On Walkabout On: The Organ Mountain’s Dripping Springs Trail – Part 2

Prior Posting: Dripping Springs Trail – Part 1
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As my wife and I continued down the Dripping Springs Trail in New Mexico’s Organ Mountains, the high rocky peaks of this great mountain range towered over us as we approached them:

The trail entered into a scenic valley at the base of the rocky peaks where the trail’s namesake, the Dripping Springs could be seen:

The spring was living up to its name because all it was doing was dripping.  You can see in the picture that at the base of the spring a retaining wall was built to collect water.  This wall was built in 1892 by Eugen Van Patten to provide water for his nearby Dripping Springs Hotel.  After all these years his wall is still standing though it has since been filled with sediment and no longer holds any water:

Here is how Dripping Springs looks when there is enough rain to make the waterfall flow:

I hope I get to see the waterfall flow like that one day.  Anyway just a short walk further up the trail is the ruins of the old resort that once operated here:

The Dripping Springs Resort was built in 1870’s by Eugene Van Patten:

Van Patten first came out west from New York in the late 1850’s when John Butterfield invited him to come work for his company the Butterfield Stage Line.  When the Civil War broke out Van Patten joined the Confederacy as a Colonel and fought in the Battle of Glorieta Pass near Santa Fe. In 1872 Van Patten returned to Las Cruces bought the land at the base of the mountain and began constructing a 14 room resort.  The resort was constructed at an altitude of 6,000 feet, which was 2,000 feet higher than Las Cruces.  Van Patten was married to a local Piro Indian girl and employed a number of boys from this tribe to work at the hotel.  The boys brought water every day from Dripping Springs for the hotel guests to use.

Reservoir above the resort that also collected water for the guests to use.

The boys also put on Indian dancing shows at night for the guests.  Initially Van Patten had much success with his resort and in 1906 he expanded the hotel to include another 18 more rooms.  Over the years a number of famous people stayed at the resort such as Pat Garret and Pancho Villa.

As I passed this outhouse I couldn’t help, but wonder whether Pancho Villa ever took a crap here?

According to this posting on the El Paso Community College website, Eugene Van Patten was a very well respected member of the Las Cruces community while operating the resort:

At one time, Van Patten owned most of the land on which Las Cruces was built. In an interview, World War II veteran Santiago Brito, 92, nephew of Van Patten’s daughter Emilia, said that Van Patten purchased the land and later sold parcels at low prices to friends and family.

According to a 1949 Las Cruces newspaper article by Joe Priestly, Van Patten gave a large tract of land he had obtained from the federal government to the Pueblo Indians now living in the village of Tortugas located a few miles south of Las Cruces. Brito agreed that Van Patten was always very kind and generous to the local Indians, and Van Patten himself was married to a Piro Indian.

Van Patten provided funds for the first Catholic Church in Las Cruces as well as for Loretto Academy , founded in 1870, many years before the school of the same name was established in El Paso. In 1885, he was elected sheriff and later became a U. S. marshal for New Mexico, Arizona and West Texas.

However, by 1917 Van Patten experienced financial difficulties and sold the resort to a Dr. Nathan Boyd who homestead on a piece of land near the resort.  Dr. Boyd studied medicine at Stanford University before moving to Australia to practice medicine there.  Even here in the remote desert of New Mexico an American connection to Australia can be found.

Dr. Boyd’s homestead at Dripping Springs.

In Australia Dr. Boyd married the daughter of a wealthy Australian engineering company.  He and his wife moved to Las Cruces in the 1890’s to promote the building of a dam on the Rio Grande River by his father-in-law’s company.  He bought a parcel of land next to Van Patten’s resort to construct a homestead on while he worked on the dam project.  However, soon after construction of the dam began the company was stopped from proceeding due to complaints filed by local ranchers who’s land would have been inundated by the dam.  After Boyd used up his finances paying lawyers to fight the government to get the dam built, the government went ahead and built the Elephant Butte dam themselves in 1916.  To make matters worse Boyd’s wife came down with tuberculosis.  He decided to the dry air in Las Cruces would be good for his wife and decided to stay and convert the resort into a sanitorium for other sufferers of tuberculosis.

As I got higher up on the rocks I got a better view of the area to include being able to see the trail that leads up into this scenic valley.

Like Van Patten before him, Dr. Boyd suffered further financial difficulties and sold the property in 1922.  The property changed hands a few more times before being bought by a wealthy rancher A.B. Cox in the 1950’s.  The Cox family turned the land into a succesful cattle ranch property, but due to the number of unique species on the property, the government was able to convince the Cox family to sell the land to the Nature Conservancy which eventually sold the land to the Bureau of Land Management in 1988.  Ever since then the land has remained open for the public to enjoy.

With views like this it is great that the public can now enjoy this land like the many resort guests did a hundred years ago:

To access Dripping Springs from Las Cruces just exit I-10 on University Avenue and then follow University Avenue toward the Organ Mountains to reach the recreation area.  A trip to the mountains is definitely one of the top day trips in Las Cruces.