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JayMiller

The Seven Cities of Gold

by JayMiller on January 11, 2003 · 0 comments

in Of Interest

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The Seven Cities of Gold has been a New Mexico fable since before Fray Marcos de Niza claimed to have seen them in 1539. As soon as Cortes and crew finished conquering the Aztec Empire in the early 1520s, they set out to find the legendary Seven Cities of Gold, said to have been established by seven bishops who fled Spain after the Moorish conquest to hide gold, gems, and religious articles in the New World.

When Cabeza de Vaca reached his countrymen in Mexico after wandering through this area following a shipwreck on the Texas Gulf Coast, he told of gems he had seen in villages to the north, “with many people and very big houses.” And thus, what is now New Mexico became targeted as the mythical Cibola. In 1539, Fray Marcos was sent on a scouting expedition to look for de Vaca’s Cibola, and returned with claims of having seen a village with buildings made of gold.

Historians believe that village was Zuni, which today can’t raise enough money for one school building made of frame stucco. It is very possible Zuni wasn’t much better off 460 years ago. The Moorish slave Estevan, whom Fray Marcos had sent ahead in an advance party, was killed at Zuni, and it is quite possible the friar turned around at that point and headed home.

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New Mexico’s Prisoner of War Camps

by JayMiller on January 11, 2003 · 0 comments

in Of Interest

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Did you know New Mexico had prisoner of war camps during World War II?

This column has talked about ones at Santa Fe and Lordsburg that held U.S. residents of Japanese descent. The camp at Lordsburg also held captured German and Italian soldiers. Another camp at Roswell held almost exclusively German prisoners, most of them from Gen. Rommel’s elite Afrika Korps, until late in the war.

As the war dragged on, severe labor shortages began to hit the nation because of the large numbers of Americans who were involved in the war effort in one way or another. In New Mexico, those shortages were mostly on the farms of the state, which were working to peak capacity to produce food for the nation and our troops overseas.

In 1942, the Bracero Program, which brought in contract laborers from Mexico, filled most of the need, but some farmers still had to plow under unharvested crops the following spring. In 1943, the government began allowing German and some Italian prisoners from Roswell and Lordsburg to work on neighboring farms at the local prevailing minimum wage.

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