The first mountains, ancient beyond imagination, were created so long ago that even the sun forgot it had ever shone upon their birth. They were formed a billion years in the past by a mighty, compressive force that thrust up great blocks of the earth’s crust into a giant east-west mountain range.
In the last paroxysm of mountain building, molten granite magma welled up from subterranean reservoirs deep in the bowels of the earth and intruded, replacing broad zones of the older rocks of the mountains. Hot mineral-bearing solutions and gases were injected into fractures and ruptures in the rock. In rare, isolated locations, copper, silver, and gold precipitated out in rich concentrations.
Finally the mountains ceased growing and rested. For six hundred million years only the rain and snow and the sigh of the wind were upon the face of the huge mountains.
Bit by minute bit, the mountains were eroded away. The high cloud-brushing peaks wore away to low hills. The valleys of the land were invaded by a shallow sea, and the hills became a chain of small islets surrounded by salty brine.
Seventy million years ago, the seas retreated to the south as a tremendous force again crumpled the mantle of the earth. The rocks arched up in gigantic folds with a north-south axis. The force continued to torture the rocks, overturning them to the east. Then one added inch of movement exceeded their strength, and deep faults of unbounded energy sliced through the layers of stone. In places the earth’s crust was lifted upward, in other locations there were down-warping and subsidence. Stupendous rift valleys were formed.
One such rift valley was fifty miles wide and hundreds of miles long. A tall range of mountains bordered it on the side where the sun rose. In the depths of the five-mile-deep chasm, a grand river came to life, fed endlessly by the countless streams pouring down from the mountains. The strong current of the river rushed away to the south until it reached a far-off sea.
Over the aeons the great fault valley began to fill with rubble from the mountains, boulders, and gravel washed down from the highlands. Once a thick lava flow dammed the river, but the prodigious torrent of water hammered a gorge through the tough rock and surged onward.
On the east side of the mountain range a myriad of streams tumbled with awesome violence down from the high ramparts. As the grade flattened on the lower reaches of the streams, they slowed and wandered in meandering courses, dropping their load of eroded mountain debris. The valleys of the streams became choked with swamps and shallow lakes as thousands of cubic miles of sediment were spread in ever-thickening layers for great distances over the land.
The millennia passed, score after score, adding to millions of years. During the long epoch a broad plain formed at the base of the mountain and extended to the east for many hundreds of miles. So flat was the land surface that the larger animals could see each other for great distances, to the limits of their vision.
Twenty million years ago, near the mouth of the grand river of the north, a hungry lizard raced down the bank to capture a fish that was stranded and floundering in a shallow pool of water. The lizard’s tail left a small scratch in the mud. From that tiny scar in the dirt, during the next rainstorm, an incipient streamlet was born.
The rivulet had inherited the hunger of the beast that had created it. Within a foot, the rivulet cut into the course of another trickle of water and beheaded it, adding that miniature flow to its own body. Then it captured another streamlet, and another. Swiftly the rivulet grew to become a creek.
The new creek greedily ate its way north along the base of the tall mountains, encountering the channels of many streams. A battle was fought each time to determine which stream would die. The hungry offspring of the lizard won every battle and survived.
The creek grew to become a river, flowing in a wide, swampy valley. Its headwaters lay on the very summit of a high mountain far to the north. Now there were two large rivers, with a mighty mountain range rearing into the sky between them.
That is the way a tribe of man found the land when they arrived, migrating from a far and distant place in the north. The people liked the land of rivers and mountains, and they stayed, their numbers increasing.
Thirty thousand years later, barely a tick of time as measured on the geologic clock, a second tribe of men arrived, creeping timidly and cautiously up from the south. They also liked the two rivers and the mountains. The men gave them names, the Rio Grande, the Rio Pecos, and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and they settled there with their women and children.
Time ticked away again, and a third tribe of men came hurrying into the land. They came from the east and their numbers were many. They made savage war upon the first two tribes.
The events of this story happened during the days of that war.