Posts

Showing posts from May, 2011

Buster

Image
We live in a funny kind of town. A thousand years ago, the area was dotted with tiny pueblos, home to the descendants of the Anasazi who built the magnificent stone castles up in the Four Corners area. They were followed by the Spanish who settled the extreme northern edge of their country’s North American empire. A hard scrabble life at the end of El Camino Real in a forgotten colony, their dominion lasted until the westward spread of the American Empire engulfed them in a war that saw little change beside their putative government. Around this time my village gained its name - “Corrales” – home to the stockyards food for Albuquerque a few miles to the south. During the American Civil War an expedition from Texas rolled in and rolled out, sent packing by a clever rear guard movement executed by Union volunteers from Colorado. Their supplies destroyed, they had nothing to do but shake the white dust off of their coats and slink back down the road to await their final destruction in 186