Santa Fe, New Mexico: Holy Faith, St. Francis and No Birth Date

Santa Fe means holy faith, and New Mexico’s capital has carried that name for over 400 years, but even its first historians couldn’t find the day it began. What they did find is that the name came with a saint attached, and that the saint’s part was picked out before the town was.

Holy faith, with St. Francis attached

Henry Gannett’s 1905 list of American place names keeps it short: Santa Fe is “A Spanish phrase meaning ‘holy faith.’” The long version depends on which historian you ask. L. Bradford Prince, writing in 1883, gave it as “La Ciudad de la Santa Fe de San Francisco,” which he translated as “the city of the holy faith of St. Francis.” H. H. Bancroft, in 1889, called it “the villa of Santa Fe, or San Francisco de la Santa Fe.” Ralph Emerson Twitchell, in 1911, said the “original and full name” was “Villa Real de Santa Fé de San Francisco.”

Three books, three word orders. All of them put the holy faith and St. Francis together, though, and none of them quotes a founding paper that settles the exact wording. Prince thought a name like that would have suited the Franciscan friars, who ran the missions, but he offered it as a likelihood, not a record.

St. Francis came first

As it turns out, St. Francis had a city waiting for him before Santa Fe existed. When Juan de Oñate brought his colonists up the Rio Grande in 1598, they settled near San Juan Pueblo. Bancroft says that “San Francisco was to be the name of the new city” planned there. Twitchell adds that the settlement “was first called San Francisco de los Españoles” before it became known as San Gabriel.

That city never really got built. Bancroft writes that, after the troubles of Oñate’s years, “it was deemed best to build the new villa on another site.” The new site was Santa Fe, and its long name, in Bancroft’s version, still starts with San Francisco.

A founding nobody dated

Bancroft went looking for Santa Fe’s founding date and came back empty. “I have been able to find no record of the date,” he wrote. He put it somewhere “between 1605 and 1616,” and said the first definite mention came on January 3, 1617, when Santa Fe’s town council asked the king for help with the “nueva poblacion,” the new settlement.

Twitchell leaned earlier. He quoted Fray Alonso de Posadas, a custodian of the missions in the 1660s, who wrote that Oñate “descubriola el año de 1605,” discovered it in 1605, and concluded that the seat of government “appears” to have moved to Santa Fe that year. Don Pedro de Peralta followed Oñate as governor about 1608. So you’ll see 1605 in one account and a ten-year window in another, and none of the books here has a dated founding paper behind it.

Bancroft had less patience for the bigger claims. He wrote that the idea of Santa Fe as “the oldest town in the United States” rested on “imaginary annals” of an Indian pueblo on the spot before the Spanish came, and he poked fun at an 1876 pamphlet that called it “the oldest city in North America.” He even noted a celebration of the “300th (or 350th or 400th, it matters not which)” anniversary of the founding.

Twitchell, for his part, was happy to call it “the oldest capital in the United States.” If you’re keeping score, that’s a different claim from oldest town, and it’s the one he stood behind. The holy faith part of the name, meanwhile, is the one thing none of them ever argued about.

Sources & further reading

• H. H. Bancroft, History of Arizona and New Mexico (1889). “San Francisco was to be the name of the new city” near San Juan (p. 133); the villa founded between 1605 and 1616, “San Francisco de la Santa Fe,” the “oldest town” claim, the 1876 pamphlet and the anniversary joke (p. 158); “no record of the date” and the petition of January 3, 1617 (p. 159).
• L. Bradford Prince, Historical Sketches of New Mexico (1883), p. 168. “La Ciudad de la Santa Fe de San Francisco,” “the city of the holy faith of St. Francis,” and his guess about the Franciscans.
• Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The Leading Facts of New Mexican History, vol. 1 (1911), pp. 332-334. Posadas and the year 1605, the move of the seat of government, “Villa Real de Santa Fé de San Francisco,” and “the oldest capital in the United States.”
• Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The Leading Facts of New Mexican History, vol. 4 (1917), p. 9. San Francisco de los Españoles and San Gabriel, Posadas as custodian in 1660-64, and Peralta as governor about 1608.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). “A Spanish phrase meaning ‘holy faith.’”
• GNIS feature 936823 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Santa Fe, “Capital of State of New Mexico.” See also the story of the state’s own name, New Mexico.