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Excerpts from Abe Peña's  popular publications

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

from CHANGE COMES TO THE VILLAGES

"Landmarks And Bypaths In Cíbola

“In our sheepherding past, most landmarks in the land of Cíbola were given a name by Hispanic sheepherders; e.g. La vereda del café—the coffee trail. Later came cowboys on horseback who named some others themselves; e.g. white horse lake. Of course, our American Indian friends had their own names; e.g. Tohajiilee—lift water, long before the Spanish came.

La vereda de café, according to old-timers, was named by Felipe Gutierrez, who found a trail of coffee beans in the snow. One of the camp tenders' burros, while moving the camp to fresh feed, went under a piñon tree with his pack and ripped the coffee sack, spilling a stream of coffee beans and naming a trail.

Another landmark in the Ambrosio Lake country was El aguaje de la Amada—the cistern of Amada. There's the story that Vicente Otero came from Tucumcari to homestead at Milpitas. He ran goats and sheep. His daughter Victoria married Mateo Martínez, and they had several children, including Florentina, Amada, and Santos.

One summer, Amada was tending the goat herd and, while watering the goats, accidentally fell into a cistern in the sandstone rocks. When they found her, she was alive clinging to some rocks, and to this day the cistern carries the name of the pretty Amada Martínez.

La piedra parada is a large standing rock near el puertecito on the road to San Mateo. The solid rock is about 40 feet high and about 60 feet wide. Sheepherders were careful not to herd their flocks near the standing rock, because the sheep died. Later, plant specialists at New Mexico State University found concentrations of selenium in the forage. Selenium was poisonous to sheep and sometimes coexisted with uranium. Had local uranium prospectors known that selenium coexisted with uranium, there might have been a different outcome to the development of uranium mining in the land of Cíbola (1950-90), and money in different pockets.

Ojo del Gallo, Spring of the Rooster. A rich spring near San Rafael is a very well known landmark. Joséphine Barela (d), a freelance writer and resident of San Rafael, wrote the book Ojo del Gallo. She died before it was published, so her good friends Margaret and John Bonomo arranged for its publication. They prefaced it, “A Nostalgic Narrative of Historic San Rafael.”

There are several stories as to how the spring got its name. Mrs. Belinda Mirabal (d) of San Rafael told me some people said the reflection of the San Rafael mesa on the small lake resembled a rooster and gave it the name. Another story is that a flock of turkeys frequented the spring, and the exceptionally large male cock strutted and paraded like he owned the spring.

Then there's El Gallito, the little rooster. Again, the story goes that a flock of turkeys dominated by a smaller rooster gave the name to El Gallito, some six miles east of Ojo del Gallo on the Rio San José near the Gottlieb Ranch.

Possibly the best known landmark in the land of Cíbola is Acoma Sky City, the oldest continuously inhabited village/pueblo in the United States. I would like to think that Sky City was named by an Acoma Indian who raised his hand to the heavens and touched the hand of God.

Then there's El Cerro de la Maruca, The Peak of the Squaw, near Seboyeta. The story goes that, when a beautiful Navajo maiden was jilted by her handsome lover, she climbed the peak, placed her braided hair in her mouth, and jumped to her death.

Many have contributed from all cultures to the naming of landmarks, trails, and bypaths in the Land of Cíbola. For example, Candy Kitchen, which some say was named by a moonshiner who made moonshine from sugar. While hauling a wagonload of sugar, he was stopped by federal marshals during Prohibition, and asked where he was transporting the sugar. He told them, “To my kitchen, where I make candy!”

Ambrosia Lake, that produced millions of pounds of uranium from 1950 to 1990, was named after Ambrosio Trujillo from San Mateo. At his homestead on a clay bed, he built a small dike with a horse-drawn scraper. Wildlife and livestock watered there, and it was known as La Laguna de Ambrosio. When the uranium developers came, they thought they heard Ambrosia, the nectar of the Greek gods, and put Ambrosia Lake on their letterheads, etc.

in the dust bowl days of the 1930s, the small lake dried up and windmills arrived on the scene. Today, only the catchy name remains."