Outside of Los Alamos, New Mexico, a small mesa provides not only a beautiful view but also a broad cross-section of the past. Explorers named Deer Trap Mesa after finding a small game pit once used by native hunters.

Thousands of years ago, a volcanic event created the Valles Caldera, and the resulting lava flows solidified into the Pajarito Plateau. The tuff and basalt cliffs form a series of spreading mesas providing the foundations for the city of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Deer Trap Mesa branches off the larger Barranca Mesa, and today a hiking trail provides access for visitors.

Humans have inhabited the mesa for nearly a thousand years. The earliest settlers, Keres-speaking Native Americans, arrived on the plateau three hundred years before Columbus set sail to “discover” the New World. Small groups lived together in caves and stone houses.

A century later Tewa-speakers migrated onto the plateau. This new culture began building much larger communities on top of the mesas, some four stories high with six hundred rooms.

Weather and warfare drove the native people away from the plateau decades before the British began to settle North America. Some traces of both building styles still exist, along with thousands of petrogylphs.

The next settlers to brave the extreme temperatures came at the invitation of the United States Federal Government. Shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, Congress passed the Homestead Act, granting western land to any settlers who would claim it, improve it, and file the inevitable paperwork.

When the railroad reached the plateau in 1887, five Hispanic families claimed land near Deer Trap Mesa. They farmed and struggled against the elements until evicted by the federal government exactly one year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The War Department needed an isolated place to keep a big secret: the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Nuclear Age brought great changes to the once-quiet plateau.

Researched, written, and narrated by Richard Adams, University of West Florida Public History program.

Credits and Sources:

Richard Adams, University of West Florida Public History Program