November 4 finds Red River in its quiet hinge season. The fall color crowds have gone home, the lifts are being readied, and the town is counting down to the ski area opening on Wednesday, November 25. On this date in 1849, one of the most famous names in Taos history rode out on a rescue march that ended in heartbreak. Here is November 4, and the week around it, across the Enchanted Circle.
Red River Town & Main Street
No verified Main Street anniversary falls on November 4 itself, so this section offers honest seasonal context instead. In the mining and early tourism years, the first week of November was when Red River closed its accounts with autumn. Merchants stocked shelves for winter, families stacked cordwood, and everyone watched the peaks for the first lasting snow. Main Street quieted, but it did not empty. Early November remains the pause between the last fall drive over the pass and the first skiers of winter.
Mining & the Gold Rush
The full story of the Big Ditch was told on this site today, so here is the shorter version, with a different eye. After gold was found on Baldy Mountain in 1866, Elizabethtown needed more water than its creeks could give. Investors answered by diverting the headwaters of the Red River itself through forty-one miles of ditches, pipes, and trestle flumes. Most of the water never arrived, lost to leaks and evaporation, yet later operators used what did arrive to power hydraulic mining. The diversion lasted until a lawsuit ended it in 1900, and the flume line remains the boldest water gamble of the Circle gold rush.
Founding Families, Characters & Legends
On November 4, 1849, Captain William Grier led a detachment out of Taos to rescue Ann White, whose wagon party had been attacked near Point of Rocks on the Santa Fe Trail in late October. His dragoons and New Mexico volunteers rode with experienced guides, including Antoine Leroux and Robert Fisher, and on the third night out, at Rayado, Kit Carson joined them. They reached the attack site on November 9 and followed what Carson later called the most difficult trail he ever followed. On November 17 they struck the camp on the Canadian River minutes too late. Ann White was found dead, and in the camp lay a novel that made Carson a hero. Sixteen years earlier, on November 4, 1833, the guide Leroux had married Juana Catarina Vigil in Taos and settled into the land grant country north of town.
Skiing & Winter
Early November is working season, not ski season, in Red River, and it always has been. Long before snowmaking, the town's winter people spent these weeks repairing lifts, cutting wood, and waiting on the weather, because the first skiable storms in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains usually arrive this month. The pattern still holds. This year the Red River Ski and Summer Area opens on Wednesday, November 25, and crews are preparing the mountain now. Taos Ski Valley and Angel Fire keep the same early winter clock, watching the same skies for the storm that turns preparation into opening day.
Enchanted Circle Towns & Places
On November 5, 1921, one day from today, a letter from Mabel Dodge Luhan reached the writer D. H. Lawrence in Taormina, Sicily, inviting him to come to Taos. The Lawrences arrived on September 11, 1922, and Mabel later gave them a one hundred sixty acre ranch twenty miles north of Taos, near San Cristobal on the road toward Questa. Lawrence named it Kiowa Ranch for the old trail crossing the property. The ranch, now owned by the University of New Mexico, is remembered as the only home Lawrence ever owned.
The Land, Weather & Wildlife
On November 6 through 8, 2024, just two years ago this week, a slow moving winter storm buried the Enchanted Circle. The National Weather Service office in Albuquerque counted forty inches of snow near Angel Fire, twenty-five inches at Taos Ski Valley, and twenty-three inches at Eagle Nest Lake State Park, along with very cold temperatures and frigid wind chills, and several daily November snowfall records were set around the region. It was a generous early deposit of winter water, the kind of storm old timers in Red River still use as a yardstick.
Roads, Stage Lines & Travel
On November 5, 1904, one day from today, the Cimarron River and Taos Valley Railway Company filed its papers at Raton with a capital stock of one million dollars. The name alone tells the ambition: to bind the Cimarron River country to the Taos Valley by rail, in an age when every valley town wanted a railroad of its own. Most paper railroads never laid a mile of track, and Taos was never reached by rail at all. The Enchanted Circle stayed a country of wagon roads, stage lines, and eventually highways.
Living History & Heritage
On November 4, 1910, the Grand Lodge of New Mexico appropriated five hundred dollars to buy the Kit Carson House in Taos, and one thousand dollars more for the property beside it, answering a challenge to Bent Lodge to save the adobe Carson had bought in 1843 as a wedding gift for Josefa Jaramillo. The house, built in 1825, had fallen into disrepair. The Masons restored it as a memorial, it opened as a museum in the early nineteen fifties, and in 1963 it became a National Historic Landmark. It remains the Circle's clearest lesson that heritage survives because somebody decides to pay for the roof.
So November 4 in the Enchanted Circle holds a rescue that came minutes too late, a railroad that existed only on paper, a writer summoned across an ocean, and a small adobe house saved by a lodge treasury. Red River's turn comes soon enough. When the lifts open on November 25, this town writes its next winter chapter in the same mountains that framed every one of these stories.