The year was 1895 and the world was changing. An Italian inventer named Marconi invented radio telegraphy, which, along with the invention of a motion-picture camera by the Lumiere brothers would someday be credited/blamed for irreversibly altering the way people communicate and think.

1895 also saw the first-time publication in Boston, MA, of a poem by Katherine Lee Bates which began “O beautiful for spacious skies,” as well as the debut of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Das Kapital - Volume 3, published following the death of author Friedrich Engels.

1895 found the second term of President Grover Cleveland to be an economic disaster for millions of Americans following a devastating “recession” which left many people broke with nothing to lose.

As early as 1870, miners working claims around Elizabethtown in the mountains of Northern New Mexico trekked over the neighboring peaks and explored the nearby valley of the Rio Colorado (Red River), wandering the length of the river from its origin to its junction with the fabled Rio Grande. Rewards were minimal and interest waned, although the Red River Mining Company established a claim and build a smelter around 1879-80. Still, results were not cost efficient and it would be another ten to twelve years before serious efforts would be renewed in the area that would become Red River City.

As spring of 1895 saw the mountain snows beginning to melt, the air buzzed with human activity, the result of the discovery of shiny precious metals in the streams and rivers that flowed in the high country. Glowing accounts in The Raton Range, weekly newspaper of the railway town located on the old Sante Fe Trail on the front range of the Rocky Mountains, proclaimed the “Great Mining Camp of LaBelle,” a renewed interest in the fading gold fields of the Moreno Valley (in particular Elizabethtown), and the declaration that “Red River City is still booming.”

Red River City was taking shape on the banks of the river which gave the gold camp its name. Tents and modest, quickly-build log cabins were springing up throughout the valley. Within a year the crush of civilization would forever change the landscape from a pastoral place for grazing sheep into a noisy center of mineral exploration and development.