Abo´ 12th century Tompiro Pueblo Indians lived here for 500 years. Hunting game, fishing streams, and gathering plants. In 1622 the Spanish arrived, and built a church. Ruins of the Spanish Empire rise on the mounds of the ancient Pueblo village. Along the canyon walls are petroglyphs and pictographs, the remnants of the Tompiro culture. Franciscan monks tried to Christianize the native people, but in just fifty years they had all disappeared.

Watermelons,canteloupe, plums, mission grapes, and chili sustained the friars and Indians. The locals had already domesticated turkeys, but the Spanish brought cows, sheep, goats, horses and built a corral. Water was supplied from a permanent spring which flowed from the Manzano mountains in the west. The Tompiro captured water in an arroyo with rock dams and catchment basins. They grew corn, beans and squash, and cooked on stone griddles at an open hearth. A Spanish census
recorded 1500 people living at Abo in 1610. Mission San Gregorio de Abo is made of red sandstone found in this arid landscape. It breaks naturally into rectangular building blocks. Every 3 years supplies would arrive by wagon from Mexico City on the Camino Real near the Rio Grande. On the return trip south the wagons were filled with salt from the lakes east of Abo. The Tompiro had always been good at making pottery and supplied nearby Pueblos with their wares. Eventually these two very different cultures, Spanish and Indian, clashed. The missionaries despised the pagan religion and they destroyed the Kachina masks, dances were forbidden, kivas raised. By 1670 drought, famine, disease and attacks by Apaches forced everyone, Spanish and Tompiro alike, to abandon Abo. No one ever returned.