Dulce Truths

Greg Strandberg Dulce Truths

Prelude — The Entrance

The Jicarilla Indian Reservation near Dulce, New Mexico

August 9, 1947

Noro continues up the trail, finally coming to its rocky top. He stands there on the ridge, surveying the vast Archuleta Mesa. It’s a rocky landscape, with scrub bushes here and there, sometimes a patch of juniper trees, but mostly jagged rocks the color of burnt orange. It was the land Noro had called home for all his 62 years. He was a Jicarilla Apache Indian, with hair still long and still quite black. It blew in the wind, though the yellow bandana tied around his forehead kept the hair out of his eyes. He’d surveyed his homeland many times, but for the others with him it was new ground. Noro stood waiting for those others to come up behind him. Colonel Harry Anderholt was first.

“There it is,” Noro says, putting his arm up to point out the area.

“Where?” Anderholt says.

“There… by those large boulders… you can’t see it from here, but once you get there you’ll be able to walk behind them.”

“And that’s where the entrance is?”

Noro nods but continues to look out at the rocks in the distance. “The bones mark it, bones that’ve been sitting there for 60 years… ever since we came to this land.” He looks back to Anderholt. “We Jicarilla know enough to stay away from that place, you should too.”

Anderholt puts his arm up. “Lead on.”

Noro was expecting such a response, and simply turns back around and starts down the trail. His mind starts down the trail of memories.

The Jicarilla Apache called Dulce home, had for nearly a hundred years. The tribe spoke the Southern Athabaskan language, though the name ‘Jicarilla’ was actually Mexican Spanish, meaning “little basket.” Hundreds of years ago they’d been located in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, in what would eventually become the state of Colorado. Beginning around the year 1525, however, they began to branch out into the Great Plains. For about 175 years they lived the life of plains Indians, riding their horses and hunting the buffalo, until the eastern tribes were pushed ever westward by the whites and their expansions inland. The Jicarilla were pushed south into the less-hospitable lands surrounding the Archuleta Mesa, an area that’d eventually become part of New Mexico. Years of smallpox and tuberculosis followed and the tribe was decimated. Then in 1887 they were given their reservation and 20 years after that they were allowed to expand into the lush San Juan Basin. Finally, things began to look up for the tribe. It didn’t last long.

By 1920 most of the tribal members were suffering from either malnutrition or tuberculosis. It was widely believed that the tribe would go extinct. To make matters worse, the reliable pastime of sheepherding fell on hard times. Many tribal members gave up on the land and moved to town. The closest was Dulce, which at that point had but a few hundred people. The Gomez family had started the place as a ranching stronghold in 1877, naming it “Agua Dulce”, Spanish for “sweet water.” A natural spring ran through the area, giving the people and the animals a reliable source of drinking water in the parched land. Then WWII came, taking a few of the Indians and town folk as recruits. For the most part the war had little impact on that corner of the country, though the area was eyed for its resource potential. That’s how things got started — with lumber.

The Jicarilla had been looking for some lumber to help them build their homes, for while the government might have allowed for a reservation back in the 1880s, it sure didn’t allow for much funding to help get it up and running. So the Indians relied on themselves, and the land around them, just as they had for centuries. That’s how a small group of them chanced upon the cave. Their bones were still there.

The Jicarilla had told the government, but the government hadn’t cared. Something mysterious killing Indians? Why, that’ll just make our job easier! Noro imagines that was the response in whatever department in Washington was in charge back then. No, the government hadn’t been interested then, but they were sure interested now. All the flying craft that’d been seen in the area lately had a lot to do with that. Just the month before, Noro knew, one of those craft had crashed 300 miles to the south of them, in a sleepy little town called Roswell. Noro wasn’t sure what had happened with that crash exactly, but ever since then there’d been more and more government and military types poking around the reservation near Dulce.

One of those military types was Colonel Anderholt.