Paul R Secord

This history of over 1,000 years of mining in the Cerrillos Hills, that contain some of the richest and most varied mineral deposits in New Mexico. The oldest known and largest prehistoric turquoise mine in North America is found in this area. Siver and lead were mined by the Spanish, Mexicans and Americans. In addition to works by Homer E. Milford and Bill Baxter this book contains extensive supporting documentation including transcription of the 1880 and 1900 census, Cerrillos Town Records, Mining District Minutes.

This book presents a detailed account of mining in the Cerrillos Hills, New Mexico which are located about fifteen miles south of Santa Fe. This area contains some of the oldest mining activity in North America. There is evidence Turquoise, which continues to be mined today, being mined as early as 900 A.D. and lead in about 1300 A.D. The Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth century mined silver there. The area was most active in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century with well over 500 claims staked by 1880.This material was originally written for New Mexico Abandoned Mine Land Bureau Reports ion the mid-1990s. The author, Homer E. Milford was the former Environmental Coordinator of the Abandoned Mine Land Bureau, the State of New Mexico Energy Minerals and Natural Resources Department, and was responsible for documenting mine history before a mine was closed for safety reason. He had been active in efforts to preserve the Cerrillos Hills for over thirty years and passed away in April 2019 within hours of working on revisions to this book.

This book in two volumes is the culmination of over twenty-five years of conjecture. Why didn't archaeologist Stuart Baldwin, PhD (1946-1999) fully write up his research after a decade of work on the now extinct Piro-Tompiro culture in Central New Mexico? Why didn't he return to the Southwest after 1988? What happened to the artifacts and notes from five years of excavation by a University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, field school at Tenabo Pueblo, a large fourteenth to seventeenth century pueblo? The answers to these questions, and a treasure trove of physical evidence and years of scholarship were discovered in 2016. This included detailed reports on the archaeology, ethnohistory and history of the Abo Pass region of New Mexico, along with complete site analyses of numerous surveys and limited excavations carried out in the region. Although completed nearly thirty years ago, Baldwin's work remains the single most comprehensive and accurate presentation on the Native American Pueblo culture in Central New Mexico. In these volumes we tell the story of rediscovering Baldwin's life work and present all of a nearly 1,400 page unpublished manuscript that remained hidden for years in a research library's archives. This is the second of these volumes and deals with archaeology and prehistory including rock art. Volume I is focused on history and ethnology. As Baldwin wrote in the preface of his "lost" manuscript: "I believe (in) any attempt to pull together and present available information on (a)...cultur(e)..., even if it is 'only' the morality of saving a people from historical obscurity."

The murals fronting the entrance of Skip Maisel's Indian Jewelry and Crafts store at 510 Central Avenue SW in Albuquerque, New Mexico are a treasure of Native American painting and are of national importance. They represent some of the earliest and finest paintings by a seminal group of Southwestern native artists. Commissioned in 1939 by the store's founder, Maurice Maisel, the grandfather of the current owner, the murals are an extraordinary expression of fine arts, rarely seen on a commercial building. Despite their prominence on the building's fa ade, a fixture in downtown Albuquerque, they are essentially hidden in plain sight. The murals' subject matter demonstrates a unifying thematic context. Through the use of paired opposites, cultural themes and subjects can be compared and contrasted. In addition, the stylistic differences between artists, while showing the strong influence of training at "The Studio" art program at the Santa Fe Indian School established by Dorothy Dunn, they also demonstrate considerable differences in execution. The Maisel's building was designed by legendary New Mexico architect John Gaw Meem, popularizer of the Santa Fe Style. Meem hired well known Santa Fe artist Olive Rush for a total of $1,500 to paint the murals. She then hired eleven Native Americans to undertake the project and saw to it that they were paid a fair wage. Maisel's was to be Rush's last Native American project and she clearly wished the project to be a culmination statement of the mural work she had been engaged in with The Studio for nearly a decade. To that end, she included artists of varying ages, from forty-four year old Awa Tsireh of the first generation of Pueblo painters, to sixteen year old Popovi Da, a beginning Studio painter and the son of famous potters Maria and Julian Martinez, as well as including representatives of three principal Native American cultures in the Southwest: Pueblo, Navajo and Apache.

The murals fronting the entrance of Skip Maisel's Indian Jewelry and Crafts store at 510 Central Avenue SW in Albuquerque, New Mexico are a treasure of Native American painting and are of national importance. They represent some of the earliest and finest paintings by a seminal group of Southwestern native artists. Commissioned in 1939 by the store's founder, Maurice Maisel, the grandfather of the current owner, the murals are an extraordinary expression of fine arts, rarely seen on a commercial building. Despite their prominence on the building's fa ade, a fixture in downtown Albuquerque, they are essentially hidden in plain sight. The murals' subject matter demonstrates a unifying thematic context. Through the use of paired opposites, cultural themes and subjects can be compared and contrasted. In addition, the stylistic differences between artists, while showing the strong influence of training at "The Studio" art program at the Santa Fe Indian School established by Dorothy Dunn, they also demonstrate considerable differences in execution. The Maisel's building was designed by legendary New Mexico architect John Gaw Meem, popularizer of the Santa Fe Style. Meem hired well known Santa Fe artist Olive Rush for a total of $1,500 to paint the murals. She then hired eleven Native Americans to undertake the project and saw to it that they were paid a fair wage. Maisel's was to be Rush's last Native American project and she clearly wished the project to be a culmination statement of the mural work she had been engaged in with The Studio for nearly a decade. To that end, she included artists of varying ages, from forty-four year old Awa Tsireh of the first generation of Pueblo painters, to sixteen year old Popovi Da, a beginning Studio painter and the son of famous potters Maria and Julian Martinez, as well as including representatives of three principal Native American cultures in the Southwest: Pueblo, Navajo and Apache.

The Galisteo Basin and the Cerrillos Hills, an ancient seabed ringed by ancient volcanic upheavals, are located in Central New Mexico. The region has been occupied for thousands of years. The oldest known turquoise mines in North America, as well as the earliest significant gold strike in North America, can be found in this region. The town of Galisteo was founded in 1617, while Los Cerrillos got its start as a railroad stop and regional center in 1880. Archaeological work on eight major Pueblo ruins was initiated in 1912 by Nels Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History. Many photographs from his expedition are found in this book, with several of them never having been published before. Also included are images of Cerrillos Hills mining in 1880; again, some of these photographs have never been previously published.