Red River Tales

A mining camp needs saloons and stamp mills. A town of families needs a school. That difference is written into one small building in Red River, the Little Red Schoolhouse, built in 1915 and used as a school until 1942, according to the town history at redriver.org. It is one of the town properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places, entered on February 23, 1984 as part of the Red River Multiple Resource Area.

High on the eastern slope of Baldy Peak, at more than 10,000 feet in Colfax County, sat one of the richest small gold mines in New Mexico history. The Aztec Mine, on the Maxwell Land Grant, did not begin as a gold mine at all. It began with copper, and a chance conversation at Fort Union.

Some historic places ask you to look through glass. The Red River Community House, at 116 East Main Street, asks you to come in, join in, and stay a while. That invitation is not new. It is more than eighty years old, and it is still being renewed every week by the families who walk through the door.

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.

Follow the Enchanted Circle Scenic Byway around its 84-mile loop of the high Sangre de Cristos and you will pass through some of the most storied ground in northern New Mexico. Few travelers realize that at one stop on that loop, the whole town is standing on a ghost town.

The Rio Grande cutthroat trout wears its name on its throat — the slash of red beneath the gills that marks every cutthroat — and it carries another distinction: it is the southernmost cutthroat subspecies on earth, native only to the headwater streams of the Rio Grande, Canadian, and Pecos basins of New Mexico and southern Colorado. It is also New Mexico's state fish. And for most of the twentieth century, it was losing its home.

Every mountain town has a room where the night comes together — and in Red River, for generations, that room has been the Motherlode. At 406 Main Street, the saloon with the big stage, the big dance floor, the pool tables in the back, and the front porch for watching the evening go by has been the town's honky-tonk through every era of its modern life.

In 1869, the brand-new Colfax County made the gold-rush boomtown of Elizabethtown its first county seat — a town that had been New Mexico's first incorporated municipality, founded three years earlier by Captain William H. Moore. The county seat would move to Cimarron in 1872, but the land war that followed it would rage for another decade and a half, and it would reach right to Red River's doorstep.

It looms over the Enchanted Circle at 13,167 feet — the highest natural point in New Mexico, the rooftop of the state, visible from Red River, Eagle Nest, and Taos alike. For most of its known history it was called Taos Peak, after the town to its west. Then, in 1950, it was renamed for a man who never lived in New Mexico but mapped it: Major George Montague Wheeler.

Ask most people about the Red River gold rush and they'll name Elizabethtown, the great Baldy Mountain camp that drew thousands in 1866. But the gold didn't stop at E-Town. In the narrow, heavily forested valleys around Red River itself — along Bitter Creek, Placer Creek, Gold Hill, and the little camps of Anchor and La Belle — a quieter generation of miners worked smaller placers for decades, and their story survived in government surveys and, remarkably, in the ground itself.