November 2 arrives in Red River with snow in the forecast, the ski mountain counting down to its late November opening, and Main Street in its quiet in-between season. It is a good day to look back, because on this exact date in 1863, just around the Enchanted Circle in Taos, three teaching sisters opened a school that would serve northern New Mexico families for more than a century. That opening is today's lead story.
Click to see more photos of the Sisters of Loretto in Taos
Red River Town & Main Street
This first entry is seasonal context rather than an anniversary, because no verified Main Street event is tied to November 2 itself. Early November was always a hinge in Red River. The town began as a mining camp in the 1890s, boomed to roughly three thousand people by 1895, and then learned to live by seasons. Summer visitors and fall hunters went home, wood was stacked, and storekeepers on Main Street turned their eyes to winter, first for mining and freight, and later for the ski season that still defines this month.
Mining & the Gold Rush
In October 1866, only weeks before this date, gold changed the Circle forever. The written accounts give the month, not the day, so we present it honestly as a late October discovery. Three men sent to check copper ore on Baldy Mountain camped on Willow Creek, panned the gravel, and found gold flakes instead. Knowing winter came early on those high slopes, they carved a discovery marker, kept the find quiet, and rode back to Fort Union. The rush that followed built Elizabethtown and, in time, sent miners on to Red River.
Founding Families, Characters & Legends
On November 2, 1846, exactly today's date, Governor Charles Bent answered a land petition from Santa Fe. Bent was New Mexico's first civilian governor under United States rule, a trader who lived in Taos and had married into the Jaramillo family there. Families from the Taos district had petitioned him on October 5 about the Conejos land grant, asking that their ownership be recognized. Bent replied on November 2 that the matter was beyond his jurisdiction. Within three months he was dead in the Taos Revolt, and land questions like this one shadowed the Circle for generations.
Skiing & Winter
This entry is fall context, again with no exact November 2 claim. In the fall of 1956, Ernie Blake was building Taos Ski Valley, around the Circle from Red River, almost from nothing. That season he installed the area's first lift, a J-Bar, with the help of sixteen men from Taos Pueblo and a mule remembered as Lightning. The only run that first winter was the steep trail now called Snakedance. Red River families watching from across the peaks were on the same road: Red River's own ski area would open three winters later, in December 1959.
Enchanted Circle Towns & Places
On November 2, 1863, the Sisters of Loretto opened their school for girls in Taos, and the date comes from the sisters' own Annals, their daily record book. Three sisters, Euphrosyne Thompson, Ignacia Mora, and Angelica Ortiz, had left Santa Fe on October 15 and walked nearly half of the seventy rough miles. Their Taos parish was divided by a church dispute at the time, yet the Annals note that all parties sent their girls just the same. A newspaper account printed fifty years later gave November 3, but the sisters who were there wrote November 2.
The Land, Weather & Wildlife
November weather on the Circle deserves respect, and this entry looks ahead in the month rather than back at today. Early November can be mild, but the month's history includes a famous extreme later on its calendar. On November 29, 1975, a storm dropped thirty-four inches of snow on Red River in twenty-four hours, a New Mexico record for a single day. That is not a November 2 event, and we do not dress it up as one. It is simply proof, written in the record books, of what this month can do at eighty-seven hundred feet.
Roads, Stage Lines & Travel
In November 1913, Red River held the first of its meetings about a new road over the pass, an effort organized by mining engineer Norman L. Faris, who had only recently arrived in town. The old road from Elizabethtown climbed grades as steep as twenty-seven percent. Wagon drivers tied a cut tree behind their wagons as a brake so the load would not run over their own horses, and winter made the road impassable. The meetings led to a new Red River Pass road, built in 1915 and 1916, that opened the town to early automobile visitors.
Living History & Heritage
November 2 is All Souls' Day, and around the Circle that remembrance is still living history, not a museum piece. At Taos Pueblo, tradition holds that families spend the day together, the village closes to outside visitors, the church bell rings through the night, and candles and food are brought to graves in the churchyard. In the town of Taos, the Hacienda de los Martinez has marked the season with All Souls' offerings exhibits, with altars made by local artists. It is the oldest kind of heritage here: memory, practiced every year on this date.
So November 2 in the Enchanted Circle holds a school bell in Taos, a governor's careful answer about land, gold found just before winter, and roads and lifts built against the coming snow. Red River's own story runs through every one of those threads. If you are in town today, walk Main Street slowly, look up at the slopes, and remember that this quiet week once carried the whole region, one classroom, one petition, and one wagon road at a time.