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Mexico Travel :: The North Mexican States

State of Chihuahua

Chihuahua, the largest state in Mexico, was inhabited in the south by Desert Culture tribes and in the north by the Paquime culture, part of the Mogollan tradition of the American Southwest. Paquime, now called Casas Grandes, was the most highly developed city in Northern Mexico. Its ceremonial plazas, temples and ball courts strongly resemble those found in the Valley of Mexico. Archeologists have found storage rooms filled with turquoise and pens that they think held parrots and macaws from the south. Paquime's development began around AD 1060, when envoys from Central Mexico visited the city and fashioned it into a center for trading ceremonial commodities between north and south. For unknown reasons Paquime began to decline around AD 1261, and after a disastrous fire in 1340, the city was abandoned. Cabeza de Vaca passed through Ciudad Juarez in 1533 or 1534, but it wasn't until 1563 and Francisco de Ibarra's exploration of Nuevo Vizcaya (Durango and Chihuahua) that Spanish settlement began. Rich mines were discovered in the sierra but the Spanish had to battle continuous Indian raids to profit from them. The Jesuits and the Franciscans divided the territory for evangelization, the former taking the sierra and the latter taking the plains, where many were killed by Apaches.

During the 18th century, presidios were built to protect the mines and the huge cattle estates from the Indians. In 1811, after their capture near Monclova, Coahuila, the insurgent revolutionaries, Miguel Hidalgo, Ignacio Allende and Juan Aldama, were taken to Chihuahua, tried and executed by firing squad on the site of the present Palacio del Gobierno. Over the next century Chihuahua was the scene of many foreign invasions and locally bred revolutionary battles. The only time of peace came under the Porfiriato, when the poor were worked to death on the flourishing cattle estates and mines. The US army invaded in 1847, Juarez and his government were chased around the state by French forces from 1864 to 1866, and numerous important battles were fought here during the 1910-20 Revolution, when Pancho Villa made Chihuahua the stronghold of his army. In 1916, Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico and President Wilson sent a punitive expedition under General Pershing to punish the Mexicans. They wandered around the Chihuahuan desert for weeks, unable to find Villa, and finally withdrew. Today, the state is peaceful, although the Wild West tradition endures.

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