Did you know that eight miles northeast of Red River, a complete gold town rose in a single autumn and was nearly gone within a few years? La Belle, in the Keystone Mining District, is one of the Enchanted Circle country's most striking boom-and-bust stories. Minerals had been found in the area as early as 1866, but for decades almost no one settled there. The high, forested country waited, quiet, while nearby camps drew the crowds.
That changed on August 28, 1894, when La Belle was established as a mining camp and named for Belle Dixon, the wife of a prospector who was among its first investors. Fortune seekers poured in. By December, just four months later, the new town already counted about 80 buildings, including three saloons, a hotel, a restaurant, a mercantile store, and butcher, blacksmith, and feed shops. It was a working town built at mining speed, meant to serve the claims staked in the gulches all around it.
By March 1895 the population had reached about 700 people, and families were asking for a schoolhouse, which was completed by July. La Belle had its own newspaper, the La Belle Cresset, and at its peak three hotels welcomed newcomers. The grandest was the Southern Hotel, a four-story, 80-room building that had been moved from Catskill. The 14-room Exchange Hotel, run by Mr. and Mrs. Nadock and later known as the Nadock Hotel, served as an official stagecoach stop. A post office opened in 1895, as did a jail that, town lore recorded in later histories says, never held anyone.
For all that energy, La Belle's promise rested on promotion as much as on ore. The camp became infamous for overstating the value of its gold reserves, using deceptive photographs and advertising to lure investment. An 1895 map of the Keystone district billed the area as the great gold fields of La Belle, and hopeful names covered the hillsides. The reality underground was less generous. The ore proved low-grade, and a town built for a rich strike had little to sustain it once that truth settled in.
The decline came swiftly in the early 1900s. The post office closed in 1901, and by 1910 only about 10 residents remained. Soon the population fell to zero, leaving La Belle a ghost town. One of the few buildings at the site today, the La Belle Lodge, was built decades after the heyday, in the 1950s or 1960s. When you drive the country northeast of Red River today, it takes a little imagination to picture 700 neighbors, three hotels, and a newspaper office in the pines, but that brief, bright town is a true piece of Red River's mining heritage.