Springer and the Colfax County War

The Colfax County Courthouse in Springer, New Mexico was built in eighteen eighty-one at the height of one of the most prolonged land disputes in the American West. The Colfax County War lasted from roughly eighteen seventy-three until the late eighteen eighties, growing out of conflicting claims to the Maxwell Land Grant, a tract covering nearly two million acres in northeastern New Mexico that had been assembled under Mexican land law and then dramatically expanded, and disputed, after the United States took the territory. Small ranchers, settlers, and squatters who believed they had rights to the land clashed repeatedly with the grant's absentee owners and their hired enforcers. The courthouse in Springer, which became the county seat in eighteen eighty-one after the county was reorganized from Cimarron, served as the institutional center for the legal battles that eventually settled, though never fully resolved, the grant question.