This long-awaited book is the most detailed and up-to-date account of the complex history of Pueblo Indian land in New Mexico, beginning in the late seventeenth century and continuing to the present day. The authors have scoured documents and legal decisions to trace the rise of the mysterious Pueblo League between 1700 and 1821 as the basis of Pueblo land under Spanish rule. They have also provided a detailed analysis of Pueblo lands after 1821 to determine how the Pueblos and their non-Indian neighbors reacted to the change from Spanish to Mexican and then to U.S. sovereignty. Characterized by success stories of protection of Pueblo land as well as by centuries of encroachment by non-American Indians on Pueblo lands and resources, this is a uniquely New Mexican history that also reflects issues of indigenous land tenure that vex contested territories all over the world.

Land grant disputes from the nineteenth century have divided and embittered some people for most of the twentieth century. In an attempt to bring final resolution to lingering controversies in New Mexico and throughout the West, in 2000 the U.S. Congress pledged to review disputed claims in the next few years. The Pecos Grant is illustrative of legal and administrative wrangling over land grants. To ensure that a U.S. Senate Committee understood the complexity of the Pecos Grant, New Mexico lawyer and historian Ralph Emerson Twitchell told them in 1923: "There are so many things in connection with this entire business that twenty King Solomons cannot unravel the knot." Yet in this book Hall does sort through the conflicting claims in the over one hundred years of Spanish, Mexican, and American legal maneuvers, legislative stalemates, and private sales involving this 18,000 acre square of land.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.