The Descendant
Nearly 150 years ago, the Gallegos family helped dig the irrigation ditch that runs through their farm. Today, Joe Gallegos oversees both.

Joe Gallegos strides across his farm in the San Luis Valley. It is the same land his great-great-grandfather worked when he helped found San Luis, Colorado's oldest town, in 1851.

The irony is as plain as the flat tire on Joe Gallegos' 50-year-old tractor: Here he is, living on $12,000 a year, giving lectures on sustainable farming to a bunch of well-heeled students paying twice that in tuition.

Another irrigation trailblazer: Walter Cheesman

But he figures the kids could learn something about nature and life -- a life of struggle, his life. So when they get politically correct with him and question why he has cattle grazing in an ecologically fragile riparian area, Gallegos hands them a post-hole digger.

Help me build a fence to keep them out, he tells them.

"City folk don't know what goes on out here," he says of the San Luis Valley. "People think this life is all hot cakes and griddles in the morning. I woke up with a flat tire on my tractor. That's what it's all about."

That's what it has always been about.

At a time when the operative words in modern life are bigger, faster, better, Joe Gallegos, 42, is determined to operate differently. The old way. The way Colorado was, not the way it has become.

His great-great-grandfather, Dario, came north from Taos, N.M., and was among the original seven settlers of San Luis, Colorado's oldest town.

The settlement, established in 1851, was laid out in a traditional way. The town was built like a Mexican village with adobe homes surrounding a plaza. A vega nearby was communal land where each resident could graze two cows, two burros and two horses. Farms were carved from the sage-covered valley the way the Moors did in 7th century Spain, in narrow extenciones that stretched five miles back from Culebra Creek. A five-mile-long irrigation ditch was dug by hand. It allowed the bone-dry valley to bloom.

Today, the San Luis People's Ditch is the oldest in the state. A monument outside town commemorates 29 of its builders. Dario Gallegos' name tops the list. Broken beer bottles lie scattered at its base.

Joe Gallegos is the current mayordomo -- the ditch rider. It's not an easy job. First, the ditch needs to be kept clean, which is getting harder with all of the logging in the mountains that once were part of the community's vega.

And then there's the issue of who gets how much water and when. The law addresses most of this. Gallegos addresses the rest.

"He may have the legal rights to his water, but does he understand the unwritten ways?" he says of newcomers. Years ago, such disputes commonly led to guns being drawn; Gallegos' grandmother told him of a man who was beaten to death with a shovel over water.

"The only thing that ties us together is this freaking ditch," he says, grateful that guns and shovels are kept out of it now. "It is the lifeblood to all of us."

Dario. Felique. Celestino. Corpus. Joe. Five generations of Gallegoses have brought change to the land. The only constant has been the family pledge: Never sell.

Celestino, Dario's grandson, planted an orchard of apple and cherry trees. His son, Corpus, switched from sheep to cattle in the 1940s. Joe still grows hay and vegetables and raises goats and cattle on the family's 1,600 acres. But his focus is on chicos, a Pueblo Indian corn that's fired in clay ovens. He sells it for $5 a pound.

"What I like about chicos is they have nothing to do with the world economy," he says. "The money guys, they don't even know what they are."

Some do. Two years ago, Gallegos sold his crop of chicos to a wholesaler. He got $1 less a pound; the wholesaler sold them for $2 more to city people wanting "traditional" foods.

"Way the world works, I guess," Gallegos says, shaking his head.

His father was a school principal, his mother a teacher. The family moved from the valley to Colorado Springs when Joe was in high school. On weekends, they returned to work the farm.

Corpus Gallegos told his son to get an education. If he couldn't make it farming, at least he'd have something to fall back on. Joe got a degree in mechanical engineering from Colorado State University. He made $50,000 his first year out of school, even more working 30-day stints on oil rigs overseas.

But he always came back to the valley. To the rugged beauty. To his family. To the clean air and hard work. To the feeling of freedom it gave him.

In 1985, he came back to stay.

Today, he probably couldn't get a job as an engineer. "I don't have any experience in that anymore." What he knows he applies to fixing his machinery -- most of it old, but paid for.

"If you think you're going to be rich out here, you're mistaken," Gallegos says.

He irrigates not with pivot sprinklers, but with hand-dug bleeding ditches that carry water from the main canal. He refuses to farm with chemicals because they're bad for the land, but he probably couldn't afford them anyway. A new house he started building a decade ago remains unfinished. In winter, he takes odd jobs -- plumbing, fix-it work, whatever. He barters with neighbors.

On this day, he offers Rudy Vialpando some goat meat if he slaughters the animal. Joe hates slaughtering goats; they cry like babies when the knife is put to them.

Vialpando laughs. Yes, like babies. He hands Gallegos 20 pounds of potatoes. Gallegos promises to drop off four pounds of chicos.

"So, how's farming?" Vialpando asks.

"You know how it is," Gallegos says.

"Nothing but work."

"Won't get fat, that's for sure," Gallegos says. Neither man looks at the other.

There are bills and stress and a manure-caked corral that needs to be cleaned before winter and pitch-black nights when Gallegos lies awake wondering why he does it. His two brothers moved on to other things. Last year, his father had a stroke, leaving Joe to work the land himself. To him, it's a powerful draw.

A century and a half. Five generations. Maybe the last Gallegos.

"A dying breed. I've been called that by a lot of people," he says. "Maybe I am. Maybe I'm kidding myself. It's all what you're used to. I'm used to this.

"I guess I pay for my freedom."

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