San Antonio de Senecu

Duane's take

The official marker tells it this way, and I'm just the one passing it along. Out here in El Paso County, the desert has a long memory. And if you slow down and look at this stretch of ground, you are standing at the approximate site of something that goes back to 1682.

A mission and a pueblo. San Antonio de Senecu. Now, 1682 is not a small number.

That is deep time by any measure. And the men who established this place were not passing through. Don Antonio de Otermin and Father Fray Francisco Ayeta, O.F.M., set this mission down right here with a purpose in mind.

A permanent purpose. The Franciscan missionaries who followed maintained what Otermin and Ayeta had started. Their work was directed toward the Piro and Tompiro Indians, the civilizing and Christianizing of those peoples.

That was the stated mission, in every sense of the word. The pueblo rose. The mission stood.

The Franciscans kept at their work. And time, as it tends to do out here in this country, moved on and over all of it. What remains now is the ground itself, holding the memory of 1682, of Otermin, of Ayeta, of the Piro and the Tompiro, and of everything that was built and maintained and then swallowed back into the desert.

Some sites ask you to imagine. This one earns it.

What the marker says

Approximate site of the mission and pueblo. Established by Don Antonio de Otermin and Father Fray Francisco Ayeta, O.F.M. in 1682. Maintained by Franciscan missionaries for the civilizing and Christianizing of the Piro and Tompiro Indians.