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39 Chapter Three COLFAX COUNTY AND THE MAXWELL LAND GRANT Y D escribing the area around Cimarron’s old plaza in 1970, a local writer pointed to piles of refuse, deserted streets, abandoned buildings, and the decaying hulks of junked automobiles, and lamented a forgotten past, barely discernible in this “dirty, neglected old village.”1 The town, he believed, deserved better, for its role in more turbulent times of economic and cultural conflict in a rapidly changing American West. The writer was recalling the decade or so preceding the arrival of the railroad in New Mexico, when Cimarron was an important place in the territory , and Colfax County a field of intense struggle. The county had attracted many immigrants from the states—settlers seeking homesteads, ranchers looking for free or cheap grazing land, proprietors, attorneys, speculators , and a lawless element that was often found in the western territories. The discovery of gold on Baldy Mountain had led to a boom in mining and the advent of new towns—Baldy Town on the mountain’s eastern slope and Elizabethtown in the verdant Moreno Valley. But the initial flurry was followed by a bust of near-equal proportion, leaving few active mines by the mid-1870s. The arrival of the railroad was anticipated as the key to a new era of growth and prosperity. Satan’s Paradise The country was beautiful—much of it rimmed with the broken skyline of the Sangre de Cristos. Baldy rose above the tree line to a height of more than 12,400 feet, affording views of mountains higher still: the Wheeler range across the valley, the Truchas Peaks to the south and west, and the hulking Spanish Peaks in southern Colorado. Stands of pine, fir, spruce, and aspen 40 Chapter Three covered the mountains, safe from the lumberman’s ax until rails should arrive to allow for the removal of timber in commercial quantities. Low grasslands and the mountain country supported increasing numbers of beef cattle and provided habitat for elk, mule deer, bears, mountain lions, and bighorn sheep. North and east of the mountains was a rolling prairie—monotonous to look at but eminently suitable for the raising of livestock, pending access to critical water sources. The plain was too dry for farming without irrigation , but mountain streams and the drainages of the Vermejo, the Cimarron, the Ponil, and the Rayado were sufficient to support ranching, limited cultivation , human habitation, and a healthy population of trout. Much of the land was found to conceal an immense bed of commercial-grade coal. The country was fair to behold, but it was not Paradise. There were racial tensions among Hispanics, mostly small farmers seeking little more than a home and a living; Euro-Americans, some of whom were looking for a good deal more; and occasionally black soldiers who came west with the army to man frontier forts and protect U.S. settlers and interests. Although indigenous Utes and Jicarilla Apaches had mostly relocated to distant reservations, a small number of Apaches remained in the area. Reports of occasional raids on settlers and instances of drunken behavior on the part of a few of the Indians compromised the region’s appeal to potential immigrants and investors , at least in the eyes of those who were promoting development and offering land for sale. These conditions produced tensions that persisted for two decades, sometimes giving way to violent conflict. Cimarron translated from the Spanish as “wild,” and it was that. An author native to the area referred to the Cimarron country of the 1870s as “Satan’s Paradise.”2 By the mid-1870s, storm clouds were moving in over Colfax County. At the center of the gathering tempest were two controversies. The first was a conflict between settlers who believed themselves to have located legally on the public domain and officials of the Maxwell Land Grant and Railway Company, whose claim to a large area of northeastern New Mexico was hotly disputed. Company officials pushed settlers to pay for the land they occupied or move, and many of the settlers pushed back. Serious resistance was also evident in the Baldy mining region, where the Maxwell Company attempted to extract compensation from miners and prospectors who were convinced that they were within their rights working claims in the Moreno Valley and on Ute Creek. Riots erupted at Elizabethtown in October 1870.3 In the spring of 1871, the Arizona Citizen reported “a little speck of war” in Colfax County, [18...

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