Gold Rush

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.

Every gold rush runs on two things: gold, and water to wash it free. Around Baldy Mountain in 1867, northern New Mexico had plenty of the first and nowhere near enough of the second. Prospectors who had flocked to the Moreno Valley after the October 1866 gold find on Willow Creek could work their placer claims only while snowmelt and spring rain kept the creeks running. By late spring most gulches dried up, and rich gravel sat idle while miners waited on the weather.

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.

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.

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.

Before the ski lifts and the motorcycles, Red River was River City — a rowdy gold camp perched at 8,750 feet in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Oral history says the town was founded on July 3, 1895, by Colorado miner Edward I. Jones and the Red River City Town and Mineral Company. It took its name from the stream running through it, which turns red with silt after heavy rains.

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.

Long before Red River was a town, the valley belonged to hunters and herders. Utes and Jicarillas chased elk and bighorn sheep across the high meadows, and sheepherders from Questa, Costilla, and Taos grazed their flocks where Main Street runs today. Prospectors drifted through in the 1870s and found the silence of the valley restful — and kept drifting, because the great strikes were all over in Elizabethtown. Then came three French-Canadian trappers with gold pans.

In the fall of 1866, a Ute Indian walked into Fort Union carrying a handful of “pretty rocks” — copper ore — and asked to trade them for winter supplies. The man behind the sutler’s store counter, retired Captain William H. Moore, recognized copper when he saw it and struck a deal to be led to its source. What followed built a town — and then quietly unbuilt it.