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.
Chetro Ketl
The Ancestral Puebloans relied on regular rainfall to sustain their agricultural society. This proved challenging in Chaco Canyon, even with consistent precipitation. By 1130, the rains had diminished and the maize crops that the Chacoans depended on had begun to fail, as the region increasingly suffered from the effects of a devastating, fifty-year drought. After a continuous occupation of more than six hundred years, the Chacoans began to migrate from the canyon. Fagan states that by 1140 "Chaco was finished". A study of 12th-century burials in the Gallup, New Mexico, area indicates as many as half of the people who lived during the drought died before the age of eighteen, with sixty percent of all deaths occurring before age thirty-five. The study estimated that for every woman, four children were needed to sustain the agriculture workforce.