Back in the early 1900s the high plains of New Mexico were well settled. Small towns were everywhere and every 180 acres had a house on it. People even lived through the droughts of the 1930s.
The drought of the 1950s did them in. We left in 1952 and within a few years most of the towns disappeared or became ghost towns. The small landowners sold out to the larger ranches so there is no where near the number of people there as before.
Some of those folks who went to Santa Fe had earlier lived in Virginia ~ i strongly suspect on ships out in the Bay, and possibly at currently unstudied fishing villages in New Jersey.
When Jamestown was still quite fresh they discovered about 20,000 Europeans living on the Jersey coast. Hardly anyone, not even the Indians, could live in the local drought zone ~ and except for the Spanish mission at Hopewell no one was making records of anything around here.
I suspect those early Santa Fe settlers left diaries regarding life on the East Coast way back when ~ love to find that material ~ but it's probably in Spain.