Radium Springs, New Mexico

About thirteen miles north of Las Cruces, Radium Springs got its peculiar name in nineteen twenty-six when a post office was established and a mineral analysis of the local hot springs showed enough radioactive trace elements that the town could legally use the word radium in its name. Before that it was called Fort Selden Springs, after the nearby Army post where a young Douglas MacArthur lived as a boy while his father commanded the garrison in the eighteen eighties. Apache leader Geronimo reportedly camped at these springs during his travels through the Mesilla Valley.

An entrepreneur named Harry Bailey, once a friend of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, built a resort hotel here in the late nineteen twenties. The springs still flow, warm and slightly radioactive, into the Rio Grande floodplain.