Outlaws

Drive south from Red River on the Enchanted Circle, through the Moreno Valley toward Cimarron, and you are crossing Clay Allison country. In the 1870s, Colfax County was Red River's rough backyard, a land of gold camps, big ranches and land-grant feuds, and no name from those years has gathered more stories, true and tall, than Robert Clay Allison.

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.

Eight miles northeast of Red River, up a mountain road that climbs into the hills, lies the ghost town of La Belle. Not much is left but the memory of a boomtown and, if the legends are true, outlaw gold buried somewhere in the hills around it.