D
ODGE CITY. TOMBSTONE. DEADWOOD. Cody. Virginia City. Fort Worth. Bodie. Scattered across the map like a spray of buckshot, you’ll find towns and cities pivotal in the settlement and expansion of the American West. They’re fun to visit for the traveler, interesting to explore for the curious, and informative for the history buff. You can walk the streets where cowboys, lawmen, outlaws, miners, gunfighters, mountain men, cavalry soldiers, and other iconic Old West characters walked. Some of these places are ghost towns now. Others linger, with lonesome populations barely hanging on.
HLAUUMA—NORTH
HOUSE—AT
TAOS
Some have been rebuilt and restored to cater to tourists. And some have been overwhelmed by the growth of the modern cities they have become. But there is still one place where life continues much as it did in the days commonly considered the Old West—and for hundreds of years before that time. When explorers under the command of Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado y Luján, searching for the mythical seven cities of gold stumbled upon Taos Pueblo in 1540, the community was already hundreds of years old. Over the years, Spanish soldiers and Catholic priests wormed their way into the lives of Indians throughout the Southwest, often by
PUEBLO
CONTINUOUSLY OCCUPIED FOR A THOUSAND YEARS.
HAS
BEEN
