The Ditch - Origins

Impoundment dams like the one on the Santa Cruz river may have been an Anglo introduction to the area, but the ditches have a more cosmopolitan background.

When Juan de Oñate arrived at the confluence of the Chama with the Río Grande on 11 July 1598 with 130 soldiers, their families, some Mexican Indian servants and eight Franciscans, he came with an awareness he needed to build an irrigation ditch. In August, he announced his intent and expected the pueblo he called San Juan to provide the labor.

The Tewa speaking group was divided into two groups, the winter people at Caypa to the east of the Chama who were responsible for hunting, and the summer people at Yunque to the west who were responsible for farming. The ones he called San Juan were the winter people.

When his plans failed to materialize, Bradford Pince says Oñate moved into Yunque with its 400 rooms, and forced the two moieties to share the same space. José Rivera and Thomas Glick suggest all he had to do at Yunque was “reconstruct an irrigation ditch sufficient to irrigate the fields to be cultivated in the fertile valley between the two rivers.”

The San Gabriel ditch still exists as the Acequia de Chamita, although the pueblo is long gone.

Local people were already irrigating the land. However, according to Dan Scurlock, they were flooding their fields directly from the creeks rather than building long distance delivery systems with their grid of laterals and head ditches.

Before they planted in the spring, farmers would bring water through wide, shallow canals. When they needed water later in the season, they would construct temporary dams of brush and logs to back water into the canals.

The methods were adequate for their populations in good years. When there was a short drought, they might make a temporary shift. When the drought lasted more than three years, they began moving to new locations. With the migration of new people into the area, the methods probably weren’t up to the increased demands on the available water.

Rivera and Glick say people commonly look to Spain for the source of local ideas about irrigation. After all, many of the most important conquistadors, as well as some of the original settlers, were from the Estremadura where the Romans built two aqueducts at Merida to support a colony of retired soldiers of the Fifth and Tenth Legions in 25bc.

However, after the Moors conquered the city, Merida was virtually abandoned until the 1500's when people were migrating to the New World. During the Moorish occupation, the area had become more dependent on pastoralism than agriculture.

Moorish irrigation was concentrated in Valencia and Murcia, in the southeastern part of Spain. A number of Oñate’s forces came from Andalucía, but mainly the port cities of Cadiz and Cartaya. The only one from Murcia was Juan de Escarramad.

The more important Moorish contribution was the body of laws governing water, including the idea that water must be made available to everyone, that there were limits on how much people upstream could take, and that communal groups determined the distribution of water through their selected leaders.

When Christians drove Moors from an area of the Iberian peninsula, the rulers usually decreed that people should continue to “irrigate in accordance with ancient custom” or as “established and customary in the times of the Muslims.” The word acequia is derived from the Arab word “sagiya.”

One would guess that under threat of starvation the settlers blended their memories of what they had seen from a distance in México and Spain with the techniques used locally.

Alvar Carlson found construction methods remained primitive into territorial times. An ox was used to begin a ditch by pulling a wooden scraper. Men deepened it with hand tools, dumping the dirt onto the embankments. Dams were made of logs and brush, flumes from hollow logs. Rather than remove large trees, men routed ditches around them and trial and error usually defined the final paths.

It was enough so long as the population remained small. When settlements outgrew the existing resources, the solution was always to send groups looking for new land, first up the Santa Cruz, then along tributaries to the Chama and Río Grande. From Santa Fé they moved south.

Notes: San Juan is now called Ohkay Owingeh.

Carlson, Alvar W. The Spanish-American Homeland, 1990.

Chávez, Angélico. Origins of New Mexico Families, revised 1992 edition, on number and characteristics of men who came with Oñate.

Prince, L. Bradford. Spanish Mission Churches of New Mexico, 1915.

Rivera, José A. and Thomas F. Glick. “1600 - The Iberian Origins of New Mexico’s Community Acequias,” Economic History Congress, 2002.

Scurlock, Dan. From the Rio to the Sierra: An Environmental History of the Middle Rio Grande Basin, 1998.