New Mexico History

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.

The most famous memorial in America now has a counterpart in the Moreno Valley. Just north of the Peace and Brotherhood Chapel at Angel Fire stands a half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall — 250 feet of black granite carrying 58,318 names.

Before the land grants, before the gold camps and the cattle ranches, the Moreno Valley belonged to the Moache Ute and the Jicarilla Apache. Their era here lasted centuries, and its ending set the stage for everything that followed.

Angel Fire is a young town with an old landscape. The Moreno Valley around it has been hunted, farmed, mined, and ranched for centuries, but the Village of Angel Fire itself only came into legal existence forty years ago, on July 1, 1986.

Every acre of Eagle Nest Lake was once somebody's farm, and no one fought harder to keep hers than Mary Gallagher. Her nine-year stand against the dam is one of the Moreno Valley's great stories of grit.

Mary was a widow farming valley land her husband John had bought with gold earned in the 1870s Elizabethtown boom. The Gallaghers had built a working farm from almost nothing, digging irrigation canals from Willow Creek and Cieneguilla Creek to water their fields. It was good land, hard won, and Mary intended to keep it.

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.

Stand anywhere in Angel Fire today and you are standing on ranch land. Before the ski runs, the golf course, and the condominiums, the Moreno Valley was a working landscape of cattle, timber, and hay meadows, and few purchases shaped its future more than the one Roy and George LeBus made in 1954.