De Dos Del Nortes - of Two Del Nortes
Copyright© 2026 by Zanski
Chapter 1. El Agua: El Rio Bravo Del Norte
In the beginning, it was the water, the source of all life. Life for the pecan and piñon trees, for the agave and the oaks, for the mesquite and persimmons, as well as for the buffalo grass, sedge, and rushes. The water gave life to the origin myths of the people themselves. It was the water that brought those prehistoric peoples to the Rio and its tributaries.
Those ancient people unwittingly built practical temples to that water: unintended presbytery called, by later inhabitants, trinchera — the aggregate complex of irrigation canals that carried the life-giving water to the fertile — but arid – soil. The soil, in turn, passed that life to the maiz, calabaza, y frijoles (corn, squash, and beans) which promised life to those ancestral Puebloans. Those were the mythical people whom the Dine’ (dih-NEH), “the people,” known later as the Navajo, called Anasazi, “the ancestors of our enemy.”
Among three closely-related ancestral Puebloan (PWEB-low-an) groups, the Rio was called by different names. It was Paslapaane (Big River) in the Tiwa pueblos, among the Towa speakers it was known as Hañapakwa (Great Waters), and P’osoge (Big River) in the Tewa villages. The Dine’, in later turn, called it To Ba’aadi (Female River) because streams flowing south were considered female.
In contrast to the native peoples’ concept of the Rio as life-giver, the earliest European colonizers saw the Rio and its valley as a gateway, a portal to wealth, the pathway to El Dorado, the fabled City of Gold, reported to be “in the north.”
The Europeans had their own names for the Great River. They called it El Rio Bravo Del Norte — “the Fierce River of the North” — and a variant, El Rio Grande Del Norte (Ree-oh GRAHN-deh dell NOHR-teh), “the Great River of the North,” or simply Rio Grande, and later the Rio Grande River, a redundancy favored by many Anglos.
By any name, it was a great and untamed river, its nineteen hundred miles making it the fourth longest water course on the continent.
From its origin in the San Juan range of the Rocky Mountains, in what was later known as Colorado, the Rio Grande gathered its headwaters from the snow-packed slopes of fourteen-thousand foot peaks along the Great Divide. Thence began a journey to the Gulf of Mexico, many hundreds of leagues to the southeast.
From its birthplace in the alpine tundra, the young Rio wove east and south through mountain canyons, marking the foot of forested slopes, joining with its South Fork just before spilling into Colorado’s expansive El Valle de San Luis (ell VAH-yeh deh SAHN loo-EES) — the San Luis Valley — where it turned directly south for several hundred miles.