NEW MEXICO

Dear Reader,

I lived for a while in the Land of Enchantment. While I’ve also lived or worked in the Land of Steady Habits, the Federal City, the Keystone State, the Lone Star State, and the Green Mountain State, New Mexico has the most appropriate nickname by my way of thinking. It really is enchanting—magical, compelling, crowded with spirits. It’s not just the landscape of red rock canyons and impossibly close sky, of mesquite and cattle skulls and adobe. Enchantment also comes from the powerful relationship that American Indians have had with that landscape.

If you haven’t been to New Mexico before, do this as soon as you can: Book a flight to Albuquerque. Rent a car and steer it north, toward the Jemez Mountains, to Bandelier National Monument. If this 33,000-acre expanse fails to enchant you, well, you’re simply un-enchantable. Park at the monument’s headquarters and gaze up at the red-walled mesa with its holes that look like the work of giant woodpeckers. The Anasazi, ancestors of the Pueblo, lived in these caves. They grew crops along a lush, narrow valley watered by the sweetest trout stream you’ll ever see. Hike up this stream and tell me you don’t hear ancient ghosts in the rustle of alder leaves and murmuring eddies.

We can’t know America’s full story without learning the continuing tale of our native tribes and their long marriage to the land. That’s why we’re proud to adapt part of Frances Kennedy’s American Indian Places: A Historical Guidebook, beginning on page 100. Travel, after all, should be more than just getting somewhere. When you really travel, you fall under the spell of a place. And who better to teach us the magic words than those whose ancestors have lived its story as far as memory can go?

Jay Heinrichs
Editorial Director

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Jay clearly has his state nicknames down pat. But how much do you know about the Bluegrass State, the Empire State, and the Hoosier State? Take this quiz of state nicknames to find out.

In 1987, Louis L’Amour blended Anasazi fact with fiction in his book The Haunted Mesa. You can learn more about the mysterious Anasazi by clicking here.

The Navajo and Hopi favored the Southwest, the Kiowa and Comanche roamed the plains, and Blackfoot and Shoshone settled in the Northwest. Read up on the many American Indian tribes—and learn fragments of history like Chief Joseph’s words of surrender—at this site.

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