In 1869, the brand-new Colfax County made the gold-rush boomtown of Elizabethtown its first county seat — a town that had been New Mexico's first incorporated municipality, founded three years earlier by Captain William H. Moore. The county seat would move to Cimarron in 1872, but the land war that followed it would rage for another decade and a half, and it would reach right to Red River's doorstep.
The trouble began with the Maxwell Land Grant. In 1841, Carlos Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda received a Mexican land grant of nearly two million acres in northeastern New Mexico; Lucien Maxwell acquired it, and in 1870 he sold it to foreign investors who organized the Maxwell Land Grant and Railway Company. The new owners looked at the settlers living on the grant — families who said they had Maxwell's own permission to be there, though no documents proved it — and called them squatters. The company wanted them gone.
Backing the company was the Santa Fe Ring, a cabal of corrupt politicians and lawyers led by Thomas Catron and Stephen Elkins, who saw the grant as a vehicle for personal profit. When Reverend Franklin J. Tolby, a Methodist circuit rider who spoke out for the settlers, was shot in the back on the road between Elizabethtown and Cimarron on September 14, 1875, the war turned hot. It is said that as many as 200 people died in the Colfax County War between 1873 and 1888.
The violence had a face, and it belonged to Clay Allison. The gunman led the lynch mob that hanged Cruz Vega, the man suspected of Tolby's murder, from a telegraph pole near Cimarron in October 1875; days later, at Lambert's Inn — the saloon known today as the St. James Hotel — Allison shot Francisco Griego dead in what was ruled self-defense. Cimarron's barrooms became the war's courtrooms.
The end came not with a gunfight but with an investigation. After the 1878 murder of John Tunstall ignited the Lincoln County War, a letter surfaced implicating territorial Governor Samuel Axtell in the Colfax County troubles; Washington sent investigator Frank W. Angel, whose report on the territory's corruption was scathing. In 1887 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Maxwell Company the legal owner of 1.7 million acres, and the last great flare-up — the Stonewall incident of 1888 — finally burned the war out.
The Colfax County War never reached Red River itself. But it surrounded the town's mining camps, filled its saloons with veterans of both sides, and wrote the region's hardest lesson: that on the Enchanted Circle, the gold wasn't the only thing people were willing to fight over.
Planning a Red River getaway? Book your stay at the Claim Jumper A-Frame 6
