Introduction : Launching Out

Aldo Leopold landed in Casas Grandes, in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, three days before Christmas 1937, just two and half weeks shy of his fifty-first birthday. The flight, his first ever, had taken him over winding streams and arroyos, rocky hills covered with twisted oaks and junipers, and canyons abounding with white-tailed deer and wild turkeys. It brought him into a region once inhabited by great thirteenth-through fifteenth-century Mexican civilizations and several even older ones. Within a short distance of the modern-day Hotel Regis, boasting the local distinction of flushing bathroom fixtures, lay a broad labyrinth of smooth-walled rooms of pink clay, ruins of the sophisticated city of the ancient Pacquime people. Leopold, staying in town for the night, took a black-and-white photograph, documenting that, at least in this moment in the 1930s Casas Grandes, no priests, traders, artisans, or farmers ambled by as in centuries past; only a few men with cowboy hats and a woman in a long, dark coat picked their way along the muddy main street after a recent snowy rain. The throbbing drums and tinkling copper bells of former Mesoamerican religious rituals no longer sounded under the clouded sky. But a horse pulling a wooden buckboard over the rutted road rattled by the flat white fronts of the local grocery store, barbershop, and two cantinas.