In the 16th century, Spain built a buffer province near the headwaters of the Rio Grande to shield her Mexican territories from possible French incursion. Transported to a wild, 600,000-acre land grant, Andalusian settlers turned their arid Tierra Amarilla into a grazing empire that exists today as New Mexico's Rio Arriba county. Bigger than Connecticut and almost as inaccessible as Tibet, the area sprawls southward from the Colorado Rockies to atomic-age Los Alamos. Its western reaches contain the licarilla Apache reservation, and to the east loom the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
