Drive northeast out of Red River toward Bitter Creek and you climb into country that once held two gold camps almost nobody remembers. Their names were Midnight and Anchor, and together they lasted about as long as a good pair of boots.
Miners and their families settled Midnight about 1895, high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The mineral database Mindat places the Midnight Mine at the head of Bitter Creek, about five miles northeast of Red River, and lists native gold as its commodity, found alongside pyrite and quartz. A United States Geological Survey catalog of New Mexico placer deposits puts Anchor about six miles northeast of town, with placer gold worked in Bitter Creek itself.
The claims clustered close around the little camp. Five of them are remembered by name: the Midnight, the Memphis, the Caribel, the Edison, and the Anchor. Half a mile east of Midnight sat the second camp, Anchor, which shared the same ground and the same hopes. Anchor never grew to much of a population, and its life was just as brief as its neighbor's.
What the Midnight miners lacked most was equipment. This was hard-rock and placer country worked the slow way, by hand and by stubbornness, and the hard labor brought in just enough gold to keep families fed and the camp alive for roughly three years. That was the pattern across much of the Red River mining district, where geologists describe production as small and activity as sporadic from about 1890 to about 1940.
Two problems finished Midnight. The first was the ore itself: there was not enough free-milling ore, the kind a small camp could crush and process cheaply, to make the work pay. The second was trouble on paper rather than underground, land litigation that clouded who owned what. A camp short on machinery could survive hard rock for a while, but it could not survive hard rock and lawyers at the same time.
The creek, at least, kept its secrets a little longer. The Geological Survey records that Bitter Creek's placers were worked in 1898, right as the camps were fading, and then again in the 1940s, though how much gold came out in that later round was never recorded. Two miles southeast of Anchor lay La Belle, another camp of the same era, so Bitter Creek and its side canyons were for a few years a small constellation of lights in the dark timber.
Today the constellation is out. What remains of Midnight is deserted log cabin ruins in the high country, the logs themselves a reminder that these miners built with the forest around them. Red River moved on to timber, tourism, and eventually skiing, but up Bitter Creek the story is still the oldest one in the valley: gold brought people in fast, and when the gold would not pay, the mountains quietly took the town back.
Planning a Red River getaway? Book your stay at the Claim Jumper A-Frame 6
