Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Part of the Public Lands History series at the University of Oklahoma Press, Crossroads of Change is an environmental history of Pecos National Historic Park. The park is a thirty-minute drive southeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico, near the headwaters of the Pecos River in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and it offers a unique overview of southwestern history. It protects the ruins of Pecos Pueblo, one of the largest pueblos at the time of Spanish arrival, a Spanish mission, a Civil War battlefield, and a former cattle ranch. Authors Cori Knudten and Maren Bzdek cover these shifting [End Page 479] land uses within the changing political and social landscape of the upper Pecos Valley.

Arranged chronologically, the book highlights the successive management regimes of the Indigenous Pecos people, Hispanic settlers, Anglo settlers, Civil War soldiers, later ranchers (including dude ranches), and finally the state and federal managers. Subsistence farming, commercial livestock grazing, mining, timber cutting, and tourism all affected, and sometimes degraded, the arid, mountainous environs of the upper Pecos Valley. In addition to changing land practices, Knudten and Bzdek cover the contentious land claims common in U.S. Southwest history. For Indigenous people, centuries of disease, Apache and Comanche raiding, Hispano land grabs, and other challenges made life at Pecos Pueblo increasingly untenable. They moved to Jemez Pueblo in 1838. For the Hispanic settlers, the aftermath of the Mexican-American War led to more American settlement in the area and loss of previous land grants. Given the layered history of dispossession, conflicts continued far into the twentieth century.

The book's coverage reflects its own origins. It started out as a National Park Service (NPS) contract and historical report by the two authors. The early chapters synthesize archaeological studies, translated documents, and secondary sources. Southwestern historians will not find much new here, but the focus on the upper Pecos Valley offers an entry point into this larger history for general readers and tourists. In later chapters, the authors use more archival sources, manuscript collections, and the occasional interview. Given these origins, the chapters that focus on the twentieth century and federal management remain the strongest.

In 1935, the lands around Pecos Pueblo were transferred to the state of New Mexico. The lack of funding and protections for the ruins that followed from state-monument status proved problematic. This eventually led to Pecos Pueblo becoming a national monument administered by the National Park Service, a designation that became official in 1966. The site also benefited from philanthropic neighbors. Oil tycoon Elijah E. "Buddy" Fogelson and his actress wife, Greer Garson Fogelson, donated money and parts of their massive ranch to the monument. In the late 1980s, after Fogelson died, the Mellon Foundation bought a 5,500-acre parcel of the ranch to donate to NPS. Southwest writer and conservationist William deBuys helped broker the deal. Such an addition required administrative changes, and in 1990, the monument became Pecos National Historic Park.

Despite NPS's success in preserving the history of Pecos Pueblo, until recently few management decisions included the involvement of Pecos descendants from Jemez Pueblo and elsewhere. The authors noted that policies changed in the 1990s to include Pecos people as stakeholders in NPS management. But given its importance, I wished for more coverage [End Page 480] and analysis of this topic. Overall, Crossroads of Change offers a succinct resource for historians interested in federal management of southwestern public lands and should make a fine addition to the park store's shelves at Pecos National Historic Park.