After the Taos Revolt in 1847, some of residents who had not been involved in it were ready to find a different home. Besides the Revolt, there were other reasons.

First, land for farming and ranching was in shorter supply becoming inadequate for the naturally increasing population, and some also had lost land to aggressive New Mexican landowners. Furthermore, some simply did not to want to live with the new foreign government, especially with its tax system.

Despite the presence of unfriendly nomadic Indians and a shorter growing season, the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant seemed like a good opportunity for relocation, and a few daredevils were desperate enough to test it out in 1847. More began to arrive in 1848.

No settlers had ever attempted this so far north of Taos and Arroyo Honda, although a few false rumors once were bandied about alleging initial attempts in the Culebra area as the 1700s. Actually, when Frémont’s expedition was desperately seeking aid in 1807, the northernmost place to find it was at the Red River, today’s Questa and no others yet existed.

But a quick look at a map of the Sangre de Cristo Grant of 1843 shows that its land included the Rio Costilla, so this area, understandably, was where the first adobe homes, irrigated fields, and range for livestock appeared in 1848. The initial plaza was Plaza de Medio (central plaza) that is today’s Costilla, NM, with satellite plazas nearby. A short distance to the southeast was Plaza de Arriba, with a four-story-high, mud tower for protection for the colonists against Indians coming down Rio Costilla.

Close by on the north was Plaza de Los Manzanares, founded in 1849. Its residents later experienced several changes: They were in Taos County when the new American government created counties in 1852; next they were in Colorado Territory in Costilla County after surveyors adjusted the line along the 47th Parallel; and in the 1870s the plaza’s name became Garcia, CO, when a storekeeper named Garcia became postmaster.

Later in the 1800s, a little farther east, the unincorporated village called Amalia got started on ranchland where a compound of notorious misfits was raided this past summer. Beyond Amalia, a country road jogs to Ventero, NM, and then over the mesa along the old Taos Trail into Colorado’s Upper Culebra villages.

Soon after Costilla was born, other colonists began to move northward on the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant to Culebra Creek, and its tributaries which provided water for plazas, farmland, and rangeland. In 1851 the first of these newcomers were driven out by Ute Indians.   

But determined New Mexicans came back the next year, dug acequias, planted crops, started the constellation of plazas with San Luis in the center and adobe homes upstream and downstream throughout the drainage. They were still in New Mexico Territory and Taos County for a couple more years until they found themselves in Colorado Territory, but as the decades passed, many of the residents still felt more New Mexican than Coloradan for a very long time. Many still seem to.

Ute Indians raiders were the misfits and a menace to anyone hoping to establish homes, while farther south the troublemakers were Apache, Comanche, and Navajo raiders. So, the U.S. Army established military forts, with the post farthest to the north in 1852 being Fort Massachusetts, making the Culebra and Costilla settlers on the land grant a tad safer. That first fort was at a poorly chosen, out-of-the way location on Ute Creek, so in 1858 it was succeeded by the more viable and larger Fort Garland. 

Next came the Civil War, then homesteaders, miners, immigrants, squatters, town builders, urban sprawl, nature lovers, gangs, tokers, LGBTs, and all the rest, good and bad. But today it’s sometimes hard to recognize who are the misfits and who are the good fits unless headliners come along, like murderers, bank robbers, embezzlers, political infiltrators, arsonists, or weirdoes holed up in bunkers.