The Baca Grant: A Hundred Thousand Acres and a Very Long Story
Near Crestone, Colorado
The land around Crestone carries one of the more convoluted ownership histories in the American West. It begins with the Luis Maria Baca Grant Number Four, a land designation created by the United States Congress on June twenty-first, eighteen sixty. The backstory starts earlier, in New Mexico.
Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca had petitioned colonial authorities in eighteen twenty for a tract on the Gallinas River near what is now Las Vegas, New Mexico, and received the grant in eighteen twenty-one. After American annexation, Congress worked through competing land claims in New Mexico Territory and determined that the town of Las Vegas had prior rights to that land. As compensation, Congress in eighteen sixty offered the Baca heirs five replacement tracts of vacant public land across the Southwest.
The fourth, a square parcel twelve and a half miles on each side in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, amounted to roughly one hundred thousand acres. It became Baca Grant Number Four. The grant changed hands repeatedly over the following century.
By the nineteen seventies it was part of a corporation called AZL Resources. In nineteen seventy-seven, Maurice Strong purchased a controlling interest in AZL, and his Colorado holdings included both a large working cattle ranch and the Baca Grande residential subdivision adjacent to Crestone. In two thousand, Congress authorized the federal purchase of the historic ranch lands.
That purchase was completed in two thousand and four. Those acres became two federal designations: the Baca National Wildlife Refuge and an expansion of Great Sand Dunes National Park. The portion Maurice and Hanne Strong had retained, adjacent to town, became the site of Crestone's spiritual community, a transformation no one involved in the original eighteen sixty congressional act could have anticipated.
