Harvesting Historical Riches

Blue Highways to Ancient Roads

In the classic travelogue, Blue Highways: A Journey into America, William Least Heat-Moon describes his 13,000-mile trek across the nation's back roads. He called those roads, printed blue in some atlases, the "blue highways." Eschewing the fast food restaurants, corporate motels, and mass-market retail stores found along the freeways, he piloted his Ford van along the "bent and narrow rural American two-lane."

In the spirit of Blue Highways, the Rocky Mountain Public Broadcasting Network (RMPBN) produced the television program America's Byways, Los Caminos Antiguos (The Ancient Roads). The program takes viewers on a journey off the beaten path and along the 136-mile Los Caminos Antigous Scenic and Historic Byway in Colorado's San Luis Valley. Starting at Cumbres Pass near the New Mexican border, the byway winds through some of Colorado's oldest towns, stops at Fort Garland and the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, and ends in Alamosa. Along the way it acquaints visitors with the people and landscapes that shaped the Valley's past. Among them are prehistoric Indians who lived in the Great Sand Dunes area more than 10,000 years ago, Tewa Puebloan people who believed that humans emerged from the underworld through the San Luis Lakes, and Hispanic farmers who settled in the Valley in the 1840s and 1850s. Tourists can stop at Fort Garland, a U.S. military post built to protect Anglo settlers from Indian attacks, or ride the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad, which crosses the New Mexico-Colorado border eleven times. Supported by a $75,000 grant from the State Historical Fund, the project also included the development of a web site and printed educational materials for teachers and museums.

Unlike brick and mortar preservation projects that evoke a sense of the past through physical structure, the program unites past and present through stories. Historian Virginia McConnell Simmons tells viewers about a Spanish priest named Francisco Torres who traveled to the San Luis Valley with a party of gold-seekers in the 1700s. A group of Indians-they may have been Utes, Apaches, or Navahos-attacked the party, mortally wounding the priest. According to legend, the sun set while Torres died, turning the mountains red. Watching, Torres whispered, "Sangre de Cristo" (Blood of Christ). Today, Coloradans know the mountains as the Sangre de Cristo Range. True or not, the story instills a sense of how culture permeates the San Luis Valley's landscape in viewers who, it is hoped, will follow in the footsteps of the Native Americans, Spanish explorers, and Hispanic settlers along the ancient roads.

Los Camino Antigous is one of twenty-three scenic and historic byways in Colorado. Started in 1989, the state's byways program provides recreational, educational, and economic benefits to tourists through the designation, interpretation, and preservation of a system of auto routes. Each route offers exceptional scenic, cultural, historic, recreational, and natural features. In 1997 the Rocky Mountain Public Broadcasting Network received a State Historical Fund grant to produce its first American Byways program. Highlighting the San Juan Skyway's cultural and scenic attractions, the program won a regional Emmy for best historical documentary. And the Association for State and Local History just announced that the network will receive a Certificate of Commendation for Los Caminos Antigous and San Juan Skyway later this year.

Rocky Mountain Public Broadcasting hopes to usher more tourists onto the blue highways with future American Byways programs. Like Heat-Moon's old van-named "Ghost Dancer" for an 1890s Native American ceremony in which participants asked the Great Spirit to restore their traditional way of life-the programs transport their passengers back in time along ancient roads.

BY BEN FOGELBERG, Editor, Colorado History NOW