Maxwell Land Grant: The 1.7-Million-Acre Tract Behind Philmont and Vermejo

What was the Maxwell Land Grant?

The Maxwell Land Grant, also known as the Beaubien-Miranda Land Grant, was a Mexican grant of 1,714,765 acres in Colfax County, New Mexico, and part of Las Animas County, Colorado. The Wikipedia article calls it one of the largest contiguous private landholdings in United States history. It reaches nearly 60 miles north to south and 50 miles east to west, from the Great Plains to the crest of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Grassland at the low end gives way to piñon-juniper, ponderosa pine and spruce-fir forest higher up. That range of elevation, from about 5,700 feet near Springer to 14,053 feet at Culebra Peak, shaped what each part of the grant was good for. The towns of Cimarron, Raton, Springer, Maxwell and Elizabethtown all grew up inside it.

How did Beaubien and Miranda get the grant?

In January 1841 Carlos Beaubien, a French-Canadian trapper turned Mexican citizen and Taos merchant, and Guadalupe Miranda, secretary to Governor Manuel Armijo, petitioned for the land. Armijo granted it within days on condition that they settle and cultivate it. They took official possession in 1843 and gave Armijo and trader Charles Bent a quarter share each.

Wikipedia describes grants like this one as made in the last years of Mexican rule to reward supporters and secure New Mexico's borders. The land had long been home to the Jicarilla Apache, who resisted settlement until about 1855, when they signed a peace treaty with the United States and began moving west.

Who was Lucien Maxwell?

Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell, born in Illinois in 1818, was a former trapper who married Beaubien's daughter Luz and managed his father-in-law's interests. He helped found Rayado in 1849 and later moved his base to Cimarron, where the same Wikipedia entry says he built a large home in 1860 and the New Mexico Office of the State Historian says he moved his headquarters in 1857. The sources differ on the year.

By buying out the other heirs and partners between 1864 and 1866, Maxwell became sole owner. By 1869 his holdings reached nearly two million acres by one count, making him among the largest individual landowners in the country. He made money by supplying beef and other goods to soldiers at Fort Union and to the Jicarillas, and he grew richer still after gold was found near Baldy Mountain in 1867.

How did cattle and ranching fit in?

Ranching, farming and mining were the grant's main economic activities. Maxwell's farms and ranches were highly productive, and he supplied the Army and the Cimarron Indian agency. Settlers sometimes paid rent in produce. The sources opened for this profile give no cattle head counts, so no herd size is claimed here.

After the sale, the company drew income from cattle and agricultural products among other sources. The grant's best-known ranching blocks came later. William Bartlett bought roughly 167,000 to 205,000 acres along the Vermejo River in 1902, and Tulsa oilman Waite Phillips began assembling a block of more than 300,000 acres in 1922 that he named Philmont.

Why was the Maxwell Land Grant so contested?

Maxwell sold the grant in 1870. By Wikipedia's account the buyers were speculators of the Santa Fe Ring who quickly marketed it to English investors, and Dutch investors later issued stock in the Maxwell Land Grant and Railroad Company. The new owners ran into a Mexican law that capped individual grants at 48,000 acres, and a government survey in 1869 said the legal grant was only about 96,000 acres. A decade of litigation followed, and the owners got title to the full area.

Settlers and miners already lived on the land. As the state historian's account records, in 1875 the Reverend F. J. Tolby, a spokesman for the settlers, was murdered, beginning the Colfax County War. In 1888 the Stonewall incident ended in a gunfight that left three protesters dead. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled for the company in 1887 and reaffirmed that in 1894, and by 1899 the company had uncontested ownership of nearly all the land.

Where did the land end up?

The company began selling assets in the 1950s and by the early 1960s had sold most of them and ended its New Mexico operations. Pieces of the grant now include the Vermejo Park Ranch, the Philmont Scout Ranch, Cimarron Canyon State Park, the Maxwell National Wildlife Refuge and Fishers Peak State Park in Colorado, which was created in 2020.

Waite Phillips donated 127,395 acres to the Boy Scouts of America in two gifts in 1938 and 1941, according to Wikipedia, and another source says the first gift was nearly 36,000 acres, so the totals are reported differently. Pennzoil bought Vermejo Park in 1973 and donated the 101,794-acre Valle Vidal to the U.S. government in 1982. Ted Turner bought the Vermejo ranch in 1992 and ran bison on much of the former cattle pasture.

Learn more about the grant and Western ranching

To keep reading, the ranching section on farm.FM covers the working side of ranch country, and a story about New Mexico ranch country is another way in.