El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro

Long before this city existed, this valley was a corridor of empire. El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the Royal Road of the Interior Land, stretched one thousand six hundred miles from Mexico City north through the Chihuahuan Desert to Santa Fe. For two hundred and seventy years, beginning in fifteen ninety-eight, this single track carried everything the Spanish colonial world needed to sustain itself: soldiers, missionaries, settlers, trade goods, and the occasional governor arriving in a creaking carriage.

The stretch through the Mesilla Valley was one of the most treacherous on the entire road. The Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead Man, lay just north of here, a ninety-mile waterless passage through open desert where travelers pushed hard and prayed harder. Those who made it through arrived in the valley near the Rio Grande grateful for water, shade, and a moment of relative safety.

The road was dangerous for reasons beyond thirst. Apache raiders controlled much of this country throughout the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, striking supply trains and isolated travelers with devastating efficiency. Travelers who died in Apache attacks along this stretch were often buried where they fell, marked with crude wooden crosses. Local lore says the clusters of grave markers were what early American arrivals saw when they described the area as las cruces, the crosses. The city that grew here in eighteen forty-nine inherited that name.

Spain used the Camino Real to extract silver from mines in Zacatecas and Chihuahua, shipping it south while pushing colonizers north. After Mexican independence in eighteen twenty-one, the road remained vital. American traders began using it in the eighteen thirties, and after the Mexican-American War ended in eighteen forty-eight, United States Army supply wagons rolled over the same ruts.

Today the Camino Real is a National Historic Trail, and the international heritage site on the Rio Grande just south of here preserves wagon-wheel cuts still visible in the desert caliche. The ground remembers every traveler who crossed it.