Forgotten Albuquerque: Santiago/Ghufoor Pueblo

Dennis Herrick, a slight, active man in his 60s, stands on the ridge of a sand hill and gestures down over a low wall toward a strangely empty lot in one of Bernalillo’s largest subdivisions. “So, there, probably where that cul-de-sac is, that was the plaza,” he says, with the confidence of a man who has studied the archaeological record and pinpointed these features on his GPS. “Or, actually, because of the gravel quarry, the plaza was some thirty feet above the cul-de-sac. And over there, by the white sign, that was one of the kivas.”



We’re standing just outside the location of one of the middle Rio Grande valley’s most historically and archaeologically important sites. Or, rather, we are standing just outside the former location of the site, greed and apathy having resulted in its irrevocable destruction some half-a-century ago. The site is that of a Tiguex pueblo called Ghufoor, which the Spanish pronounced “Alcanfor” and later renamed “Santiago.” In an ironic footnote, the subdivision that now occupies the land is also named Santiago.

It was here at Ghufoor that Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, commander of the first ill-fated Spanish entrada into the lands that would become New Mexico, set up a long-term encampment in what was then known as the Province of Tiguex. He then used the pueblo as his base as he pursued a months-long war against the native Tiguex people of the area during the winter of 1540-41. The Tiguex War, as the conflict came to be known in the Spanish chronicles, bears the ignoble distinction of being the very first named war between Europeans and Native Americans on the North American Continent. It is also notable for having decimated what was one of the most densely populated and fertile regions in the Southwestern United States.




A portion of the pueblo was excavated in the mid-1930s, revealing a wealth of information about the Tiguex people and their practices, as well as providing evidence of one of the Tiguex War's first battles. Gordon Vivian, who led the excavation, called Ghufoor “the focal point of the early Spanish history of the Tiguex Province”. Among other finds, a skeleton was unearthed from the floor of one of the complex’s many rooms- buried in its chest was the point of a Spanish crossbow bolt. Only the Coronado expedition carried crossbows in their inventory, and this, along with other evidence in the form of loose bolts and Spanish Harquebus balls, proved that the pueblo had come under fire from Coronado’s men in the winter of 1540.

There was still confusion about the site’s identity, however. The Tiguex pueblos are notoriously difficult to correlate to the specific sites mentioned in the early Spanish chronicles, due to sloppiness in Spanish records, shifts in the course of the Rio Grande and other obstacles. In 1892, the famous archaeologist Adolph Bandalier muddied the waters further when he, proceeding off of purely anecdotal evidence, labeled the site as “Puaray”. Even years after the actual site of Puaray had been discovered and authenticated some two miles further south, Southwestern archaeologists still referred to the Ghufoor site as “Bandalier’s Puaray”, respect for the man outweighing his mistaken labeling.

Dennis Herrick, an ex-newspaper man from Iowa who teaches courses at UNM, volunteers with the Archaeological Conservancy as the caretaker of this site, or what’s left of it anyway. The pueblo itself was destroyed in the 1950s when the owner of the land allowed it to be quarried for gravel. “They just sent the bulldozers out here, gouged out the entire pueblo,” Herrick recounts, his disgust at such a callous act audible in his voice. He shakes his head.

Herrick is passionate about the site, in fact he has written a book on the pueblo, to be published in 2010, and his enthusiasm is infectious as he guides me around. There’s little to see but a road ending in a cul-de-sac among a few vacant lots on the southern edge of the Santiago housing development, but as Herrick points out the locations of various features of the pueblo- the blocks of rooms, the site of the kivas, a burial ground- I can almost make out the living Ghufoor in my mind's eye. Adding to the surreal act of visualizing an ancient pueblo transposed over a modern subdivision is the fact that the pueblo site would have actually been somewhere above our heads, the quarrying operation having lowered the level of the ground by some twenty to thirty feet.

The majority of the pueblo had yet to be studied when the land-owner undertook the fateful decision to destroy it, and a wealth of information from this unique site was lost forever. Fortunately, however, the owner did not fully succeed in annihilating the site’s significance- in the early 1980s, archaeologist Bradley Vierra made a discovery in the surrounding area that, along with geographic clues, identified the pueblo as none-other than the same Ghufoor/Alcanfor that Coronado made his long-term encampment. 400 meters west of the pueblo site, Vierra's team found a series of dugouts and metal Spanish artifacts that indicated a well-used campsite. Likely, the campsite was used by Coronado’s Mexican Indian slaves, while the Spaniards themselves occupied the pueblo.

The identification of this site as Ghufoor presents an interesting commentary on the murky history of the Tiguex War. According to Pedro de Castañeda, a foot soldier in Coronado’s entrada who later made an account of the expedition, the Tiguex willingly allowed the Spaniards to occupy Ghufoor upon their arrival in the region, and it was the Tiguex who later launched the first attack in the War. However, the prevalence of crossbow bolts at Ghufoor, including the one found embedded in the skeleton’s chest, tell a different story. Considering this evidence, it seems possible that Coronado’s men took the pueblo by force, thus placing the first battle of the Tiguex War at a site and time different than is generally known.

Herrick personally believes that this is the case. “Castañeda just says that the Puebloans left, but he doesn’t say how. He does mention that they left with only the clothes on their backs, however.” To him, this rushed evacuation, combined with the remnant ammunition, is damning evidence that it was outright Spanish aggression that instigated the War.


After we finish our tour of the subdivision/Ghufoor pueblo, Herrick drives me past the campsite that Vierra discovered in the early 80s. Again, there is literally nothing to see above ground, but at least this site, unlike Ghufoor, remains untouched. He stops the car to allow me to take a few pictures of the site, two acres of typical New Mexico scrub beside the highway, and then we proceed down the winding streets of another subdivision.

Stopping the car by an unassuming dead-end street, we disembark. He leads me out of the subdivision and onto a pristine sand hill overlooking the Rio Grande Bosque. “I wanted you to see what it looked like before the subdivision. This was the original height of the pueblo.” He points to the north and a few hundred yards away I see the vacant lots where we were a few minutes before, now some thirty feet below us. We are on wild land now, curiously isolated although it is sandwiched between two subdivision and only some fifty yards from the highway. As we walk along the hill, he points out to me a channel where the Rio Grande once flowed before the installation of Cochiti Dam, the level fields where the Puebloans at Ghufoor would have grown their crops and the site of an old Spanish ranch that occupied the hill some decades after Ghufoor was abandoned.

During a pause in the conversation, I ask him what had initially drawn him to this little known site. He takes a moment to gather his thoughts and then answers, “When I moved out here, I was made aware that this place existed,” He pauses again and points down into the Bosque. “There’s a trail along the river that I walk, and if you close your eyes just right you can almost see the Conquistadors and the Puebloans coming down it…” He trails off, offering no further explanation.

But I understand. For some of us, the pursuit of history is about communing with the past, respecting the lives of those who are long gone. About going to a site as brutalized as Ghufoor and being able to see a ghostly pueblo where a sprawling subdivision now stands, about finding a wild spot between two housing developments and seeing the land as it once was. About closing your eyes and seeing the past as close at hand as the river trail that you walk along.

It is, of course, a tragedy that the physical remnants of Ghufoor were destroyed forever by a petty, mean-spirited act, but as long as there are people like Dennis Herrick to tend to its memory and tell its story, it will never truly be gone.





Cross posted from Forgotten Albuquerque.

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