bridge was a precarious affair of planks and had to be rebuilt several times. This bridge was eventually replaced by the suspension bridge at Otowi, built between 1921 and 1924, which could accommodate automobile traffic.58 After the river was negotiated came the long haul up to the plateau. Teams of horses had to pull wagons heavily loaded with supplies, tools, household goods, seed, and perhaps an entire family. It was not an easy task. The elevation gain between the Rio Grande and White Rock is seven hundred feet, while the homesteads on the Pajarito Plateau lie almost two thousand feet above the communities settled along the banks of the Rio Grande. One descendant of a homesteader recalls a story his grandfather told him: He would tell us that one time they were coming up the mountain when the wagon was full of food for the family and seed to do the year’s planting. The horses were pulling with all that they had and they just couldn’t pull any more. My grandmother and my aunt were in the wagon and he had to get them down and sit them down on the side of the road and unload the wagon so the horses could make it up the steep hill. After he finished unloading, he led the horses and wagon out and then took my grandmother and her daughter and picked them up. Then began to haul what he had emptied and loaded upon the wagon once again.59
times homesteaders had to build rock embankments to shore up the outer edge of a road; sometimes they had to excavate an inside wall to allow their wagon to pass by. Such excavations could extend as high as 9 or 10 feet.60
Local Homesteading: The ‘Seasonal Round’ Economically speaking, homesteading on the Pajarito Plateau was a survival strategy used by Hispanics to supplement the subsistence living they practiced on their farms in the nearby Rio Grande Valley. A subsistence economy is a barter economy, one in which people raise most of their own food, make most of their clothing and material goods, and trade with other families or with the larger community for food or articles they cannot produce themselves. Cash is little needed and little used. Homesteaders on the plateau who had received title to their land needed cash primarily for paying the annual property tax.
During the homestead era on the Pajarito Plateau, however, the United States was engaged in a transition that transformed the country: the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society. With the coming of the railroad, commerce increased and expanded westward, including into the territory of New Mexico. By the time New Mexico became a state in 1912, subsistence farmers were experiencing a growing need for cash to pay for goods and services that extended beyond the economy of scarcity they had been practicing. Staking a claim on the Pajarito Plateau offered a way to increase their production of food, not only for their own use but to sell for cash.
The wagon roads built by the homesteaders formed a transportation network vital to their needs. They used these narrow, one-lane tracks to migrate up to the plateau each March, to access water sources, to visit their plateau neighbors, to haul products to market back down in the valley, to herd stock to grazing land, and to return to their winter homes each November. Building the wagon roads required hard labor. One of the two homestead roads up Bayo Canyon, for example, ascends from the canyon floor at a grade of 12 percent to 16 percent. Occasionally, a short section could be a steep 18 percent grade. SomeFigure 38. This early plateau road led to Frijoles Canyon, now part of Bandelier National Monument, between about 1910 and 1925. (George Lytle Beam, Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, GB-7672) 26
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Homesteading on the Pajarito Plateau