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.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, a Native trader who came to Fort Union showed specimens he had picked up on the peak. The men at the fort recognized copper ore, followed him to the spot, and located a prospect high on the west side of the mountain, at about 12,200 feet, later known as the Mystic Lode. Its altitude and distance from any railroad kept it from ever paying well, but it put prospectors on Baldy Peak, and that changed everything.
In October 1866, a party sent out to develop that copper prospect found placer gold on Willow Creek, on the west slope of Baldy Peak. News spread quickly. In the summer of 1867, placer mining began in earnest in what became known as the Elizabethtown district, the first great gold rush in New Mexico. The Geological Survey, citing F. A. Jones, put the gold recovered from those placers at about $2,250,000. Water was the constant problem: there was never quite enough on Baldy's streams, and working the gravels stayed expensive.
The placers also posed a question. All that loose gold was washing down from somewhere. Because placer gold turned up only along streams heading on Baldy Peak, prospectors climbed higher, searching for the vein it came from. In June 1868 they found the outcrop, and the Aztec Mine was opened on it. Development moved fast. A 15-stamp mill was put into operation on October 29, 1868, crushing ore so the gold could be caught on amalgamating plates.
For a few spectacular years, the Aztec justified every rumor. The Geological Survey reported yields sometimes as high as $21,000 a week, and R. W. Raymond, reporting in 1870, found ore averaging as high as $68.83 a ton saved on the plates. Geologist L. C. Graton estimated the total take at between $1,250,000 and $1,500,000, with about $1,000,000 of it in the first four years alone. The Survey added that the Aztec was said to have been the immediate cause of the sale of the Maxwell Land Grant, all 1,750,000 acres of it, to an English syndicate. Mexico had made the grant in 1843, and Congress confirmed it in 1861.
Bonanzas that rich rarely last, and the Aztec's first ore body was soon exhausted. In 1872 the mine became tangled in litigation and operations ceased. For more than 40 years, hopeful owners tried and failed to find another paying ore body. The revival, when it came, was geological. In 1909, J. T. Sparks worked out that the old ore lay along the contact where the conglomerate at the base of the Raton Formation rests on the older Pierre shale. Following that contact, his successor, E. V. Deshayes, drove an adit that in August 1914 entered a large body of high-grade ore. In the 10 months before geologist Willis T. Lee visited in July 1915, more than 2,100 tons had been treated, averaging $107.60 a ton.
Today Baldy Peak still watches over the Moreno Valley and the eastern arc of the Enchanted Circle, a short drive from Red River. The rush it started built Elizabethtown and drew thousands into these mountains. Look east from Red River on a clear morning, and you are looking at the mountain where New Mexico's gold story truly began.
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