COLUMN ONE : This Land ‘Belonged to All of Us’ : A timber baron shut out descendants of Colorado’s Mexican settlers from the mountains they loved. Now, the state is trying to turn the area into a park and preserve an endangered heritage.

In 1960--a year bitterly remembered in this southeastern Colorado farming community--North Carolina timber baron Jack T. Taylor bought a 77,500-acre tract in the nearby Sangre de Cristo Mountains, fenced it and hired gunmen to keep local residents out.

To the Latino subsistence farmers and ranchers of the San Luis Valley, it was an assault on their traditions, their culture, on the survival of their very community.

As descendants of Colorado’s first Mexican settlers, they had survived for nearly 150 years in a special relationship with the towering mountains they call La Sierra. They believed their rights to share La Sierra’s bounty--its game, pasturelands and even firewood--were guaranteed under an 1844 Mexican land grant later ratified by Congress.

So they fought back. But they were beaten in the courts, and barred from the mountain range by Taylor’s hired hands.

As battle after battle was lost over the last three decades, the people of San Luis watched their numbers dwindle by half to 900.

Now, they have hope. The state is stepping in with a proposal to buy the land from Taylor’s heirs, restore the local community’s historic rights and, at the same time, create a public wilderness park among the range’s 14,000-foot peaks.

If the plan succeeds, it would be one of the first efforts to preserve unique cultures seen as endangered. It could also be a spur to the nascent national movement that holds that America’s distinct societies, steadily eroding under outside pressure, are as worthy of protection as the land they live on and the wildlife it supports.

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As the sun peeked over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Joe Gallegos emerged from the house built for his great-grandmother and girded himself for the struggle of cutting cattle from his herd to take to market.

Nine years ago, this pastoral life lured him from a lucrative job as an oil-drilling engineer in Africa back to the family homestead just below La Sierra’s western flanks.

“You won’t get rich here,” shrugged Gallegos, 38, a rangy pony-tailed cowboy who took charge of the 1,600-acre family farm and ranch believed to be the oldest in Colorado. “But you’ll never starve.”

Gallegos is among the descendants of settlers sent north by Mexico in the 1840s to counter the westward expansion of the United States. Here, his ancestors adapted to life in a remote, high-altitude valley with short growing seasons and annual rainfall of nine inches. It is still a place where people speak a peculiar blend of Spanish and English. There are autos and tractors, and even a few solar heating systems and satellite dishes. But many families use outdoor dome-shaped adobe ovens called ornos to smoke strains of corn developed in Mexico thousands of years ago. A few ascribe to a secretive religious group known as the Brotherhood of Penitents, which evolved out of a shortage of Catholic priests when the original settlers anchored the northernmost reaches of what was then Mexico.

At the root of their dispute with Taylor were opposing views of land rights. The Latino residents believed--in old Mexican land grant tradition--that the land protected them and they protected it. While one person or company could hold title to the entire region, local people still had rights to live on that land.

They still share a 644-acre commons pasture called the Vega--the last vestige of a million-acre grant awarded by Department of New Mexico Gov. Manuel Armijo in 1844 on behalf of the Republic of Mexico.

But barred from grazing their cattle and sheep in the highlands, San Luis watched half of its farming families sell their livestock and move away.

Among those too stubborn to let go is activist Maria Valdez, 44, who lives on a 23-acre farm with her husband and five children and is working on a Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque.

“Land, water and language keep a culture alive--a culture that loses those things can only be read about in books,” Valdez said while preparing a dinner of sauteed elk and home-grown potatoes over a wood stove. “Yet, Jack Taylor is holding this community hostage from the grave, all because he couldn’t understand our bond to the land.”

The Valdez family counts itself among a new generation inspired by the fierce rhetoric of respected viejitos , or elders, such as Apolinar Rael, who died in July at age 93.

“Before he passed away, my father said, ‘Don’t give up! It’s taken 33 years to get this far, and if it takes another 33 years, do it!’ ” recalled Rael’s daughter Gloria Maestras, 60. “My dad always said that Jack Taylor thought he was dealing with a bunch of idiots--Taylor was wrong.”

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When Taylor bought the mountain ranch, he turned it into an encampment bristling with weapons aimed at teaching residents a stern lesson. This land is now private. Keep out.

The feud exploded into violence on a cold November day in 1961, when Taylor’s men severely beat three young Latinos suspected of setting fire to a trailer on the ranch, tossed them into the back of a pickup truck and drove them to the sheriff’s office in San Luis.

“It was 20 degrees below zero that day and the local boys were heaped in the bed of the truck like sheep carcasses,” recalled former San Luis Mayor Joe Espinoza, 82, shaking his head. “It was pitiful.”

Taylor and his men were taken into custody for their own protection, Espinoza said, as 200 angry residents converged at the jail, wanting to lynch them.

In 1965, Taylor won a court fight clearing his deed of any language that could allow access by the San Luis community to his ranch.

Shootouts, mysterious fires, vandalism and cattle rustling persisted in and around the ranch until 1975, when a bullet ripped through the roof of Taylor’s home and shattered his left ankle.

No one was arrested in the shooting. But an attorney for the lumberman--who wore a bullet-proof vest and carried a gun in his truck at all times--asked then-Gov. Stephen McNichols to call out the National Guard to protect his client’s life. When McNichols refused, Taylor moved back to North Carolina.

More than 150 residents calling themselves the Land Rights Council filed a class-action lawsuit in 1981, arguing that land grant heirs were denied due process in the 1965 trial. The case is before the state Supreme Court.

If the residents win, they will be allowed to renew a legal dispute that could open a Pandora’s box of questions regarding the validity of already-settled land grant disputes throughout the Southwest, according to Denver attorney Jeff Goldstein, who represents the council on a pro bono basis.

The battle has put a cloud over the ranch’s future, which otherwise could be prime property for mining and timber operations, ski resorts and subdivisions.

Taylor died in 1988. His son Zachary, executor of the estate, could not be reached for comment. But the family’s Denver attorney, Albert B. Wolf, said: “If the state is willing to pay a fair price for the property, and the Taylor family is willing to sell, that would be a fair solution.”

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When Taylor died, he left his heirs with hefty estate taxes, and a desire to sell the ranch. They have offered it to the state for about $30 million if a private offer falls through before Dec. 15.

Gov. Roy Romer has appointed a commission to study the possibility of raising the funds through public and private donations, along with proceeds of the Colorado lottery, which voters have decided may be used for acquisition and maintenance of state parks.

The state’s effort to preserve the San Luis Valley culture could serve as a model for settling some of the dozen other Mexican and Spanish land grant disputes in Colorado and New Mexico, officials said.

“Our plan has the potential to strengthen the historic agricultural and cultural activities of the community of San Luis Valley,” said Ken Salazar, executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and chairman of Romer’s land grant commission. He said it also would “create benefits for people in the state and around the world.”

Marianne Stoller, a historian at Colorado College who was raised in the San Luis Valley, agreed: “The state’s solution, which would be unique in the United States, should be considered very carefully. Cultural conservation is a new idea whose time has come.”

Saving this culture and others from extinction also means preserving lands cherished for their “intrinsic spiritual or cultural qualities, aside from their economic value,” said Maria Montoya, assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

“If we look at the Native American tribes of the Great Plains or the Hispanic cultures of southern Colorado,” Montoya said, “we realize that in some ways they are more environmentally friendly to their landscape than 20th-Century urban dwellers and corporations who view land as a commodity.”

Hawaii already is working on a similar preservation effort. The state is developing a “living cultural park” for native Hawaiians in a lush, 5,000-acre valley on the island of Oahu. Earlier plans to evict residents and build a commercial, tourist theme park were scrapped after public outcry. Instead, Kahana Valley State Park is seen as a place where 31 families can bring their traditions back to life and teach residents about Hawaii’s heritage.

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Ernest Valdez, 65, remembers when fences were alien to the mountains that dominate the San Luis Valley near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

“The mountains belonged to all of us before (Taylor) came and bought them and took our rights away,” said Valdez, whose fields have been producing beans, corn and potatoes for his family since the late 1800s.

“I’m old, but the younger generation is strong and educated, and they will keep fighting for our rights,” he said. “It’s all up to them.”

“It’s up to us,” agreed rancher Joe Gallegos, saddling a horse beside a small adobe house on the ranch in which his father was born. “No one owns this land. It’s God’s. We just take care of it.”

His father, Corpus Gallegos, 73, smiled and added: “I always told my children to keep fighting for what is right. There’s no place in this valley for a quitter.”