By Dick Foster
Denver Rocky Mountain News Southern Bureau

SAN LUIS -- Journey from the Front Range deep into south-central Colorado and the region's towns and features take on a decidedly different look and feel.

Wood and brick give way to adobe. Main streets are replaced by town plazas. Little ranchos with small pastures and a few cattle, horses and goats supplant the sprawling ranches and farms of the plains.

Spanish is the mother tongue. Some who speak it trace their ownership of this land back five generations.

The oldest towns in Colorado are not on the Front Range. They are in the San Luis Valley. The oldest bears the valley's name, San Luis.

When fortune-seekers and settlers first pitched their tents at what is now Denver in 1858, Santa Fe was already 21/2 centuries old, and Mexican pioneers had been migrating north from there in small numbers to the fertile San Luis Valley for almost three decades.

The first permanent town was founded on June 21, 1851, the date of the annual Fiesta de San Luis. In true Catholic tradition, the village was named after the saint.

San Luis modeled the traditions of Spanish settlements farther south, with homes built around a plaza or town square for protection from Indians. The town had a vega, or common grazing meadow, and acequia, a common irrigation ditch for the fields.

The San Luis People's Ditch, dug in 1852, continues to operate to this day.

Colorado's oldest continuously operated business, a general store now called the R&R Market, stands at the same site where it was founded by Dario Gallegos in 1857. Today it is operated by Felix Romero, 53, a fifth-generation descendant, and his wife Claudia.

"It's always been in the same place," said Joyce Romero, Gallegos' great-granddaughter and Felix's mother. "And that big house right next door is Dario's old house."

Like the Romeros, the roots of many San Luis families run deep, but they run to the south and New Mexico, not to the north and Denver.

"Felix told me he remembered going to Denver only one time when he was growing up. That was a high school trip," Claudia Romero said. "But he remembers going down to Velarde (north of Española, N.M.) all the time because that was where his father's family was, and they'd trade their beans and corn for the Velarde apples and pears."

West of San Luis, other old settlements resemble the trailblazing town: Antonito, La Jara and Conejos, where Lady of Guadalupe Church, founded in 1857, stands as the first in Colorado.

San Luis and the few miles around it remain a vestige of what came first when the Spanish arrived in the valley.

"You're looking at the northernmost Spanish frontier," said Rick Manzanares of the Colorado Historical Society museum at Fort Garland. "It's kind of a separate history, almost, from the rest of Colorado.

"You had the village system that was very family and communal oriented. The plaza was built for a reason, to keep the Indians from coming in and attacking. The farm system and the acequia system all depended very much on everybody cooperating, because there wasn't a lot of government. You had to have this communal system for existence."

The absence of government was matched by a similar lack of priests and church structure, giving rise to the Penitentes, a four-century-old brotherhood of laymen still active in the San Luis Valley.

While the group was most noted for ceremonies of self-flagellation and reenactment of Christ's crucifixion, its most important role was maintaining the functions of the church in communities seldom visited by priests.

"These were the laypeople who kept religion alive and government alive when there was none," Manzanares said. "They provided the social services in the villages. If a young man died and left a widow and kids, the brotherhood would make sure they were cared for. They were the glue of the neighborhood."

Although self-flagellation has been discarded, the Penitentes tradition survives in San Luis. Faithful have built a shrine and the Stations of the Cross in San Luis, and residents from the surrounding villages still gather for large Christmas and Easter ceremonies.

"You have kind of a 19th-century culture trying to survive in a 21st-century world," Manzanares said.

The life and traditions seem lost in time because the area remained isolated for so long from the world around it.

"It's kind of set apart from anywhere else in the valley and anywhere else in the state, too," Claudia Romero said.

The vast San Luis Valley, 60 miles wide and 80 miles long, is like a giant bowl, rimmed on the north and east by the Sangre de Cristo mountains and the west by the San Juans. Only the southern end is accessible without traversing high mountain barriers. The Spanish entered from New Mexico and found gold and a vast, fertile area for ranching and farming.

"We can go back as far as 1830 to document settlements in (what are now) Conejos and Costilla counties," Manzanares said. "The Spanish were well aware of this land, and they wanted to settle here and wanted it to be part of their northern frontier."

In fact, Spain earlier had claimed all of Colorado north to the Arkansas River as its territory. But explorers from the United States, including Zebulon Pike in 1807, also had come through the valley and seen its potential.

After winning its independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico sensed U.S. designs on some of its territory, including the San Luis Valley, so it tried to settle the area with its own people. Land grants in 1843 and 1844 gave large tracts of the valley to citizens willing to live and work on the land.

The largest, the Sangre de Cristo grant, eventually gave birth to San Luis. Nearly a million acres, it stretched along the Culebra range, south across the New Mexico border and west to the Rio Grande River. It was granted to Charles "Carlos" Beaubien, a French Canadian businessman who had become prominent in New Mexico.

Beaubien encouraged settlement, gave newcomers land for the town of San Luis and the vega, and personally screened applicants to settle in the town.

Before many arrived, the United States and Mexico went to war. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war in 1848, ceded southern Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California to the United States.

Beaubien's and his settlers' titles to their lands remained intact in the treaty, but what was long considered northern New Mexico was made part of Colorado when the territory was created in 1861.

"Many of us still consider it expatriate New Mexico," New Mexico State Historian Robert Torrez said. "People of the San Luis Valley who come here to do genealogy trace their ancestry to Taos and other areas of northern New Mexico, so many of them still consider it part of New Mexico. Socially, culturally, they have been that way for a long time."

Colorado Milestones, which appears Tuesdays, is part of a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society. Digital and print copies of historical images available at the Colorado Historical Society (303) 866-2305.

On TV: Sunday at 10 p.m.: Colorado History: When a rash of burglaries hit Denver in the 1950s, the burglars wore badges.

November 16, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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