El Cuartelejo

The board's 'probably remained here until the 1730s' covers years of pressure. Spanish reports of the 1600s gave the name El Cuartelejo to this Plains Apache village of the High Plains. In 1720 the Villasur expedition stopped here on its way north to learn how far French influence reached, and near the forks of the Platte the Pawnee killed most of its men. French traders reached El Cuartelejo in 1727. Raids by Comanche, Ute and Pawnee wore down the Cuartelejo Apache, and by the 1730s the survivors had moved south to join the Jicarilla Apache at Pecos.

What the plaque says

El Cuartelejo To escape Spanish oppression, a group of Indians from Taos Pueblo left their home in New Mexico and settled in what is today Scott County. Here they lived along- side the Kiowa Apaches with whom they hunted and planted crops from the 1660s to 1680s, when Spanish soldiers came to force them back to their homes. Then Indians from Picuris Pueblo arrived in 1696 to join the Apaches, but in 1706, the Spanish came to escort them back. The Apaches probably remained here until the 1730s and then moved south. They left behind a multi-room pueblo home built of rock and adobe. Inside the pueblo was evidence of ladders used to enter and leave the building from the roof, pottery from the pueblos of the Southwest, and an adobe stand for a stone slab used to grind corn. No other pueblo sites have been located this far north and east. Today the site is within Lake Scott State Park. In 1970 the foundation was rebuilt to appear as it had when discovered in 1898. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and is designated a National Historic Landmark. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Historic Lake Scott State Park — 3.1 mi
  A spring-fed lake in a hidden canyon off U.S. 83, where water seeping out between gravel and chalk drew Apache and Pueblo farmers, a homesteading couple, and finally the state.
• Keystone Gallery — 8.0 mi
  A homesteaders' stone church of 1917 on US-83 above the Smoky Hill valley, rebuilt off the power grid as a fossil museum by a family that has hunted the chalk since 1925.
• Little Jerusalem Badlands State Park — 12 mi
  A maze of Niobrara chalk walls above the Smoky Hill River, once ranch land, now held by The Nature Conservancy for raptors and a buckwheat that grows nowhere else.
• Monument Rocks — 14 mi
  Chalk towers and an arch from the floor of an inland sea, standing beside a county road in Gove County pasture, still losing pieces to weather and still full of nesting cliff swallows.

More markers nearby

• El Cuartelejo — 3.3 mi