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Northeastern New Mexico |
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Welcome to Harding County, NM |
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Melvin Whitson Mills Mills arrived in New Mexico Territory in 1868, and in short order made a name for himself in business and political circles. In the early 1870's, he established a law practice in the mining camp of Elizabethtown, but soon moved to Cimarron and gained prominence representing the Maxwell Land Grant Company during the Colfax County War, the sometimes violent struggle between land grant interests and longtime settlers in the area. In 1875, he ran for the territorial Legislature and won a controversial victory. Shortly afterward, his opponent in the bitter election was murdered. Mills and several cohorts narrowly escaped a lynch mob and later underwent investigation by a Taos grand jury. No indictments were returned, however, and the crime remained unsolved. Later, when the railroad bypassed Cimarron, Mills relocated to Springer, where he married and prospered, investing judiciously in various businesses and gaining appointments as district attorney for Colfax, Mora, Rio Arriba and Taos counties. In the 1880's, he acquired land in the area now known as Mills Canyon and began his greatest venture, the Orchard Ranch, a massive, state of the art farming and livestock operation that quickly became a phenomenal success. At its height, the Orchard Ranch stretched for miles along the river bottom and included orchards with thousands of fruit and nut trees, acres of vegetable gardens, an extensive irrigation system, numerous structures, roads, and a cargo tramway running from canyon floor to rim, 800 feet above. Contemporary accounts include stories of peaches 5 inches in diameter and descriptions of long caravans of produce wagons filing up the steep canyon road toward the railhead at Springer. By the turn-of-the-century New Mexico standards, Melvin Mills qualified as a genuine tycoon. But the good fortune that had followed Mills all his life eventually deserted him. A single catastrophe signaled the beginning of the end for the Orchard Ranch: the massive floods of October 1904. Prolonged rains on the Canadian's drainage basin that fall caused the river to rise dramatically, 70 feet in three days by some accounts. The high water wreaked havoc on the agricultural operation in the canyon bottom, destroying the orchards, fields and irrigation system, and burying what remained under a thick blanket of silt. The river, which had provided the fertile soil and irrigation water that allowed this small empire to flourish, took most of it away in a few days. This disaster sank Mills into debt from which he never recovered. For the next few years, he made efforts to resurrect the farming operation in the canyon, but finally, his debts overwhelmed him just as the 1904 flood had, and his holdings were lost to the bank. Mills died a pauper in 1925 at the age of 80, and his accomplishments faded into obscurity, as lost to local memory as his unmarked grave in the Springer cemetery.
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(c) Mary Helen Garrison |
