Sheep in Hispanic New Mexico

Sources

Spain’s Search for Wealth . Spain’s far northern frontier in North America had few commodities to offer the outside world. The Spanish search for gold had failed, but for religious and military reasons the Spanish Empire still maintained the colony of New Mexico. In the first half of the nineteenth century small-scale irrigated agriculture and livestock formed the basis of the economy. Although residents bred and used cattle and horses, sheep became the dominant domesticated animal in the region. Unlike some sheep breeds, the small churros, which were more valuable for meat than wool, survived in the harsh, arid environment of New Mexico.

Churros . With the arrival of Juan de Onate and his party of colonists in 1598, sheep became a part of the New Mexican economy. When the Pueblo Indians revolted in 1680, they ejected the Spanish and their religion but kept their sheep. At the end of the 1700s, a century after the Spanish reconquered the colony, sheep raising had developed into a major regional industry. Though New Mexico remained peripheral to the rest of New Spain, it helped feed the communities centered around the valuable silver mines of north-central Mexico. Hispanics of the northern Rio Grande started herding flocks of sheep southward into Chihuahua, Mexico, along a well-established route that connected the colony to the rest of the Spanish Empire. In 1803 perhaps as many as twenty-five thousand churros were driven south. The numbers exported from New Mexico fluctuated in the following years, but sheep remained important to the region’s economy.

The Partido System . In the early nineteenth century the New Mexican sheep industry benefited the wealthier colonists. New Mexicans had developed the partido system in the mid eighteenth century. Under this system an owner of a flock lent a specific quantity of sheep to an individual and expected an equal number to be returned in three to five years. Each year the renter paid around 20 percent of the flock to the owner. If the sheep reproduced in sufficient numbers, the system worked well for both parties. The owners received annual payments while someone else watched over his livestock. The renter could build his own flock and eventually lend out some sheep of his own. Such arrangements in a cash-poor province functioned as a transfer of capital, but if the flock did not reproduce as planned, the renter remained in debt to the owner. Although the partido system resulted in economic opportunity for some, it worked to the advantage of the rich.

Ricos. By the early 1800s sheep were the most important asset of nearly all well-off New Mexicans. Moreover, a small cadre of families dominated the export trade. In 1835, when herders sent eighty thousand sheep south, a single family—the Chavez brothers—possessed almost half of these animals. The ricos, economic elites, dominated the New Mexican economy through much of the early nineteenth century.

Josiah Gregg Describes the New Mexican Sheep Industry

The American merchant Josiah Gregg participated in the trade along the Santa Fe Trail in the 1830s. In 1844 he published his famous book, Commerce of the Prairies. In his chapter titled “Domestic Animals” he describes the importance of sheep in the economy of Hispanic New Mexico: “Sheep may be reckoned the staple production of New Mexico, and the principle article of exportation.. .. This trade has constituted profitable business to some of the ricos of the country. They would buy sheep of the poor rancheros at from fifty to seventy-five cents per head, and sell them at from one to two hundred per cent advance in southern markets.. .. The sheep of New Mexico are exceedingly small, with very coarse wool, and scarcely fit for anything else than mutton, for which, indeed, they are justly celebrated.. .. The flesh of the sheep is to the New Mexicans what that of the hog is to the people of our Western States—while pork is but seldom met with in northern Mexico.”

Source: Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies: A Selection (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), pp. 62–63.

Village Economies. Despite the wealth of the ricos and the larger economy of the sheep trade, villagers on the local level lived a more communal existence. In northern Hispanic settlements such as Las Trampas, certain social values discouraged an individual who was not a rico from profiting at an endeavor that hurt others. Also, most sheep grazed on communal pastures called ejidos. Though these villagers were poor by later standards, and divisions of wealth existed, few people starved because community members took care of each other in times of dearth. Northern New Mexico village economies remained largely self-sufficient; these Spanishspeaking villagers had only limited contact with the outside market until the last decades of the nineteenth century.

The Sheep Trade . The sheep trade south along the Rio Grande continued until 1846—the year the United States acquired New Mexico. After the California Gold Rush began in 1848, Hispanics sent thousands of churros to miners further west. Anglos intruded on this enterprise and began shipping their own flocks from New Mexico. However, in the early 1850s the profitability of the commerce diminished, although the Hispanic herders continued moving their stock to California for another five years. Still, sheep remained a fundamental part of the economy of northern New Mexico. The second half of the century witnessed improvements in breeding due to the expanding market in wool.

Overgrazing. The actual number of sheep in New Mexico during any given year remains in dispute. By the 1820s as many as two million of these woolly animals roamed the region. The dramatic nineteenth-century increase in sheep proved hard on the New Mexican range. Overgrazing had long been a part of the sheep industry, and it was particularly bad in long-settled areas. When sheep nibbled away pastures near the Rio Grande, New Mexicans pushed their flocks outward from the river. Still, overgrazing in the first half of the nineteenth century paled in comparison to the damage inflicted later because in the early 1800s the New Mexican economy remained relatively isolated, despite the Chihuahuan trade. With the arrival of the Anglo-American market, and with the villagers’ growing participation in the cash economy, the number of livestock skyrocketed. Cattle also arrived in larger numbers. Overgrazing in New Mexico became a hotly debated issue that persists to this day.

Sources

John O. Baxter, Las Carneradas: Sheep Trade in New Mexico, 1700–1860 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987);

William DeBuys, Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985).