Lake Scott State Park
Lake Scott State Park is the site of a ruined Taos Pueblo. The Taos arrived in western Kansas in 1664. After having escaped the Spanish colonial rule in New Mexico. They formed an alliance with a group of Plains Apache. The Taos Indians built the protective pueblos and an irrigation system from a nearby spring to water their crops. The settlement, known as El Cuartelejo, was occupied for 20 years before the builders returned to their home territory. The pueblo was reoccupied in 1696 by a group of Picuri Indians. The Picuris were compelled to retreat to their homelands in colonial New Mexico ten years later.
Agriculture in the prehistoric Southwest
Floodplain cultivation was possible under the most extreme conditions. The Sand Papago (Hia C-eḍ O'odham) were mainly hunter-gatherers but practiced floodplain cultivation when it was possible for them to do so. In 1912, ethnographer Carl Lumholtz found small cultivated fields primarily of Tepary beans in the Pinacate Peaks area of Sonora. In the Pinacate, with an average annual precipitation of three inches (75mm) and temperatures up to 118F (48C), Papago and Mexican farmers utilized runoff from sparse rains to grow crops. In the 1980s author Gary Paul Nabhan visited this area, and found one farm family taking advantage of the first large rain in six years, planting seeds in the wet ground and harvesting a crop two months later. The most successful crops were Tepary beans and a drought-adapted squash. Nabhan calculated that the Pinacate is the most arid area in the world where rain-fed agriculture is practiced.