Gold needs water as surely as it needs a pick and a pan. When prospectors found gold on Willow Creek and the western slopes of Baldy Mountain in 1866, Elizabethtown boomed almost overnight on the far side of the mountains from Red River. Thousands of miners arrived, claims multiplied, and the little creeks around Baldy Mountain soon proved inadequate to supply both the mining operations and the bustling boomtown that became New Mexico's first incorporated town.
Click to see more photos of the Big Ditch — the flume that ran between Red River and Elizabethtown
The answer, backed by land baron Lucien B. Maxwell, Captain William H. Moore, and other entrepreneurs, was one of the boldest engineering projects in territorial New Mexico. They built the Big Ditch to divert water from the headwaters of the Red River itself and carry it across the mountains to the placer workings near Elizabethtown. The ditch ran for 41 miles through ditches, pipes, and wooden flumes on trestles, winding around mountaintops and through canyons, even though the distance in a straight line was only about 11 miles. The cost was a monumental 280,000 dollars.
Did you know that most of that hard-won water never arrived? Only about one-tenth of the water that entered the ditches and flumes came out at the other end. Leaks, seepage, and evaporation took the rest along that long mountain journey, and the flumes required constant maintenance to keep even that fraction flowing. Photographs taken decades later, including the one with this article, show the elevated wooden flume still marching across the country between Red River and Elizabethtown, a reminder of how much timber, labor, and money went into moving a river.
The ditch nevertheless mattered. Under later operators, most notably Irish-born Matthew Lynch, who directed the hydraulic development of the placer fields until his death in 1880, the water that did arrive powered hydraulic mining that could wash whole gravel banks through sluices. Contemporary histories recorded very large seasons for some grounds worked with that water, and the ditch remained in use, in one form or another, until 1900.
In the end, a lawsuit banned the diversion altogether, and Red River's water stayed in its own valley. Elizabethtown faded into a ghost town, while Red River, the ditch's source, grew into the mountain town visitors know today. The next time you drive the Enchanted Circle between Red River and Eagle Nest and look up at Baldy Mountain, picture a wooden river in the sky, leaking at every joint, carrying this valley's water over the divide to chase gold.