Scott City and El Cuartelejo: The Northernmost Pueblo

About thirteen miles north of Scott City lies a place most travelers never expect to find in western Kansas: the ruins of a pueblo. El Cuartelejo, designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-four, is the northernmost pueblo ruin in the United States. Taos Indians fleeing Spanish authority settled here with a band of Plains Apache around sixteen sixty-four, building a seven-room adobe structure.

Picuris refugees joined them in sixteen ninety-six before Spanish soldiers returned them to New Mexico in seventeen oh six. Scott City was itself founded in eighteen eighty-five by the Scott City Town Company, with most settlers arriving from Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. But the deeper story along this stretch of US Eighty-Three is the thousand-year layering of peoples on what looks from a car window like empty plains.