European Settlers

   Since 2006, the Cañada Alamosa Project has been conducting oral history interviews with residents of Monticello Canyon. Thirteen interviews had been recorded and transcribed by the summer of 2010. When the interviews and transcriptions are completed, in 2013, the more than twenty biographical files with accompanying photos, documents, and other materials will be deposited at institutions in Las Cruces (Human Systems Research and New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum), Truth or Consequences (Sierra County Historical Society/Geronimo Springs Museum), and Santa Fe (New Mexico State Archives).

   The goal of the oral history component of the project is to capture and preserve, through interviews with descendants of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and Native American inhabitants of the canyon, recollections, stories, and images of the way life was lived in the canyon from the arrival of people of European descent to the present day.