The miners in the Elizabethtown, New Mexico area were mighty frustrated. There just wasn’t enough water to satisfy their need to wash the gold out of the flanks of Baldy Mountain. They were willing to pay, but there was no one selling. But on May 28, 1868, their problem appeared to be on the way to being solved, because construction began on the Big Ditch.
Designed by a East Coast-educated former Army Engineer Capt. N.S. Davis, the Big Ditch project would employ over 400 men to construct a 41-mile system of reservoirs, dams, and wooden trestles that would funnel Red River’s headwaters to the placer mines on Baldy Mountain’s western flanks. About 7.6 million gallons per day (600 miner’s inches) were anticipated, water enough to supply all the miners in the district.
Or so they thought. The problem was that, as the water sat in the three reservoirs, then flowed through the landscape and the primarily wooden flumes on its 41 mile route to the mines, leakage in the flume and evaporation into the dry New Mexico air sucked much of the anticipated liquid right out of the system. When the water bean to flow the following July, only about 1/6 of the expected amount actually reached its destination. Just over one million gallons a day, or about 100 miners inches, remained for the miners to use.
Not only was there not enough water, selling what there was wouldn’t return the $280,000 cost of construction to the original investors. The price of 50 cents per miner’s inch simply didn’t cover the amount invested. The Big Ditch changed hands several times until it was eventually sold to Irish-born Matthew Lynch, who jerry-rigged the system sufficiently to provide for his own hydraulic mining operations and leave a small surplus to sell. So the Big Ditch did turn out to be useful, just not to the level originally projected.
Sources: Red River City, A history of northern New Mexico, J. Rush Pierce, JRP Publications, Red River, NM, 2008; The Leading Facts of New Mexican History, Ralph Emerson Twitchell, Sunstone Press, 2007.
The need for organization was urgent: As many as 400 mining claims had already been staked within an eight mile radius of Baldy Peak. This included Ute Park, where prospectors Tim Foley, Matthew Lynch, and Robert Doherty had found gold in the bed of Ute Creek, a find that would lead the following year to the discovery of the Aztec Mine, a mine that would produce over $100,000 in gold between October 1868 and July 1869.
In May 1870, the newly-incorporated Maxwell Land Grant and Railway Corporation, with a capital stock of $5 million, began the process of taking possession of what had been the Beaubien/Miranda Land Grant, and what formed the majority of New Mexico’s Colfax County. A $1.35 million contract to purchase the grant from Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell and Maria de la Luz Beaubien Maxwell had been signed in late April. However, there’d been a small glitch in the process because the investors purchasing were English. Only Americans were allowed to hold property in New Mexico Territory. So a corporation board of Americans was assembled. Even then, most of the men on the board would have been considered “outsiders” by anyone who’d been born and raised in New Mexico. Only one of them was originally from New Mexico and only two of them would die here.
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Fiction and Fact From Old New Mexico 