In Ghost Town, Only Memories Glitter

People still come to pan for gold in this former boom town, which lost its luster around the turn of the century and became a ghost town after World War II.

“I’ve got people every weekend that ask me if they can pan gold,” says Chuck Friske, 36, one of 11 residents of E-Town, as just about everyone calls the place.

“There’s a lot of guys running around here who think there’s buried treasure yet. It wouldn’t be like the early days when they could dig it up by the shovelfuls,” says Robert Mutz, 66, whose ancestors built E-Town’s Mutz Hotel.

The ruins of the sandstone Mutz Hotel are the town’s most distinctive landmark. Its walls loom starkly on the mountainside along U.S. 64 between Red River and Eagle Nest, about 20 miles northeast of Taos. After a 1903 fire destroyed the wooden hotel, Mutz says his relatives rebuilt it in stone. It was gutted again by fire in the mid-1940s and never rebuilt.

“Just about the time World War II started a lot of the younger people went away and never came back,” Mutz recalls.

He came here in 1942 when he was 16. At that time, he says, 75 to 100 people lived in Elizabethtown.

“I own about 80% to 90% of the town site,” says Mutz, who inherited it after his father’s death in 1974.

Soldiers from Ft. Union, N.M., were looking for copper in 1866 when they discovered gold instead.

The town, founded in 1868, was named for Elizabeth Moore, daughter of miner John Moore. At its peak it had a population of up to 7,000. Fortunes were made and lost overnight. Gunfighters such as Clay Allison and Black Jack Ketchum slouched in her seven saloons.

Elizabethtown had three dance halls, six stores, two hotels and a newspaper, The Lantern.

Miners used erosive placer techniques to loosen the gold from the slopes of Mt. Baldy with high-pressure water jets. They then separated the ore in sluice boxes as the water rushed down the mountainside.

“They never found the mother lode, but they put a tunnel through the mountain looking for it,” Friske says.

Friske, a carpenter from Mt. Horeb, Wis., lives in the oldest building in E-Town, a log cabin that was once an office for the Maxwell Land Grant and Railroad Co.

Friske owns the oldest store in town, as well. He cleared title on the place in March. That is no small task when it involves searching back to an 1841 land grant.

“It was an old grocery store,” he says. “That’s one of the original buildings. It used to be called Froelich Store.”

Nobody living here today knows what became of store-owner Herman Froelich. Friske uses the store as a workshop.

The attic walls are papered with old correspondence, including a letter from Lucien B. Maxwell, owner of the Maxwell Land Grant, to a blacksmith seeking horseshoes in time for a 4th of July race at Cimarron in 1870.

Nowadays, weekend prospectors want to know if it’s OK to pan Moreno Creek outside town. But Friske says most of the land is private ranchland and the ranchers don’t like trespassing.

“There’s only one spot along the creek that’s public property,” Friske says. “It’s about 12 feet long, down by the store, where the creek bends.

“I’ve panned gold right down here in front. It’s just such tiny little specks.”

Mutz, who runs about 200 head of cattle on his ranch 2 1/2 miles west of here, says he never has panned for gold.

“I never had much inclination to,” he says. “It’s in small quantities.”

He says the 19th-Century miners used a steam dredge to dig 30 feet deep in the creek bottom.

“Those old miners pretty much knew what they were doing. If they left any gold there, it was pretty thin,” he says.

Nonetheless, he says, several people have sought prospecting leases on his land. He turns them down.

“If you give them a lease to prospect, you might as well give them the land if they find anything. They wind up tearing the whole place up.”