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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 Los Alamitos
"Before the town was known as Grants, it was called Los Alamitos. There were only three or four Hispanic families living in Los Alamitos when the railroad came through, in 1882. Some of the families had come from Seboyeta, looking for grass for their livestock and fertile soil for crops; one of these families was that of Antonio Chávez. The family of Jesús Blea came from Santa Rosa, on the Pecos River. Many of the descendants of those original families still live in the area.


The coming of the railroad led to the rapid development of Grants and the land of Cíbola. The tent city on the west side of town sheltered thousands of workers who came to build the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, work that was subcontracted to the three Grant brothers, from Canada. Among the workers was a large contingent of Filipinos, who helped to cut the railway heading west.


The entrepreneur Simon Bibo purchased 160 acres from Jesús Blea and started a store and hotel, as well as selling land to others. Several other businesses also sprang up along the railroad. Grants was a water and fuel stop for trains, both passenger and freight. The railroad drilled a water well on the south side of the tracks and built a tower to elevate the water tank. I can remember in the 1930s a tall, black elevator chute near the depot that loaded coal on trains to produce the steam that powered the trains going east, and across the Continental Divide going west. The Santa Fe Super Chief was one of the most popular passenger trains that stopped in Grants. Many recruits who went off to the world wars boarded trains in Grants on their way to forts, camps, and bases around the country. I used to ride the train to Las Cruces, when I was at New Mexico A & M in the late 1940s. I still remember how the collar of my shirt would get black after a twelve-hour ride, but there was something special about a steam engine puffing away.


Sheep were followed by cattle and cattle were followed by timber, in the evolution that moved Pueblo Indians, Hispanics, and Anglos into the cash economy. Carrots followed the timber industry, bringing the Navajos into the cash economy. The rich volcanic soil of the Bluewater Valley, west of town, produced premium carrots that brought high prices in the eastern markets. In 1950 when the price for carrots started slipping, the uranium boom began. Grants grew from twelve hundred people to nearly twleve thousand, and Milan grew from two hundred to three thousand. By the time the boom ended, in 1985, Grants was on its way to diversifying its economy, which has brought stability and prosperity to the land of Cíbola.


Grants, where ancient trails meet modern highways, is now the county seat of Cíbola County and the commercial and banking center for the area whose people and customs you’ll discover in the following pages.

Long before the first Europeans came through Grants, the Anasazi Indians, and later their descendants, the Zunis, the Acomas, and the Lagunas, hunted and traveled extensively through the area. The nomadic Navajos and Apaches later settled in “rancherías,” and sometimes there were conflicts between them and the Pueblos.


The Spanish explorer Hernando de Alvarado and some twenty men were the first Europeans to pass through the area, in August 1540. He was sent by the conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado from near Zuni Pueblo on an exploring expedition to the east. Coronado and a larger party passed through what was to become Grants later in the year, to winter near present-day Bernalillo. Some fifty years later, Juan de Oñate, the first Spanish governor of New Mexico, passed through in 1598. On a later expedition he cared his name on Inscription Rock at El Morro, “Pasó por aquí el adelantado don Juan de Oñate del descubrimiento del mar del sur... abril 16 1605.” (“There passed through here the Adelantado Don Juan de Oñate from the discovery of the sea of the south... April 16, 1605.”)
In 1862, some 257 years after Oñate, came Antonio Chávez and his family from Seboyeta, to build the first home in Grants, according to the Grants Daily Beacon centennial edition. In 1872 Jesús Blea, veteran of the Civil War Battle of Valverde, came from Santa Rosa with his family and added to the home. They called the settlement “Los Alamitos” (The Cottonwoods”); the trees were thriving on the edge of the malpaís, near a spring that provided permanent water for the settlers. The original adobe and lava house is still standing, but in disrepair, on Valencia Street, off San Jose Drive, in South Grants. George Dannenbaum had it listed in the New Mexico State Register of Cultural Properties in 1976.


With the coming of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, in 1882, came three Canadian brothers, Angus, John, and Lewis Grant. They won the contract to build the railroad through “Los Alamitos” and established a camp there. Over four thousand men and more than two thousand mules worked the line as it inched its way toward California. People began to call the greatly expanded settlement “Grants’ Camp.” Later when a station was built, it was known as Grants’ Station. Eventually the name of the whole settlement became simply “Grants.” The year of 1882 is recognized as the founding of Grant’s. The U.S. Postal Service removed the apostrophe in 1937, and it’s been “Grants” ever since.


Next came the enterprising merchant Simon Bibo. He and several members of a Jewish family came to the United States from Prussia, in 1866. He purchased most of the 160 acres of the original townsite from Jesús Blea and built a store facing the railroad tracks, where Falcomata Motors on Santa Fe Avenue is now. The railroad built livestock loading pens nearby, and thousands of sheep and cattle were shipped to markets around the country. The livestock industry gave Grants a shot in the arm. A hotel and general merchandise store were opened, and Grants began to develop as the commercial center of the area.


In the 1920s came the Breece Lumber Company, which built a railroad to the heart of the Zuni Mountains, in order to haul the timber to Grants, then on to Albuquerque, on the main line of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, successor to the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad and now known simply as the Santa Fe. The timber industry became the largest provider of jobs, bringing the local Hispanic people into the cash economy. To that time we had been mostly a self-sufficient and barter society. Grants grew slowly but surely.


The year 1929 was one to remember. The first electricity lit up a few homes and businesses. The first telephones came in. The first street was paved. The first high school in Spanish colonial architecture was built, which is now the attractive Cíbola County courthouse. The first Fourth of July rodeo was started. Bluewater Dam was built. And the stock market crashed and started the Great Depression of the 1930s.


By 1940 the timber in the Zuni Mountains was harvested, and the rails were taken up and sold, in large part as scrap iron to the Japanese. Some of those rails probably came back at us, in the form of bombs and bullets at Pearl Harbor.


The vegetable industry, from Milan west to Bluewater, was started by some enterprising Bluewater farmers after Bluewater Dam was built. In time it attracted large planters from the Phoenix area, who planted some 4,000 acres of carrots and lesser acreages of other vegetables for America’s tables. Several packing sheds were built, hundreds of people were employed, and thousands of railroad cars were shipped to eastern markets. Large numbers of Navajos came from the reservation to work the fields and help harvest the carrots... It was truly a spectacular sight to see hundreds of the Navajos, including the women in their colorful velveteen blouses, working together. Carrots brought our Navajo friends into the cash economy.


World War II saw the development of the cellophane plastic bag, and after the war American homemakers wanted their carrots packaged in them. The attractive Grants deep green carrot top was generally cut off and disappeared from produce counters, and Grants carrots lost their advantage in the markets. Rising freight and pumping costs for water from irrigation wells meant that Grants could not compete successfully with areas closer to consumers, with less expensive irrigation water. The commercial vegetable industry in the area went out of business by the 1950s.


But as the fates would have it (some call it “Grants luck”), our good friend Paddy Martinez brought in the rock that changed the complexion of our area for all time—uranium! The fever that ran through the area was catching. Many of us invested in Geiger counters and took to the hills. It was not uncommon to see landowners posting their land “No Trespassing. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted Or Shot.” In many cases the landowner owned the surface but not the mineral rights, and this situation created problems, especially if there was Bureau of Land Management acreage on the same ranch that was eligible to “claim.” Lawyers had a field day, but when the dust settled, the Grants uranium industry developed about six thousand jobs and produced about 63 percent of all the uranium mined in the United States. The town grew from twelve hundred people to twelve thousand. The village of Milan was born and grew to three thousand. Trailer parks dotted the landscape, where hundreds of mobile homes provided housing for a mushrooming population.


In 1979, after the meltdown scare at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the price of uranium began dropping, and layoffs followed by more layoffs on the part of the mining companies were necessary, but devastating. The price per pound of uranium dropped from an average of thirty-two dollars to less than eight dollars. The last mines to close operated at a loss, hoping for times to improve. By 1991 all the mines were shut down, and the number of jobs fell to less than one hundred. Today land reclamation is going on at the huge tailings ponds left by the mills. The giant A-frames, sentinels of Ambrosio lake, are disappearing from the landscape.


Grants and Cíbola County by their grit have survived the dismantling of an industry and are turning the tide. Interstate 40, our monuments, our museum and riverwalk, our nearby pueblos, our Hispanic villages, our championship golf course, our small industries, our service industries, our coal mine and generation plant, our cardboard factory, our government facilities, our retailers, and residuals from sheep, cattle, timber, and vegetables are all contributing to a strong recovering economy.”