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Excerpts from Abe Peña's  Memories of Cibola

All material used with the kind permission of the author, given to me personally.

from AT THE MOUTH OF THE CANYON

"I have some friends in San Mateo who argue that the village was founded in the 1700s.  The belief comes from the fact that two land grants were granted in the eighteenth century:  la merced de Bartolomé Fernández, granted in 1767, and la merced de Santiago Durán y Chaves, granted a year later, in 1768.  The latter is better known as the San Mateo Springs Grant, on which the village is situated.  However, it was almost one hundred years before either grant was utilized or inhabited.  There was considerable fear of the Navajos until 1862, when the first settlers came from Seboyeta, the mother village, to stay, bringing their families and starting to build homes.  They had been coming for two or three summers before that, grazing their flocks and planting crops but returning to Seboyeta in the winters.


The village was built at the mouth of San Mateo Canyon, on the northwest side in the shadow of Mount Taylor, known in the colonial period as La Sierra de San Mateo, and known to the Navajos as Tsoodzil, 'Sacred Mountain of the South,' or Dootl'izhii Dziil, 'Turquoise Mountain.'  An abundant spring provided water to the settlers for home use, livestock, and irrigation. 
The settlers chose the name San Mateo for the church, after St. Matthew, one of the apostles of Christ and the evangelist who wrote the first gospel.  In the Hispanic period, villages generally adopted the name given the church.  The statue of St. Matthew has permanent residence in the church and has taken part in many processions through the years, especially for La Fiesta de San Mateo, on September 21.


There's the story that one year he was taken in procession in July to the fields and gardens to show him the need for rain.  The following day a hailstorm hit the fields and did a lot of damage to the crops.  The villagers once again took him in procession to show him 'La porquería que hizo!' ('The mess he made!')


I was born and raised in San Mateo, and the village still draws me, as it does the others who grew up there.  Our roots go deep.  Some of us didn't move too far away.  I now live in nearby Grants, and I visit San Mateo often, especially now that my contemporaries are passing on.  Many of my visits now seem to involve funerals.  But in the stories that follow, you will have the opportunity to see them and our elders as they are remembered by those who knew and loved them.


I must admit that some of the individuals in the stories may sound 'almost perfect,' but that's the way I remember them.  It is also how they were generally remembered by others whom I respected while I listened to their stories.

On February 5, 1768, Santiago Durán y Chaves petitioned Governor Don Pedro Fermín de Mendinueta for a land grant known as Los Ojos de San Mateo, on the northwest slope of the 'San Mateo Peaks,' today called Mount Taylor.  Santiago Durán y Chaves was from Atrisco and stated in his petition that he had '80 mares, 40 mules, 1000 sheep, and some other livestock belonging to his mother' that needed grass.


The grant was made and witnessed by Mateo de Peña Redonda; it instructed Bartolomé Fernández de la Pedrera, chief alcalde, 'to proceed to the place named and place said Santiago Durán y Chaves in possession of said grant... provided it does not displace Apache / Navajos or interfere with their cornfields.'  The conveyance was made by picking up rocks and throwing them to the four winds, cutting grass and pitching it in the air, and saying, 'God save the King' three times, after which the land passed to the grantee.  It included, 'The spring and the valley of San Mateo bounded by mesas surrounding said valley and containing about 4 leagues of land more or less.'  Four leagues would have been approximately 17,000 acres.  A year earlier, in September 1767, Governor Mendinueta had granted Bartolomé Fernández a grant north of San Mateo, 'including the valley of San Miguel,' amounting to about 21,176 acres.  The petition read 'for military services of Bartolomé, his father and grandfather in the reconquest of New Mexico.'


Because of the remoteness of both grants from the more settled Río Grande Valley and out of respect and fear for the Navajos, neither grant was utilized until almost a hundred years later.  About 1834 Manuel Chaves from Seboyeta and a small group of young men went on a trading expedition into Navajo country, where they were assaulted by Navajos at Chusca.  With multiple wounds, Manuel and an Indian boy raised in Seboyeta started back to home; they were the only survivors.  They reached some large oaks west of what is now the village of San Mateo, where the Floyd W. Lee ranch headquarters is currently located.  While resting, he promised he would build a chapel to the Virgin Mary under the large oaks, if he recovered from his wounds.  The Indian boy died.  A party sent from the walled village of Seboyeta found Manuel and carried him across the mountain back home.


The village of San Mateo was finally settled in 1862 by several colonists from Seboyeta, followed shortly by Román Baca, who settled at nearby El Rito.  He was a half-brother to Colonel Manuel Chaves.  The Colonel, now a distinguished veteran of the Civil War, returned in 1870 to build the chapel he had promised and to build a ranch in the meadows about a mile west of the village, known as Chavesville in some of the handsketched maps of that period.  The stage coach from Santa Fe to Fort Wingate passed through it.  Don Román A. Baca built a home on the grant at El Rito, two miles to the south of Chavesville, and called it 'La Providencia.'  With the blessing of his older brother, he filed a claim for San Mateo Springs Grant as an heir to Santiago Durán y Chaves.  In his claim he stated, 'I am one of the present owners and reside upon same.'


On April 4, 1883, after years of testimony and dispute, the claim was approved by H. M. Atkinson, Surveyor General of the United States in Santa Fe.  A counterclaim was filed, however, and it was sixteen years before Chief Justice Joseph Reed of the New Mexico Supreme Court eventually ruled in favor of Don Román Baca in 1898.  Don Román, a former captain in the New Mexico Volunteers, was a large rotund man and a stern taskmaster.  'He expanded the ranch operations that reached more than 40,000 sheep,' according to Marc Simmons, in The Little Lion of the Southwest, the life of Col. Manuel Chaves.  In concluding his book, Simmons wrote,

In late January of 1889 a bulletin went out from Grants 
Station south of San Mateo.  The Little Lion had finally 
been defeated; the light flickered out at last.  Manuel's 
casket was a hollowed log prepared by his sons, and he 
was placed to rest, according to the Spanish custom of 
his ancestors, beneath the altar of his beloved chapel. 
When his devoted wife Vicenta followed him in death 
six years later, she was laid beside him.  And as the 
spring winds swept off the highest crags of the San 
Mateo Peaks, the oak leaves whispered:  He sleeps 
his last sleep, He has fought his last battle; No sound 
can waken him to glory again.

Two sons and two daughters survived them:  Amado, Ireneo, Luz, and Vicenta.


In 1916 Amado Chaves wrote a letter to George R. Baucus, in which he referred to the 'Fernandez Company,' using the name of one of the original grantees, Bartolomé Fernández, 'owned by three men, A. B. McMillen 82,000 shares; J. A. Jestro 150,000 shares and Amado Chaves 68,000 shares for a total of 300,000 shares.'  Later in his letters Amado mentions 'a large sum of money owed to the bank.'  The end of the Chaves era apparently came thereafter, when he sold his shares to pay the bank.


A. B. McMillen, called 'El Maxemila' by the Spanish people, assumed the operation of the ranch, and Floyd W. Lee was hired to work there.  Floyd W. Lee had attained the rank of captain in the First World War and quickly rose to manager and eventually owner of the sheep and cattle ranch.  Mr. Lee expanded the ranch.  The sheep were sold off in the 1970s because of heavy losses to coyotes and a declining market for wool, and today it's one of the largest cattle ranches in New Mexico."