Down the valley on your left are the remains of Elizabethtown — E-town, as everyone calls it — and it is New Mexico's most complete boom-and-bust story.
The gold was found around eighteen sixty-six. Within four years there were more than seven thousand people living here — which, for perspective, would make it a substantial town in this valley TODAY. It was the first seat of Colfax County. It had saloons, stores, hotels, newspapers, a red-light district, and the general moral atmosphere of a place where several thousand armed men are digging for gold at nine thousand feet.
It was founded by an army officer from Fort Union, Captain William Moore, who named it for his daughter Elizabeth.
And by eighteen seventy-two — six years after the strike — the population was around a hundred. The easy gold was gone, the county seat moved to Cimarron, and that was effectively that. There was a small revival when the railroad came near in the eighteen nineties, a fire took most of the town in nineteen oh three, and it was finished by about nineteen seventeen.
There are stone walls and foundations left, a small museum, and a cemetery. It is on private land in places, so read the signs.
Seven thousand people to zero in fifty years. Boone has a story from E-town's worst days, and I will warn you now: it is a dark one.
Photo: John Collier Jr. · Public domain