Where the Plains End and the Mountains Begin

The river running through town has been called five different names in five different languages, and each one tells you who passed through and what they made of this place. The Spanish named it El Rio de las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, the River of Lost Souls in Purgatory. The name traces to a legend: a Spanish regiment wintered here sometime in the seventeen hundreds, then marched south into the canyon and vanished entirely.

No survivors, no word. Years later a priest in Santa Fe learned from an indigenous witness that warriors had killed every man. The regiment had no priest of their own, so in the theology of the time their souls were condemned to wander the canyon walls in purgatory.

French trappers arrived next, shortened the name to Purgatoire, and passed it to Anglo mountain men who found French no easier than Spanish. By the time American teamsters were hauling freight through here toward Santa Fe, the river had become the Picketwire, as if it had something to do with a fence. It did not.

Trinidad grew up here because the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail had no other choice. Wagon teams had to ford this river before climbing nine miles over Raton Pass into New Mexico. Trinidad was the last rest stop before the grade began, and its founders were not Anglo settlers pushing west.

They were Hispano farmers from Taos, New Mexico, pushing north. Felipe Baca, a sheep rancher from Taos, was hauling flour to Denver in eighteen sixty when he recognized this valley for what it was: fertile bottomland, reliable water, shelter from the pass winds. He moved his family here that fall.

Two years later, twelve families from Taos followed him over Raton Pass. Baca built a general store, donated land for a school and a Catholic church, and dug an irrigation ditch. Trinidad was a Hispano town before it was anything else.

The pass itself got tamed by a different sort of man. Richens Lacy Wootton, Uncle Dick to everyone on the frontier, settled near Trinidad around eighteen sixty-four, obtained franchises from both territorial legislatures, hired Ute workers, blasted rock, built bridges, and opened a twenty-seven-mile toll road over the pass in eighteen sixty-six. He charged a toll for each wagon, though Native Americans were often allowed to pass free.

In eighteen seventy-eight, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway needed his right-of-way. Uncle Dick negotiated a monthly pension and lifetime groceries for his wife instead of a lump sum. She outlived him by forty years and collected that pension until nineteen thirty-five.

The trail moved on. The river stayed, with all its names.