Elizabethtown

Did you know that one of the Moreno Valley's first cattlemen reached New Mexico by crossing an ocean to avoid a war, and then promptly enlisted in another army? Patrick Lyons was born in February 1831 at Kilriney, in County Kildare, Ireland, and was educated in the national schools of his native land. In 1854 he was drafted into the English army for the war between England and Russia. To avoid that service he came to America instead, landing in New York, where, strange to say, he immediately enlisted in the First Regiment of Mounted Rifles.

Elizabethtown had already lived several lives by the autumn of 1903. Born in the gold rush of 1866 on the west slope of Baldy Mountain, it became New Mexico's first incorporated town and, in 1870, the first seat of newly formed Colfax County. When the easy gold gave out, its population fell from thousands to about one hundred by 1872, and the county seat moved to Cimarron. Yet E-Town, as its residents called it, hung on and revived somewhat when the railroad passed nearby, making mining feasible once again.

From Angel Fire, look northeast across the wide Moreno Valley and one summit commands the view. Baldy Mountain rises to 12,441 feet, the highest peak in the Cimarron Range, climbing about 3,640 feet above the valley floor in just a few miles. Its bare, treeless crown is beautiful, but for rockhounds it is also a lesson: the gold rush that built Elizabethtown began in the geology of this one mountain.

The most famous hotel in the Cimarron country was built by a French chef who had cooked for Abraham Lincoln. Henri Lambert's road from the White House kitchen to the Santa Fe Trail runs straight through the Moreno Valley.

Lambert was born in France on October 28, 1838, and learned his trade in the port city of Le Havre. Emigrating to America, his skill carried him to an extraordinary post: chef to President Abraham Lincoln. His service ended in sorrow — Lambert was relieved of his duties on April 14, 1865, the very day Lincoln was assassinated.

On the night of October 27, 1870, a crowd of miners in Elizabethtown burned the Maxwell Land Grant Company's office to the ground. It was the opening shot of the Colfax County War, and it happened just up the Moreno Valley from today's Angel Fire.

The Moreno Valley gold rush began in creek gravel, but its fortune was buried in the mountain. The story of the Aztec Mine is how a placer camp on Willow Creek became one of New Mexico's great hard-rock mines.

Every ranch, mine, and ski run in the Angel Fire country sits on ground once controlled by a single land grant — and, for a time, by a single man. The story of the Maxwell Land Grant shaped the Moreno Valley as surely as its mountains did.

Elizabethtown, the Moreno Valley's great gold boomtown, started with a mistake. In October 1866, a party sent out from Fort Union was working a copper prospect on Baldy Mountain when they panned the gravels of Willow Creek — and found gold instead.