Every gold rush has the miners who swing the picks, and then it has the man who owns the ground under their boots. For the rush that swept the mountains around Baldy Peak and Elizabethtown, at the edge of Red River's own mining country, that man was Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell, once the largest private landowner in United States history.
Maxwell was born on September 14, 1818, at Kaskaskia, in Illinois Territory, the son of an Irish immigrant father and Odile Menard, whose father Pierre Menard became the first lieutenant governor of Illinois. He learned the fur trade from his grandfather, left home at fifteen, and after two years at a Vincentian college in Missouri struck out west at seventeen. On the frontier he met and befriended Kit Carson, and in 1841 both men signed on with John C. Fremont's western expeditions, Carson as guide and Maxwell as chief hunter.
In 1844 Maxwell reached Taos, then still part of Mexico, and married Maria de la Luz Beaubien, daughter of Carlos Beaubien. The year before, Beaubien and his partner Guadalupe Miranda had received a land grant of about a million acres in northeastern New Mexico. In 1849, after the Mexican-American War, Maxwell and Carson settled on the Rayado River along the Santa Fe Trail, where Maxwell built a large house. A year later he moved on to Cimarron and built a large adobe mansion famous for lavish hospitality, and he made money supplying beef and other goods to the soldiers at Fort Union.
Piece by piece, the whole grant became his. In 1858 Miranda, still in Mexico, sold Maxwell his share for 2,745 dollars. After Beaubien died in 1864, Maxwell acquired much of the rest, and his holdings peaked at 1,714,765 acres, an empire remembered simply as the Maxwell Land Grant. Then, at the end of the Civil War, gold was discovered on his property at Baldy Mountain. Maxwell did not need to pan a single creek himself. He leased land to the miners pouring in and sold them the supplies they needed, growing richer with every claim staked around Elizabethtown and Baldy Town.
In 1870, not yet ready to spend the rest of his life running an empire, Maxwell sold most of the land for 1,350,000 dollars to a British company, which incorporated it as the Maxwell Land Grant and Railway Company. He moved to Fort Sumner, which he had purchased from the government in 1869 after the army abandoned it, and renovated the former officers' quarters into a handsome house around a courtyard. He died there on July 25, 1875, aged fifty-six.
His name outlived him in the land fight that followed. The new owners' attempts to evict settlers sparked the Colfax County War, and litigation over the grant's title ran until 1887, when the United States Supreme Court approved a clear title. Six years after Maxwell's death, in 1881, Pat Garrett killed Billy the Kid at the Fort Sumner house, by then owned by Maxwell's son Pete. The miner, the land baron, and the outlaw all belong to the same northern New Mexico story, and it starts with the ground Maxwell owned.
Planning a Red River getaway? Book your stay at the Claim Jumper A-Frame 6
