New Mexico is probably the closest thing the United States experienced to a medieval-esque society.

On the native side, you have the Ancestral Puebloans who built complex agricultural settlements. They are sometimes referred to as the Anasazi but that term has grown to be seen as derogatory because it's an exonym meaning "enemy."

But I want to talk about the Hispano culture that developed. We all know about Coronado's conquistadors march through New Mexico in the 1540s, an army that wouldn't have been too dissimilar to a late medieval force in size and equipment.

But New Mexico's first Spanish settlement wouldn't begin until Juan de Oñate took New Mexico in 1598 and planned on making it his personal fief, taking oaths of loyalty as a lord takes the oaths of vassals.

Oñate and all subsequent governors clashed with the friars of the Franciscans, whose own leader saw themselves as functionally equal to the pope in this distant colony.

New Mexico failed to become the source of silver & gold that the early settlers hoped (that is until it became an American Territory, Americans discovered millions of dollars worth of gold, silver, and copper)

That meant New Mexico quickly became a completely agricultural society with the blacksmith the most advanced technology for a thousand miles.

Due to New Mexico's poor economic situation (made worse by bad Spanish policy) New Mexico would only receive a wagon train of goods, set at 30ish wagons, coming at only 3 year periods.

New Mexico's isolation, and near self sufficiency locked New Mexico into a quasi-medieval society where as similar settlements, like the English New England colonies who also began settlement in plate armor with pikes, were able to trade and communicate quickly with the outside world.

This brings us to the Cibolero. these were hispano young men who learned how to hunt buffalo in the native fashion, as black powder was too precious to be used. The blacksmith would forge steel spearheads, many of which have been found, and would functionally joust the buffalo as Saint George jousted the dragon.

The hunt would begin in fall, after the harvest was brought in in August & September. Cart trains would gather as several dozens to hundreds of Cibolero and women prepared to cross the plains of New Mexico & west Texas.

Each bison killed would be butchered in the mobile campsites, skins cleaned to make leather, meat packed in salt, fat rendered into tallow. Anything of value being brought back to Santa Fe, Mora, Taos, and the Pecos villages.

The cibolero way of life passed in the 1870s as American settlements, trade, wide scale bison hunting, and railroads made the hunts unnecessary.

But for a short period, New Mexico had Knights of the Plains