Pecos Pueblo: Eight Centuries and Seventeen Survivors

The ruins you can see from the visitor center here were once the largest building in North America north of Mexico. At its peak in the fourteen hundreds, Pecos Pueblo rose five stories high, contained roughly six hundred ground-floor rooms, and housed somewhere between two thousand and twenty-five hundred people. It was not a village. It was a city, and for two centuries it was the dominant trading power of the entire Southwest.

The Pueblo people who built it had chosen the location with precision. Pecos sat at the edge of two worlds: the agricultural pueblos of the Rio Grande valley to the west, and the buffalo hunting grounds of the Great Plains to the east. Comanche traders came from the plains with dried meat and hides. Pueblo traders came from the west with corn and cotton cloth. The Pecos people controlled the exchange, and they grew wealthy and powerful doing it.

When Francisco Vásquez de Coronado arrived in fifteen forty looking for cities of gold, the Pecos people redirected him with stories of fabulous riches somewhere further east. Coronado wandered off into the plains and found nothing. But the Spanish kept coming back. By sixteen twenty-one, Franciscan missionaries had the Pecos people building one of the largest adobe churches in the New World, hauling pine beams from the mountains on their shoulders.

The Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for twelve years. Pecos joined the revolt. When the Spanish returned in sixteen ninety-two, the cycle of resistance and accommodation resumed. But the pueblo's population, already strained by epidemic disease and the labor demands of the mission, began to collapse.

A Comanche raid in seventeen seventy-five killed nearly every adult man. The Spanish recorded five hundred and ninety-nine people at Pecos in seventeen sixty. By eighteen oh five, there were one hundred and four. In eighteen thirty-eight, the last seventeen survivors packed their remaining belongings and walked eighty miles northwest to Jemez Pueblo, the only other community that still spoke their Towa language.

Their descendants live at Jemez today, holding dual identity as Pecos and Jemez people, attending the Pecos Pueblo Feast Day each year at a pueblo their ancestors had to abandon.