American Indian Culture and Research Journal

A convenient route to California, water for steam locomotives, and resources for construction to the Pacific dictated late nineteenth-century United States railroad expansion west through New Mexico territory. Land tenure conflicts in New Mexico plagued the Native American people of Laguna Pueblo, and by the 1880s their economy was shifting away from its traditional agrarian base. There is substantial evidence that declining agricultural success forced the people to look outside their traditional structure for subsistence. The arrival of railroading provided a needed outlet for internal economic pressures on the tribe. The appearance of the steam locomotive in the Southwest offered alternative employment; railroads led directly to the departure of many Laguna people to distant regions as wage laborers. After years of warring with tribes that plundered their villages, resisting Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American invaders, and accommodating squatters of all types, the Laguna Pueblo people came under a new pressure: Railroads would now vie for use of their land. In 1866 the Atlantic & Pacific received a federal grant of more than 13 million acres for a rail line between Albuquerque and the Arizona-California border at the Colorado River. Laguna territory lay squarely in the path of railroad surveys favoring a route from Colorado through New Mexico to California along the 35th Parallel.