Fort Stanton State Historic Site
I’m in New Mexico this week visiting my mom, as I often do this time of year. As we also often do, we took a couple of days to go camping and hiking somewhere in the state. This time went to Lincoln County, where we also took in some of the sights in the area. I figured I would do a post just to discuss what we did, since I found in planning this trip that detailed information was hard to find about a lot of things.
Lincoln County is in the south-central part of the state. These days it’s relatively obscure, but it was important in the territorial period and there’s still a lot to see there that’s of historical interest. We focused primarily on Fort Stanton, which is a New Mexico State Historical Site that was an old frontier fort established in 1855. It’s still in remarkably good shape, partly because it was still in use for various purposes until quite recently, and is a bit of a hidden gem for those interested in historic architecture and frontier history. Very much worth visiting. We didn’t get to see the museum since we arrived right at 4:00 pm when it closes, but the grounds are open until 5:00 so we saw most of the other buildings.
Rio Bonito near Fort Stanton, New Mexico
Surrounding the State Historic Site is the Fort Stanton-Snowy River Cave National Conservation Area, managed by the Bureau of Land Management. We were intending to camp here, but it was quite hard to find detailed information about the two campgrounds. The main one, the Rob Jaggers Campground, turns out to be mainly oriented toward RVers and equestrians rather than tent campers like us, but the other one, the Cave Campground, was more our style. It’s a small but quite well-maintained campground that apparently gets very little visitation, probably because it’s right at Fort Stanton cave, which is now closed to public visitation because of White Nose Syndrome in bats. Highly recommended as a camping option in an area that has few. There are ramadas and picnic tables at three or four campsites, and a vault toilet that was very clean. There’s no water at the campground, so we had to fill up our jug in the nearby towns of Lincoln and Capitan.
There are a lot of trails on the NCA, and we did a small loop that went right by the Rio Bonito, which runs through this area and lives up to its name. There is also a petroglyph site at the southwestern end of the NCA which I wanted to see, but the road to it turns out to be extremely steep and rocky, and we decided it was not worth the risk to my mom’s small car to try to get there. Hiking to the site along the trails might be a better way to get there.
Old Courthouse (Murphy-Dolan Store), Lincoln, New Mexico
We also visited the town of Lincoln, which is famous for the Lincoln County War in the late 1870s which made Billy the Kid (in)famous. Many of the old buildings from that period are still very well preserved, and several of them are part of Lincoln State Historic Site. Some of them are set up as museums, although the exhibits in them get a bit repetitive at times since they all focus so much on the same short period of time. Still, it’s a very interesting place. The short video at the visitor center was quite helpful in summarizing the War and the background to it, which ultimately revolved around rival groups of ranchers and merchants trying to access government contracts to supply Fort Stanton and the nearby Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation. Having seen Fort Stanton first was helpful in contextualizing this, since it was a quite large and elaborate post for the time and place and supplying it would clearly have been quite lucrative.
On our way back to Albuquerque we stopped in Capitan and saw the Smokey Bear Historical Park. The “real” Smokey Bear was a cub discovered in the midst of a forest fire near Capitan in 1950 and brought to the National Zoo in DC to serve as a living embodiment of the fire-prevention mascot (who had already existed for a few years by then). The museum is mostly about forest fire safety, including a lot of discussion of how our understanding of the role of natural fire has changed over the years. There is also a garden showing various native plants of the Southwest, along with the burial place of Smokey, who died in 1976.
Sign at Smokey Bear Historical Park, Capitan, New Mexico
Since it was sort of on the way and my mom had not been there, although I had, we decided to stop at Gran Quivira on the way back as well. There is a relatively direct route to it, but we missed the (apparently quite subtle) turnoff and ended up going the long way around through Corona and Mountainair before getting to the site. It’s a really great site, I think.
So then we ended up back in Albuquerque, just as it was starting to rain yesterday evening. Yesterday was my birthday (I’m 32), and this trip was a nice way to celebrate it. I fly back to Alaska tomorrow.
“New” Church at Gran Quivira
Gambler's House 