On this day, Sunday, January 21, 1866, Kit Carson and nine other men filed a Kit Carson Mining Company claim for El Coyote Copper Mine near the town of Coyote on Coyote Creek, Mora County.  Carson’s partners were Colfax County sheriff Andrew J. Calhoun, H.J. Farnsworth, Charles McClure, J.C. Collier, Vicente Romero, George W. Ashenfelter, M. Calhoun, E.A. DeBreuils, and T.J. Donahue. The paperwork was witnessed by a John Gibbs and a John Moore, who may have been the sutler at Fort Union.

Carson had just turned 57 and was in poor health. The El Coyote mining claim may have been part of an attempt to provide for his family after his inevitable demise. The copper claim wasn’t his first venture into mining. He and Ceran St. Vrain had also invested in Arroyo Hondo mining claims near Taos as part of the 100 or more claims registered there by 1865.

Source: Kit Carson and his three wives, Marc Simmons 2003

Unfortunately, the Arroyo Honda ore was low grade and unevenly distributed and that mining boom seems to have gone bust fairly quickly. It’s unknown whether any ore was ever actually extracted from the El Coyote Copper Mine, so Carson’s investment there may have been even less successful than those  in Arroyo Hondo and therefore of little benefit to his family. At any rate, he likely didn’t see much benefit from any of his mining ventures: he was dead by the end of May 1868.

Sources: Source: July 9, 2015 email from Mitch Barker, NPS archivist for Ft. Union; Harriett Frieberger, Lucien Maxwell: Villain or Visionary, Sunstone Press, 1999; J. Rush Pierce, Red River City: A history of Northern New Mexico 1800-2000, JRP Publications, 2008; Jerry D. Thompson, A Civil War History of the New Mexico Volunteers and Militia, UNM Press, 2015.