The Chief the Valley Would Not Forget

The valley you are moving through right now sits at nearly six thousand feet, wedged between the Wet Mountains to the west and the plains opening to the east. It is called the Greenhorn Valley, and the town at its center is Colorado City. Both names trace back to a single September afternoon in seventeen seventy-nine, and to a man the Spanish called Cuerno Verde, Green Horn.

He was born into a Comanche lineage already soaked in grief. His father, a warrior chief who wore a headdress adorned with a distinctive green-tinted bison horn, was killed by Spanish soldiers at Ojo Caliente in New Mexico in October of seventeen sixty-eight. The son inherited the headdress, the name, and the war. The Spanish called him Cuerno Verde as they had called his father before him. His own people called him Tavibo Naritgant, Dangerous Man, and throughout the seventeen seventies he made that name true, leading raids deep into Nuevo Mexico that left the colonial administration shaken.

The Spanish response was to dispatch Juan Bautista de Anza, then governor of New Mexico, with a force of five hundred to eight hundred soldiers and allied Ute, Apache, and Pueblo fighters. De Anza was canny. Instead of marching the obvious route from Santa Fe straight into Comanche territory, he used the mountains as cover, swinging north and then turning back south to catch Cuerno Verde from an unexpected direction.

The fighting stretched over several days at the end of August and into September. On September third, the battle reached its end in a gully along the St. Charles River, in the foothills just below what is now Greenhorn Mountain, visible from this valley, its summit rising above twelve thousand feet to the west. Cuerno Verde, his firstborn son, and fifteen of his warriors died on that ground. De Anza took the green horn headdress from the battlefield and carried it south to the viceroy. By some accounts it was sent to the King of Spain, who passed it to the Pope. The raids against New Mexico's settlements quieted after that day.

The mountain above you was named for him. The creek running through this valley was named for him. The valley was named for him. When an Anglo translation replaced the Spanish, Green Horn becoming Greenhorn, the name held the shape of the man even as the man himself receded into the landscape. Mountain man John Brown set up a trading post in this valley in the eighteen forties. Families settled along the creek, ran cattle, dug irrigation ditches. A post office opened in eighteen sixty-six. By the early nineteen hundreds a modest resort community had grown up around the reservoir now called Lake Beckwith. Colorado City as a formal district came together through the mid-twentieth century, with a golf course and a five-member elected board managing the reservoir and the grounds.

This is a quiet place now. But the quiet has a name. Every road sign for the valley, every mention of the mountain, repeats it: Green Horn. A two-hundred-and-forty-seven-year-old echo of one morning's fight in a gully below the peak to the west.