One of the
joys of volunteering at El Rancho de las Golondrinas Living History Museum is
hearing visitors wax nostalgic about memories evoked by buildings and settings
from their or their families past. (El
Rancho has structures dating from the early 1700s into the late 1800s – many of
whose real world likenesses were still in use in the 20th and even
21st centuries.
Recently in
Sierra Village (c. 1890) Jim had the pleasure of talking to a woman whose
grandfather lived on a doppelgänger of this family compound-farm in Southern
New Mexico where he was a successful commercial cotton grower. Among other things, she wistfully and proudly
remembered how buyers would come from the east specifically to bid for his
bales of the white, fluffy crop.
Since
moving to Santa Fe we have become aware that the Navajo, now weavers of woolen
objects, practiced their craft with cotton prior to the arrival of the Spanish,
and their churro sheep, in the 16th century.
We also heard at the Botanical Garden that a
type of this fiber-producing shrub (along with quinoa, amaranth and other
grains) grew wild at the high elevations of New Mexico, and that the natives harvested
and learned to grow and use these plants for their clothing or dietary needs.
But we did
not know much of anything about the story of New Mexican cotton either before
or after the Navajo switched from that material to wool for their weaving.
“The most precious commodities of
southwestern prehistory were turquoise, macaws, copper bells, seashells and
cotton and the textiles woven from it.”
(Grasshopper Pueblo: A Story of Archaeology and Ancient Life By Jefferson
Reid, Stephanie Whittlesey
Fortunately
for historians, New Mexico is one of
“four known areas in the world where perishable textile material,
preserved by excessively dry conditions, has survived in appreciable amounts to
the present day.” The others are Inner Mongolia, Egypt, coastal Peru. (Kate
Peck Kent, “The Cultivation and Weaving of Cotton in the Prehistoric
Southwestern United States)
While most
evidence comes from the years between 1000 and 1400 A.D., the artifacts
indicate that there was loom weaving with cotton in New Mexico as early as 700
A.D. Among the relics recovered were corpses
wrapped in cotton blankets sometimes with tools for spinning (the process of
making thread out of raw fibers), cotton yarn, cottonseeds, seed beaters (instruments
used to remove seeds), loom parts, weaving tools, and cloth bags. The quality of work showed the “same skill in
spinning thread and the same proficiency in weaving that appear in fabrics of
later periods.”
Peck Kent
concludes that the cotton plant was not indigenous – more likely a pre-Spanish
import from northern Mexico believed to be what is now called Gossypium Hopi –
a fast blooming (84-100 days) species that grows at high altitudes in arid
conditions.
Similar
finds occurred in Arizona and Utah. Walter
J. Fewkes wrote in 1909, “Fabrics made of cotton are common in the ruins of the
Red-rocks, and at times this fiber was combined with yucca.” Francisco Vázquez de Coronado mentions seeing
natives of the region raising cotton and Pueblo Indians wearing cotton blankets
and giving his 1539 expedition presents of cotton cloth.
And writing
in the Santa Fe New Mexican, historian Marc Simmons reported, “Hernán Gallegos, accompanying a small
expedition to New Mexico in 1581, wrote that the Pueblo Indians ‘have much
cotton, which they spun, wove, and made into blankets for covering and clothing
themselves.’” For example two cotton
blankets were sewn together to form the basic Pueblo woman’s dress. The other frequently used material for
clothing was finely tanned buckskin called gamuza. This was quite a pleasant surprise to the
Catholic but Puritanical Spanish who, in Mexico, had been exposed to Indians
who were “scantily dressed, if at all.”
“In
addition to using native-grown cotton, early Pueblo weavers worked with
apocynum (Indian hemp), yucca leaf fiber, fur, and feather cord,” according to
the Michael Smith Gallery website.
“Tools found in many of the prehistoric sites indicate that cotton was
spun with the same type of stick-and-whorl spindle still in use today. The
resulting yarn was fashioned by finger processed into socks, bags, nets, and
braids or was woven into cloth on a wide upright loom or a horizontal backstrap
loom in which one of two beams holding the warp yarn is attached to a strap
that passes across the weaver's back. Weaving on the loom was a man’s art and
continued to be so until recently. Anasazi [ancient Pueblo] weavers knew a
limited range of natural dyes, including brick red, brown, black, yellow, and
pale blue.”
The Navajo
learned about cultivation of cotton as well as weaving on the loom from the
Pueblo Indians with whom they had a sometimes fractious, sometimes affable
relationship. They also learned the
Pueblo technique of gathering cotton by pulling the bolls from the plant and
drying them in the sun. The dry seeds
were then “ginned” either by placing the bolls on clean sand, or between
blankets, and beating them.
Cotton was
known in Europe by the 1400s, but was not commonly used until the 18th
century. But Columbus may have first
discovered the textile’s practacality as explained in this footnote from
Charles C. Mann’s book, “1491.”
“Given the choice between their own scratchy
wool and the indian’s smooth cotton, the conquistadors threw away their clothes
and donned native clothing. Later this
preference was mirrored in Europe. When
cotton became readily available in the eighteenth century; it grabbed so much
of the textile market that French woolmakers persuaded the government to ban
the new fiber. The law failed to stem
the cotton tide. As the historian
Fernand Braudel noted, some woolmakers then thought outside the box; They proposed sending prostitutes in cotton
clothing to wander Paris streets, where police would publicly strip them naked. In theory, bourgeois women would then avoid
cotton for fear of being mistaken for prostitutes and forcibly disrobed. This novel form of protectionism was never
put into place.”
Cotton was however
used in Spain for some clothing in the 1540s as evidenced by the 250
Gambeson/Esquipil quilted cotton jackets and 4 quilted cotton head armors that
Coronado had listed in the muster inventory for his expedition.
And the
“Clothing Guide at El Rancho de las Golondrinas Living History Museum” list the
major historically accurate materials as “leather, wool, and cotton”: “the
daily costume of New Mexican women was a looses cotton chemise…a long scarf,
made of silk or cotton…[and for men] cotton or leather breeches…collarless
white cotton or linen shirt…cotton stockings.”
Cotton City (2010 population 388) is
a census-designated place in Hidalgo County, New Mexico, named for its cotton
gin, which serves the area's cotton farms.
In 1807 the
Spanish tried to establish a cotton weaving industry among colonists but
cheaper cotton goods from the U.S. brought in on the Santa Fe Trail in ended
that idea in 1812.
Then in the
early 20th century – during New Mexico’s last years as a U.S.
Territory and first years of statehood – the cotton-producing industry of the
United States began expanding beyond the “Old South Cotton Belt” of Virginia to
East Texas. They established new production
centers in western Oklahoma, the Southern Plains of Texas, and created large
irrigated farms in California, Arizona, and in the Rio Grande and Pecos river
valleys of southern New Mexico.
New
Mexico’s agricultural experiment stations and land-grant college (now New
Mexico State University) contributed significantly to this expansion by
developing a variety of Acala cotton suited to these western growing
conditions.
The long,
winding river valleys tended to be more moderate, with precipitation between
ten and twenty inches a year, but sometimes had shorter growing seasons due to
the elevation. Summer temperatures were
high and the crop-growing season was generally long, but in these arid lands
farmers had to irrigate. Fortunately,
most of the rainfall came between April and June, the best time to give cotton
seedlings a good start before the hot summer months ensued.
In New
Mexico the largest areas of irrigated farming occured in the Pecos Valley, from
Roswell, New Mexico, to near Fort Stockton, Texas, and in the Rio Grande
Valley, largely on the lands of the Rio Grande Reclamation Project, in the
Mesilla and Rincon valleys. The
completion of the Elephant Butte Dam in 1916 established control over the Rio
Grande, eliminated periodic floods, and made agriculture a more stable and
profitable venture. Cotton fields
occupied only 0.4 percent of the total crop acreage in 1919. In 1927 it had
expanded to 59 percent.
“By World
War II the cotton-producing areas of New Mexico had become fairly stabilized. Of the approximate 133,000 acres of cotton in
the state, about 54,000 acres were in the Pecos Valley and fifty-nine thousand
were in the Rio Grande Valley. Although New Mexico cotton acreage expanded to
over 200,000 acres in the 1950s, even with the additional acreage in the Pecos
and El Paso/Rio Grande valleys in Texas, the production of the New Mexico/Far
West Texas region was relatively small compared to the rest of the Cotton West.
The region has proven to be far more influential for its development of the
Acala 1517 cotton variety,” according to Cameron Lee Saffell of Iowa State
University. The 2007 cotton crop was
valued at over $38 million with over 98,000 bales produced. (Texas (25%), California, Arizona,
Mississippi and Missouri are the leading producers.)
Among these
farmers was the grandfather of Jim’s Sierra Village visitor.
Cotton has
been part of the fabric of New Mexico’s lives since almost the beginning of
those lives. It is a pleasure to be part
of a living museum that helps keep those memories alive for those that
experienced them, as well as for those who are learning about them for the
first time here at las Golondrinas.
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