The open grassland running along this valley is ranch country, and it has been for well over a century — which makes it, in local terms, the steady business. Mining boomed and vanished. Skiing came late. Cattle have been on this grass the whole time.
It is hard country to ranch. At eight thousand feet the growing season is short, the winters are long and genuinely cold, and this valley has recorded some of the lowest temperatures in New Mexico. Stock gets moved up to high summer pasture and brought down before the snow, which is a pattern older than the fence lines.
Much of the land here traces back to Spanish and Mexican land grants — enormous parcels issued before the United States took the territory in eighteen forty-eight. What happened to those grants afterward, as American courts and speculators worked through the titles, is one of the great sore subjects in New Mexico, and it cost many Hispano communities the common lands they had grazed for generations. It is not settled history; it is a live issue in this state.
The largest of them all, the Maxwell Land Grant, covered much of the country east of here — nearly two million acres, one of the biggest single land holdings in the history of the United States, and the cause of a shooting war in Colfax County in the eighteen seventies.
The gold rush you heard about happened on that grant. Which is a large part of why it turned violent.
Photo: John Collier Jr. · Public domain