A Town Named for the Conquistador, in a County Named for His Victim
Near Cortez, Colorado
The naming of this place layers historical irony upon itself. Cortez is named for Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who destroyed the Aztec Empire in the fifteen twenties. The county it sits in is named Montezuma, after the Aztec ruler Cortés overthrew.
The colonizer and his victim, honored in the same breath, in a place that was occupied by Indigenous people for thousands of years before either Cortés or Montezuma entered history. The town was founded in eighteen eighty six not for gold or silver but for water. Irrigation builders dug tunnels and canals to divert the Dolores River across the dry plateau, and Cortez grew up at the center of that irrigation grid.
The post office opened on June twenty first, eighteen eighty seven. Farmers arrived to work the newly watered land and found themselves plowing fields that Ancestral Puebloan farmers had cultivated eight hundred years before them. The potsherds and stone tools that turned up with the plow were reminders that this plateau had supported a civilization and watched it depart.
Today Cortez serves as the commercial center of the Four Corners region, a hub for Mesa Verde National Park and for the constellation of monuments and archaeological sites that surround it, from Hovenweep to Canyons of the Ancients to the Ute Mountain Tribal Park. Montezuma County alone holds thousands of documented archaeological sites.
