Did you know that when early writers tried to rank Red River's mines, one property kept coming out on top? In the spring of 1895, shiny metal in the creeks set off a rush of rainbow chasers — teachers, farmers and store clerks who had lost everything in the hard times and had little left to lose. Names like Golden Treasure, Independence and Black Copper stirred their spirits. But Fayette A. Jones, in his 1904 survey New Mexico Mines and Minerals, called another mine the most noted property in the district: the Jay-hawk, managed by H. J. Luce.
The Jayhawk sat about three miles above Red River City, on what was known as Black Mountain. Red River City itself had only been laid out in 1894, when the first systematic prospecting in the district began, and by 1895 it was a thriving camp of about three thousand people. The Jayhawk property consisted of five claims, three of them patented — about seventy acres in the later territorial history's reckoning — ground its owners held by title, not just by hope.
What set the Jayhawk apart was how far its development had gone. By January 1904 its tunnel ran more than 300 feet, with a 50-foot shaft besides, and that one tunnel had pierced five distinct leads, or veins. One lead was nearly 22 feet wide, another about 10 feet, and the smallest of them, Jones reported, carried the best values. A territorial history published three years later agreed on the essentials: the ores were gold and silver bearing, with the gold values largely predominating.
Turning that ore into money was the hard part. At first the ore was hauled down the mountain about five miles to a concentrator that could handle about 30 tons a day, working with two Wilfley tables, a 60-horsepower boiler, a 50-horsepower Corliss engine and a crusher. To escape that long haul, the company was building a new mill right at the mine. Jones praised the district's many good features, then named its one great drawback, a complaint every Red River miner knew by heart: the long distance from transportation.
The boom did not last. Mining here peaked in 1897, and by 1905 the town's population had fallen to about 150, though Red River survived and the last serious mining efforts held on until 1931. The Jayhawk faded with the rest, but it never quite vanished from the record: John H. Schilling's 1960 Mineral Resources of Taos County, the state Bureau of Mines Bulletin 71, still catalogued the Jay Hawk mine, and mineral collectors' records still list native gold from its workings. Next time you look north from town toward the high, forested slopes, remember that the best-regarded mine of Red River's gold rush once drove its tunnel into Black Mountain up there — and that old workings are dangerous, so admire that history from a safe distance.