood might "harm Jesus," as he roamed town in invisible robes. Musicians kept guitars carefully stored, away from wandering hands that might invoke Jesus' wrath with a few unthinking chords.

Wailing prayerful chants, and the thin echo of reed pipes called men of Las Vegas to Mount Calvary on Ash Wednesday. They stole into a simple adobe morada, a secret church of the Los Hermanos Pentitentes, the penitent brothers, where they knelt on hardened dirt floor and prayed the Stations of the Cross. The brothers sang hymns of praise and passion, sang loud and heavy, their voices echoing from the pinon-laced hill across the wind-whipped plains.

Los Hermanos Penitentes consisted of men throughout Northern New Mexico including Las Vegas who, to atone for their sins, practiced severe penance. In each morada, the community participated in bloody ceremonies meant to emulate the sufferings of Christ. One by one, the brothers bowed before a Sangrador who - with a jagged piece of glass - gouged crisscrosses on their backs. The penitents would keep their wounds open and raw until Easter, often by rubbing rock salt in them.

The brothers assembled each Good Friday,  with one lucky man chosen to be the Cristo. Against the dull crack of horse whips, they proceeded to Mount Calvary. The Cristo dragged a heavy wooden cross behind him, his shoulders aching from the weight. At the top of the hill, the Cristo was lashed so tightly to the anchored cross that his skin turned black and puffy.

Rome didn't sanction the brotherhood for years, until the late 1940's, by which time membership had dramatically fallen. It still exists today, in small secret pockets of faithful members who continue to relive the Passion of Christ in as fully physical a way as possible. The old adobe moradas, once so mysterious and steeped in spirituality, toppled inward.

Life and Catholic practices have clearly changed in Las Vegas, in northern New Mexico, even in environmentally-aware Rome. But the influence of the Penitentes, of every group that desires to relive the sufferings of Christ, still breathes every Holy Week. While the faithful attend modern services full of song and uplifting praise, there are those who still quite literally carry the cross.

Ghost Plane

78 years ago a young man sat on the edge of dusty forever. His airplane's wheels dug into dry prairie. He didn't know the grass would soon lift from the earth, carve across the Great Plains in clouds of fury and death. You can see this man against an interior wall in the Las Vegas, New Mexico Railway Depot, his handsome face covered in aviator's goggles, encased in framed glass. Two men stood behind the fuselage. They hugged one another, dark intertwined shadows against the drought-scarred land.

The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce leased the parcel beneath his plane one year before, plunked down earnest money for a 40-acre pasture. They drove out herds of thin cattle, a small handful of poor squatters, declared the parched earth an airfield. A local booster club gathered their men, carried buckets of thick white paint and heavy boar's hair brushes to the pasture. They followed Herbert Hoover's strict orders to label their space, painted "Las Vegas" on the hills, a careful circle around the airfield, on the evaporated land so that future aircraft would know they would be welcomed with home-cooked meals, a stuffed cotton bed. The paint dried quickly in the New Mexican sun. The men looked at their creation, added an arrow so that wayward pilots could find the landing strip, even though one was not yet smoothed into the crusty surface.

The residents of Las Vegas patted each other on the back. Not many cities in the Southwest sported an official runway, a place of potential international commerce. Men visited the spot, sometimes taking wives sporting reed-woven picnic baskets filled with chili and tortillas. No planes touched down, not then, not yet, but the city people knew it would soon happen. They added gates at both ends of the field for fuel trucks, and a tall wind sock made of tight white canvas.

The budding airfield caught the eye of Transcontinental Air Transport. TAT sent a courier to north east New Mexico with an important letter. Las Vegas may be one of our official stops, the letter read. Your town may be famous, a place where weary travelers stop on coast-to-coast journeys. We're sending our president, the letter continued. Expect a visit from Charles Lindbergh on October 23rd.

Thousands of Las Vegans packed the airfield. Children carried tiny American flags. Women wore their Sunday best and gently pressed fancy combs of glazed horn into their hair. The sun shot patterns of long-legged men across the soil as the people held handkerchiefs to their noses as Lindbergh landed in a black plume of exhaust.

This moment echoes forever in the Depot's waiting room. The hugging men speak for Las Vegas, for a future not yet realized, not yet understood, a future desperately wanted. The TAT didn't share that hug. They choose Clovis as their official stop. Las Vegas didn't stop leaning into the prairie wind. They caught Lindbergh's passion for flight, and eleven years later - after depression, after a decade of sifting dust - opened the airfield to regular traffic.

Lindbergh never visited Las Vegas again. But somehow he still lives here, on the edge of the grasslands, just behind the train tracks, on a quiet wall only travelers see. His face is hidden in shadowbox glare, but his adventurous spirit radiates, flies past the perceptual boundaries of time and space, lands in the hearts of all Las Vegas' people.