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Travellers who like to look history straight in the eye are fascinated by "
Inscription Rock ", 43 miles west of Grants along NM 53 hooming up out of
the sand and sagebrush is a bluffs 200 feet high, holding some of the most
captivating messages in North America. Its sandstone face displays a written
record of the many who inhabited and travelled throhgh this land, beganing
with the Ansazi who lived atop the formation around 1200 carved with steel
points are the signatures and comments of almost every explorer,
conquistador, missionary, army officer surveyor, and pioneer emigrant who
passed this way between 1605, when Gov Don Juan de Onate carved the first
inscription, and 1906,when it was preserved by the National Park Service.
Onate's inscription, dated April 16, 1605, was perhaps the first graffiti
left by any European in America. A paved walkway makes it easy to walk to
the writings, and there is a stone stairway leading up to other treasures,
One reads year of 1716 on the 26th of August passed by here Don Feliz
Martiner Governor and captain General of this realm to the reduction and
conquest of the Moqui " confident of success as he was, martiner actually
got nowhere with any of " conquest of the Moqui, " or Hopi peoples. After a
2 month battle, thai chused him back to Santa Fe. Another special group to
pass by this way was the us Camel corps, trekking past on their way from
Texas to California in 1857. The camels worked out fine in mountains and
deserts, outlasting horses and mules 10 to 1, but the civil war ended the
experiment when Peachy Breckinridge, fresh out on the Virginia Millitary
Acadamy, came by with 25 camels, he noted the fact on the stone here. EI
Morro was at one time famouse as the Blarney stone of ireland. Everybody had
to stop by and make a mark. But when the Santa Fe Raitroad was laid 25 miles
to the north, EI Morro was no longer on the main route 20 California, and
from the 1870s, the tradition began to die out. |
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