Chaco Roads | El Camino Real | The Old Spanish Trail

Chaco Roads

The ancient Chacoan roads, first constructed in the 11th century, can be seen from space, long pre-historic corridors leading to important Navajo sites, shrines and kivas.  Deeply embedded in the soil they traverse, these roads are nevertheless difficult to map on the ground without remote sensing instruments to detect the ancient footprints of countless Native Americans. 

Originally used as a system connecting important Chacoan great houses in central Chaco Canyon, which was the center of ancient Native ritual, to outlaying communities, there also appear to be several unconnected shorter roads.  The purpose of these shorter segments of road has not been determined.  In later years the Chaco roads were used by Navajo herders and Anglo and Spanish ranchers.  Due to erosion caused by natural weathering and innumerable animals moving over these trails, the original boundaries are difficult to determine.

The mystery that surrounds the Chacoan road system is the constant linearity of the roads.  Roads that run into obstacles, remain straight, and bridges, steps or tunneling resulted in order to keep the original design true.  Sometimes, the more outlaying segments of road will follow the natural topography of the land, but the closer to central Chaco Canyon ritual areas the road is, the more linear the line remains.  This adherence to design seems to indicate a spiritual or ritual component to these ancient trails. 

Modern scientists can only speculate the beginnings of these long and linear roads, but most now agree that what probably originated as a system of roads connecting different communities to ritually important places eventually became trade routes, war paths, and general corridors of transportation for all the peoples surrounding Chaco canyon.    

El Camino Real

El Camino Real, the long, dangerous road, winding from Mexico City to Santa Fe, New Mexico, remains an American cultural icon today, as it was 400 years ago.  Initially serving as a means of cultural and commercial exchange, El Camino Real helped fuel the western expansion into the current era.

El Camino Real began as a Native American trade-route connecting the Native Americans to the Mesoamerican Indians in Mexico.   What began as a footpath between cultures emerged centuries later as a “Royal Road”, or a road that connected towns annexed for New Spain and the Spanish Monarchy. Connecting Santa Fe with Queretaro, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosi and Zacatecas, El Camino Real became known for its opportunity for commerce, as silver mines were abundant along the route.

In 1598 Juan de Oñate led 120 men and their families, 83 wagon loads of arms and supplies and more than 7,000 head of livestock, north from Santa Bárbara, in what is now southern Chihuahua, to the Tewa pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh on the upper Río Grande. Shortly thereafter, Oñate founded the Spanish town of San Gabriel, which was later replaced by Santa Fe as the capital of the newly christened province of New Mexico. El Camino Real, the royal road, served as the official road between the colonial capital in Mexico City and the administrative center of this new province.

The first road that connected the United States with Mexico then saw two centuries of conflict between the different cultures of Mexico, New Spain and Native peoples. In the 19th century, El Camino Real became instrumental in the American fight against Mexico for New Mexico and the territories of California, Arizona, Colorado, Texas and parts of Utah, Montana and Wyoming. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo put an end to the war, agreeing that these territories were United States territories, and a new age for the “Royal Road” began.

Now, railroad lines and Interstates flank the original Camino Real, and to the uninitiated, the road may look ordinary. El Camino Real remains a legacy, rich in culture and mythology and deeply rooted in American, Mexican, Spanish and Native American history. 

The Old Spanish Trail

The Old Spanish Trail was originally established as a trade route between the trappers and traders of Old New Mexico with the Ute tribes.  The trail, winding from Santa Fe, New Mexico, through southern Colorado and central Utah, then snaking down into southern Nevada and across southern California to Los Angeles, proved to be one of the most treacherous trails of the Old Southwest.  Braving parched deserts, high mountain ranges and broad canyons, caravans of pack trains traveled this trail with ultimate financial gain.  With all of it’s topographical challenges, the Old Spanish Trail opened up foreign trading for isolated Santa Fe, with the allure of exotic goods shipped into the port city of  Los Angeles.

The Old Spanish Trail, traveled as early as 1776 by European explorers, is 1,200 miles long.  Through the mid-1850’s, Franciscan missionaries tried unsuccessfully to find a route to Los Angeles, but in 1829, Santa Fe merchant Antonio Armijo discovered a route that connected several smaller trails leading to the coast.  This network of trails became known as the Old Spanish Trail.

Word of the trail traveled and it soon became used by bandits for raiding California ranchos for their horses and mules, and for immigration from Mexico to California.  Illegal slave trading became an issue along the trail, with Native Americans being the unwilling victims.

Eventually, the trail became less effective, bigger wagon trains established different roads and as Mormon immigration increased along with their intolerance for slavery, so the trail diminished as a trading trail of the old southwest.   The Old Spanish Trail became obsolete as the turn of the century approached, though parts of the trail still exist in the street names and collective memory of the old southwest.