Cimarron Canyon

This narrow gorge cut by the Cimarron River once lay at the heart of one of the largest private landholdings in American history. In the eighteen forties a Mexican land grant here grew, under the trader Lucien Maxwell, into the Maxwell Land Grant, sprawling across about one point seven million acres of New Mexico and into Colorado. The town of Cimarron became its headquarters in eighteen fifty-seven.

The canyon road that threaded this gorge saw its share of frontier violence. In eighteen seventy-five a minister named Franklin Tolby was ambushed and killed along it, helping ignite the bloody Colfax County War over who really controlled the grant lands. Decades later the state bought the canyon, and today it is a state park. Beneath the drama, its towering rock walls record an ancient story of fire and uplift in the southern Rockies.