Mogollón: Mountains, Miners, and Ancient Peoples

The rugged mountains surrounding you carry the name of Juan Ignacio Flores Mogollón, the Spanish governor of New Mexico from seventeen twelve to seventeen fifteen. He reportedly ordered a military expedition into these ranges, and his name stuck to the peaks, the canyon, and the small mining town that would later grow up here.

But the name also belongs to an older story. The Mogollon people, a prehistoric culture distinct from the Ancestral Puebloans to the north, lived throughout these mountains for centuries, building cliff dwellings and pit houses and crafting some of the finest black-on-white pottery in the ancient Southwest. They abandoned the region in the early fourteen hundreds, their reasons still debated by archaeologists. After them came the Apache, who knew these mountain fastnesses as their own stronghold for four hundred years. The silver and gold boom that began in the eighteen eighties drew Anglo miners in, and the town of Mogollon was born, clinging to a narrow canyon. Today it survives as a ghost town, a quiet layering of all those histories.