"Anyone who has not spent time in Northeastern New Mexico, doesn't know what they're missing. It’s a beautiful place, cool and refreshing, and with a remarkable history. Pure Old West."From hiking and biking in the back country on The Santa Fe Trail, camping under open skys in pristine wilderness, to visiting hot spot volcanic fields, North Eastern New Mexico will be a new and refreshing experience for you and your family.
The history of this area is diverse. The land has been molded by it's geologic history, and by it's people. From Kiowa Indians living off the land, to the development of small towns by rugged settlers, we here at Kiowa Valley Ranch Camp would love to share the area's history with you.
Kiowa Indians
In the early spring of 1790, at the place that would become Las Vegas, New Mexico, a Kiowa party led by war leader, Guikate, made an offer of peace to a Comanche party while both were visiting the home of a mutual friend of both tribes. This led to a later meeting between Guikate and the head chief of the Nokoni Comanches. The two groups made an alliance to share the same hunting grounds and entered into a mutual defense pact. From that time on, the Comanches and Kiowa hunted, traveled, and made war together. An additional group, the Plains Apache (also called Kiowa-Apache), affiliated with the Kiowa at this time.
The Kiowa lived a typical Plains Indian lifestyle. Mostly nomadic, they survived on buffalo meat and gathered vegetables, lived in lodges, and depended on their horses for hunting, eating, and military uses. From their hunting grounds south of the Arkansas River, the Kiowa were notorious for long-distance raids as far west as the Grand Canyon region, south into Mexico, Central America, and north into Canada.
Volcanic Fields
The Raton-Clayton field in New Mexico is one of the best examples of a large volcanic field in the world. Volcanic fields differ from the more popular conception of volcanoes, like Hawaii or Mount St. Helens. Instead of one big volcano, volcanic fields are clusters of many small volcanoes (up to 2 miles across). Volcanic fields are usually 60 or more miles across, and contain tens to several hundred separate volcanoes. Each volcano consists mainly of cinders, spatters, and dark lava flows.
The Raton-Clayton volcanic field (RCVF) is the eastern-most Cenozoic volcanic field in the United States. The town of Clayton publicizes the nearby occurrence of dinosaur tracks at Clayton Lake State Park. The volcanic field covers nearly 7500 square miles of northeastern New Mexico and adjoining Colorado and Oklahoma. The distinctive characteristic of the Raton-Clayton field is its great size, young age, continental interior setting, and possible association with one of the few volcanic hot spots in the world. If you start traveling east, you would not encounter volcanic rocks this young again until the mid-Atlantic ridge. The lava compositions are also somewhat unusual. And it is the site of Capulin Volcano, the eastern-most young and easily accessible volcano in North America.
Content: General Discussion about the Volcanic Field http://www.nmnaturalhistory.org/volcano/raton.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiowa
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