By Dorothy Watson First Printing July, 1960 Second Printing August, 1960 Third Printing September, 1960 This Printing April, 1970 Printed by The Silver City Enterprise Silver City, New Mexico...

Pinos Altos, the oldest Anglo settlement in Grant County, is a small town in southwestern New Mexico. It lies across the Continental Divide at an altitude of just over 7000 feet, between the Diablo Range to the north and east and the Pinos Altos Mountains to the south and west. Bear Creek begins in the Pinos Altos Mountains and flowing north divides the town, joining the Gila River near the town of Gila, twenty miles away as the crow flies. Whiskey Creek has its source in the Diablos, skirts the

Early one spring a party of twelve scouts left Tucson for the Rio Grande. When they reached Mesilla they decided to prospect in the mountains to the northwest. They stopped in Santa Rita to replenish supplies and then moved westward. On May 18, 1860, three prospectors, from that party, named Birch, Snively and Hicks, camped on what is now known as Bear Creek. Birch went to the stream for water and found chispas—small nuggets of gold, in the bed of the stream. Scooping up a handful he returned to

The next two decades were of increasing prosperity, thanks to the efforts of Trolius Stephens and Nathaniel Bell. Not only was there greater mining activity but new businesses were opened. The Ancheta Trading Post had been bought by Bell and Stephens and enlarged into a general merchandise store which handled everything from hair pins to machinery. They subsidized a drug store, a barber shop, and a meat market which had its own slaughter house. Other merchants opened clothing stores—general and

There must have been doctors here before the ’80’s but they left no records. Dr. Lewis B. Robinson came to take charge of the drug store and to care for the ill and injured. He was a character, crude in his methods but a family physician of the old school, ready day or night to go where ever needed. He would go to a home just to see the folks, have the children stick out their tongues, sometimes leaving pills or asking them to go by the drug store for a powder. There was a “pest house” where vic

Captain Tevis in his recollections of Pinos Altos as told in “Arizona in the ’50’s” tells the story of Miss Rhoda Parker, a young woman from Iowa who came with her father and her uncle, a Mr. McCulloch, who were interested in mining. She was the first American woman to visit the camp and was immediately very popular with the miners. There were seven or eight Mexican and a few half-breed children in camp. Miss Parker thought it a shame that they had no schooling and offered to teach them. The mor

The first Catholic church was built in 1868. The adobe ruins between the homes of Miss Ashton and Mrs. Strachbein may have been it. There is a record of Fr. Francis Bernal having visited the camp in 1869 where he baptized several children, one of them being a sister of Francisco Grijalva. At the time Mesilla was the center of the diocese and priests from there visited all ranches and small communities at least once a year, baptizing all children born during the year, hearing the marriage vows of

As long as the gulches yielded a fair return in gold there was no so-called hard rock mining. Prospectors wandered over the hills, sampling the surface veins. The Atlantic and the Pacific, east and west of town, were located in 1861, also the Langston, but no development work was done. The next year the Locke lode, later called the Mountain Key, was discovered and years later became one of the richest producers. Surface ores were treated in 75 arrastras during the war years. Crude furnaces were

There was a time when asking a person in the West where he was from was a shooting matter. Visitors today have no hesitancy about asking that or about how long one has lived here or what brought one here in the first place. Is it more eccentric to spend one’s life here than in a small hamlet in Vermont or elsewhere? Lack of initiative or drive may be partly responsible and surely sentiment is. Some of us just love the home place. My father, W. E. Watson, came west for his health at the age of ni

Messrs. Birch, Snively and Hicks would not recognize the valley if they could come back one hundred years later. Gone are the tall pines that gave the place its name; gone for the greater part of the year are the streams where they placered for gold; gone are burros that carried their tools and supplies; gone is the excitement of a rich find and gone, too, are the hundreds of placer miners who followed them seeking “El Dorado”. Today there are approximately fifty families and a few lone individu

To: Dr. Nanette Ashby of New Mexico Western College and her students of Southwestern Literature who have shown interest and pleasure as we gathered on the Continental Divide and talked of the “good old days”, whose questions and comments spurred me to write “The Story of Pinos Altos”; To: The sons and daughters of the men and women who made those times what they were, and who have shared the tales their parents told: To: The few “Old-Timers” who are left who remember so much and delight to recal

MAIN STREET, 1900. Dr. Robinson, the Robinson and Nolan boys pause to be in picture. The road leading into town, 1895. Picture taken from crest of Continental Divide. Corn grows on the Potosi Placer Claim. The Pacific House. In the group from left to right are Pat Mullins, John Head, Spaulding’s adopted daughter, the dog, “Wad”, Spaulding and Frank Bell, the first seated figure. Others not recognized. F. J. Davidson bought the Neff Store and operated it until it burned in 1902. It stood in the n