Did you know that one of the great characters of the Enchanted Circle once owned the whole town of Red River? He stood over six feet tall, straight as a lightning rod in the saddle, and northern New Mexico knew him as Long John Dunn, Juan Largo, and the King of Taos. His friend Max Evans told his story in the 1959 biography Long John Dunn of Taos, and it reads like a western novel, except that Dunn lived every improbable page of it himself.
Click to see more photos of Long John Dunn — in front of his Taos house in 1952, at his bridge, and in his stagecoach days
Evans wrote that Dunn was born in 1857 in Victoria, Texas, on a poor dry-land farm, and that he dug his own father's grave because the family could not pay for a funeral. He cowboyed and drove a herd north to Montana. Back in Texas, he came to his sister's defense against her abusive husband: the man threw the first punch, Dunn answered with one of his own, and the man fell, struck his head on a hitching rail, and died. Dunn was sentenced to life in the state penitentiary. Transferred to a prison farm, he got hold of a smuggled file, sawed through his leg irons, and escaped by jumping into the river. After a rodeo scrape, he leaped through a courthouse window as a judge prepared to sentence him, took a horse, and was gone again.
That escape brought him to our mountains. A wagon driver named Tom Holder smuggled him into New Mexico hidden under the hay, and when Texas Rangers stopped the wagon, they never found him. Dunn arrived in Elizabethtown, the gold camp below Baldy Mountain, where he ran poker games in the boom years that had begun with the 1866 strike. The cards were kind to him here: for a time, the biography says, he owned the whole town of Red River.
In 1889 Dunn rode through Therma, the town we now call Eagle Nest, and on into the Taos Valley, and there he found his real calling. Taos had almost no public transportation, only a branch railroad ending some thirty miles west of town, and Dunn decided the West needed transportation. He bought two bridges over the Rio Grande, at Taos Junction and Arroyo Hondo; when a flood washed both of them out, he rebuilt the Arroyo Hondo bridge and its hotel and charged a toll of one dollar a person, fifty cents for a horse or cow, and twenty-five cents for a sheep. His stagecoaches met the Chili Line trains and carried passengers over the mesa through snow and hail, and in time he owned Taos's first automobile, a Ford Model T. He held four saloons, a gambling hall, a hotel, and a livery stable, and for close to thirty years controlled most transportation in and out of Taos.
The outlaw ending never came. In later years Dunn held court near the Taos plaza four or five days a week, and everyone came to pay respects to the King. In 1942 the governor of Texas pardoned him, a day Dunn called the happiest of his life. He died on May 21, 1953, and the tributes covered most of the front page of The Crepusculo, the forerunner of the Taos News. The modern John Dunn Bridge still crosses the gorge where his toll bridge stood, and his Taos house on Bent Street is shops today. So the next time you drive the Enchanted Circle through Eagle Nest, picture a very tall fugitive riding that same road in 1889, on his way to becoming a legend.