Debunks the great tourist myth, and explains how the Santa Fe architectural and design style, so popular with millions of visitors today, was consciously created by Anglos in the early 20th century.

A native resident of Santa Fe discusses the impact of tourism on the City Different and the cultural identity of its Hispanic citizens.

Santa Fe, the City Different, has deeply excited visitors for over a hundred years with its crystal blue skies, Blood of Christ Mountains, pure dry air, old adobe charm, and beautiful light. But this high-desert State capital and artists haven may also be a Land of Lighta premier landscape of multiple sacred sites and heightened spiritual charge. People love this place, they say, for its uplifting, spiritually leavening effect, for how it starts a process of transformation, healing, deep change, and self-reinvention. People revere this place as an axis of creativity, a hotbed of innovation, and a paramount center for recreating culture and spirituality\ capable of inspiring the world. Santa Fe Light explains why. An able travel guide, it takes you to 111 different locations and their Light temples in and around Santa Fe, numinous places usually only encountered in myths or dreams. And it proposes that the observed social qualities of Santa Fe, its livability, might be due to this fabulous visionary geography alluringly just beyond the veil of our ordinary perception.

By the late 1800s, the major mode of transportation for travelers to the Southwest was by rail. In 1878, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway Company (AT&SF) became the first railroad to enter New Mexico, and by the late 1890s it controlled more than half of the track-miles in the Territory. The company wielded tremendous power in New Mexico, and soon made tourism an important facet of its financial enterprise. All Aboard for Santa Fe focuses on the AT&SF's marketing efforts to highlight Santa Fe as an ideal tourism destination. The company marketed the healthful benefits of the area's dry desert air, a strong selling point for eastern city-dwelling tuberculosis sufferers. AT&SF also joined forces with the Fred Harvey Company, owner of numerous hotels and restaurants along the rail line, to promote Santa Fe. Together, they developed materials emphasizing Santa Fe's Indian and Hispanic cultures, promoting artists from the area's art colonies, and created the Indian Detours sightseeing tours. All Aboard for Santa Fe is a comprehensive study of AT&SF's early involvement in the establishment of western tourism and the mystique of Santa Fe.

Anyone who has even a casual acquaintance with the history of New Mexico in the nineteenth century has heard of the Santa Fe Ring—seekers of power and wealth in the post–Civil War period famous for public corruption and for dispossessing land holders. Surprisingly, however, scholars have alluded to the Ring but never really described this shadowy entity, which to this day remains a kind of black hole in New Mexico’s territorial history. David Caffey looks beyond myth and symbol to explore its history. Who were its supposed members, and what did they do to deserve their unsavory reputation? Were their actions illegal or unethical? What were the roles of leading figures like Stephen B. Elkins and Thomas B. Catron? What was their influence on New Mexico’s struggle for statehood? Caffey’s book tells the story of the rise and fall of this remarkably durable alliance.