Over the last thousand years the Cerrillos Hills, with its tricultural heritage, have held an unusually important place in the history of the American Southwest. The Cerrillos Hills turquoise and lead deposits played a central role in the commerce and economy of the prehistoric Indians of the greater Rio Grande Valley, and it is probable that these mineral deposits influenced the early Spanish explorations and settlement of New Mexico.

The layers of lifeways in these hills, from pre-Columbian shrines, excavations and stone tools to Spanish-American and Anglo-American recreation, ranching, and commerce, give us our identity, define our cultural character, and constitute our heritage. To see and touch the mines that were dug by prospectors a hundred years ago, the stumps of the trees they cut for firewood and shoring, and the sites of their tents and the walls of their shelters is far more meaningful and memorable than simply reading about it in a book. The Cerrillos Hills Historic Park brings us into real contact with our real history.

Pottery sherds found in the Cerrillos Hills date the use of the mineral resources from about AD 900, and the Hills are the source of much of the lead that was used for glaze paint by Rio Grande Pueblo potters between AD 1300 and 1700. Analysis of the sherds in the Cerrillos Hills indicated a large portion of them came from the nearby San Marcos Pueblo, which between the middle 1300s and the middle 1400s was the major center of pottery-making in the upper Middle Rio Grande Valley. Archaeological sites present today and associated with the Puebloan mining activities in the Hills include turquoise pits, quarries, lead or galena mines, refining areas, workshops, hearths, campsites, and sherd areas. The Mina del Tiro, on private property adjacent to the CHHP lands, is perhaps one of the most ancient and longest-worked galena lode mines in the New World.

There are numerous sites on the Park lands that are registered with the Museum of New Mexico's Laboratory of Anthropology, including three prehistoric stone rings and a petroglyph at the summit of Grand Central Mountain.

The arrival of the Spanish with the Coronado entrada of 1540-42 certainly passed within a few miles of the Cerrillos Hills, but for whatever reason -- the Indians of the Galisteo Basin had suffered recent depredations by Teya or other raiders from the Plains and were particularly wary of these newcomers, or possibly the mines at the time were temporarily closed down -- the Puebloans were reluctant to disclose the location of the mines. In any event, the Spanish quested for gold and disdained turquoise, not a formula that would recommend the resources of the Hills to them.

Subsequent entradas in the 1580s and 1590s were successful in visiting the Cerrillos Hills and obtaining ore specimens for assay. In 1591, Captain Gaspár Castaño de Sosa visited many of the region's pueblos. He gave several of the pueblos the Spanish names by which we know them today, including "San Marcos where the mines had been discovered". While de Sosa went on to visit other pueblos a portion of his party remained for 17 days at San Marcos. They prospected and "...made many tests which showed silver..."

In the mid 1600s a cattle ranch was established south of the Santa Fe River near Alamo Creek and the nearby hills were given the name Los Cerrillos. In 1695, Governor Vargas appointed a mayor for El Real de los Cerrillos which qualifies it as the oldest Western mining settlement for which we have a clear record. El Real de los Cerrillos was abandoned and probably destroyed during the revolt of 1696.

Some time after the Reconquista, perhaps about 1700, the Rio Grande potters ceased to make glaze-decorated pottery, and presumably the mining of lead ore by the Puebloans ceased at the same time. However, Puebloan turquoise mining in the Cerrillos Hills continued into the twentieth century, with historical records showing inhabitants of Santo Domingo, Cochiti, San Felipe, and San Ildefonso all making use of the mines.

Spanish activities in the Cerrillos Hills during the first hundred years are poorly documented. Spanish mining laws were strict, so whatever mining was carried out by the Spanish colonists was probably done without the benefit of official sanction and concomitant records. It was only as recently as 1970 that the archaeological evidence confirming 17th century Spanish mining and smelting in the Cerrillos Hills was discovered by George O. Bachman, USGS.

Late in 1879 there was a mining boom in the Cerrillos Hills fueled by an influx of "Anglo" miners -- a probable misnomer; the details of the ethnic makeup of these miners will be reported here in the future -- many of them escaping from the labor unrest and strikes of Leadville, Colorado. The Cerrillos Mining District was formed and in a very short time over 1,000 claims were registered. [A mining claim was customarily 1,500 feet (457.2 meters) along the lode vein and 150 feet (45.7 meters) on either side of it.] Many towns sprang up in the Cerrillos Hills area, one of the first called Dimmick's Camp, later known as Carbonateville (and possibly Turquoise City, which alternatively may be nearby). Carbonateville, named for the putative nearby lode of silver carbonate, has left its mark in history in that Territorial Governor (and sometimes mine-owner) Lew Wallace was resident at the Carbonateville Hotel while he worked on the galley proofs of his Biblical epic "Ben Hur".

The Village of Cerrillos was established in 1879 as a tent camp between the lead and silver of the Cerrillos Hills to the north and the coal of Madrid and the gold of Placer and Ortiz Mountains to the south. It flourished as a natural point of access to both areas, but it was the arrival of the railroad in 1880 that assured the fate of the Village of Cerrillos would be different than that of Carbonateville.

A few of the mines survived into the 20^th century. The American Turquoise Company, an agency of Tiffany, New York, was active around the turn of the century, especially at Turquoise Hill on the north side of the Cerrillos. World War I breathed additional life (ironically) into several lead-zinc-manganese-silver operations, most notably the Cash Entry and the Tom Paine mines. The Depression of the 1930s saw the end of production mining, and with the exception of some minor starts related to World War II and the frenzy for consumer products that followed it -- the Tom Paine reopened for a while -- the activity in the Cerrillos Hills has since that time been classified as "hobby mining".

In the middle 1970s the now defunct Occidental Minerals Corporation (Oxymin) pursued the creation of a large-scale acid-leach copper mine in the Cerrillos Hills but was unable to convince the State Environment Department that their proposed mine could be operated without polluting the ground water, and the project was terminated. Community disapproval, difficulty securing water rights, and the price of copper were also factors in this decision. Outside of but adjacent to the lands of the Cerrillos Hills Historic Park there is a present-day gravel mining operation on the same site as the January 1977 Oxymin underground test detonation. This mine is currently (mid 2003) not in operation.

The Cerrillos Mining District is listed on the New Mexico State Register of Cultural Properties and also is included in the US Department of Interior's Historic American Buildings Survey. Fayette Jones, Director of the New Mexico Bureau of Mines, said of the Cerrillos Mining District in 1905, "From a historical standpoint, no section in the United States is possessed of so much interest".