Eagle Nest
Last time, I had us at the Vietnam War Memorial on the road from Taos. We were there for an hour or so, maybe two, and then headed out, continuing north. We made our way through yet more foliage and yet more mountains, and soon we were at the town of Eagle Nest.(1)
There wasn’t much to it, actually. It is quite small. According to its Wikipedia entry, it is just about five square miles in size (that’s 13 square kilometers for the metric types in the audience), and a population of just about 290. It is attractive. We found ourselves in a village made of some medium-sized commercial buildings and a great many private residences. These ranged from single-family dwellings to vacation homes (some quite fancy) to the ubiquitous double wides.
About the photos: I was astonished to realize that I had almost no photographs of Eagle Nest. Fortunately, I did find one on Wikimedia. This is a shot of downtown by user Davishan99, who makes it available under a Creative Commons license, specifically: Davishan99, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. You may find the image here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eagle_Nest.JPG
Second, here’s Martha making a face while being a bit exasperated with her camera-happy husband. We were at breakfast in Albuquerque.
Third, and finally, Martha being a bit more cooperative with the aforesaid camera-happy husband in Winfield, Kansas back in 2024.
There is a large lake just outside town--The Eagle Nest Lake -- and we learned that this was really the heart of the community. (More about the Lake, and the dam which makes it possible, in future.)
I guess I had always assumed that Eagle Nest was a ski town. After all, the Angel Fire and Taos ski areas are just a hop, skip, and jump away, and the Colorado border is only a few miles away.
But, in fact, there is no skiing done here (at least not alpine) and relatively few people come here to stay while they are schussbooming down hills in the Taos area. The real draw, I’m told, is the lake itself. It is a popular destination (in summer) for camping, sightseeing, swimming, and most of all fishing. In winter, meanwhile, it is (forgive the feeble pun) an ice fishing hotspot.
That’s what the vacation homes, lodges, and hotels are here for. They cater to the angling crew.
However...
It wasn’t always like that. Once upon a time, this was a very different place. ‘Fact is, it was a kind of a hell-raising town.
To explain that, I’ve got to go way back. Originally, Eagle Nest, which was then called Therma, was just a little farming community up in the New Mexican northlands. I’m guessing it also shared a bit in the prosperity of the mining industry. There was a gold rush here in the 1860s. Just ten miles north of Eagle Nest there’s a ghost city, Elizabethtown, NM, which was a booming mining center at the time.(2)
It was also a pretty nasty place by all accounts. Lots of gold, but lots of shooting, fighting, corruption, killing, and mob violence to go along with it. The town even had its very own serial killer, Charles Kennedy, who ran a rest house/inn in the area. Travelers tended to stay at his house on the journeys to and from the area. The problem was some of them didn’t check out again. Finally, he was exposed as a mass killer and neatly hanged by the local lynch mob in the pursuit of its self-appointed duties.(3)
Elizabethtown continued on as a center of the mining industry, as well as a place of vice and frequent violence for several years. It sounds like the kind of town that would have made the Barbary Coast look like a Sunday School outing.(4) But, then mines eventually turned unprofitable, and the “E-town” withered away. By 1917, it was only a memory.
At about the same time, two wealthy ranchers in the area, Frank Springer and Charles Springer, entered the picture. They were both members of the same family, obviously, (I believe they were cousins) and sometimes they worked together. But not all the time. Charles was a lawyer and later a statesman, a big name in New Mexico politics. Frank was a rancher and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, something of a gun slinger. It was a useful combination of skills.
For a variety of reasons, one of their (kinda rare) joint efforts was to build a dam on the Cimarron River. The two boys worked together on this one...one of them dealing with the territorial government in Santa Fe, the other quietly removing local opposition with a minimum of fuss.
Eventually, there it was, the Eagle Nest Dam, 140 feet high and 400 feet long. According to Wikipedia, “It is considered the largest privately built dam in the United States.” (5) Oh, and much of the labor was provided by folks from Taos Pueblo.
Anyway, the Lake grew and attracted visitors. The town of Therma was renamed after the Lake.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Except...except...for one thing that kind of stood outside of history.
To wit...the Roaring 20s.
More to come.
Footnotes:
1. My primary source on Eagle Nest is “Eagle Nest, New Mexico,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nest,_New_Mexico
2. “Elizabethtown, New Mexico,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabethtown,_New_Mexico
3. For more on Mr. Kennedy’s rise and then final fall, see New Mexico Nomad, “Charles Kennedy | Serial Killer on the Taos Trail,” New Mexico Nomad, May 25, 2025, https://newmexiconomad.com/charles-kennedy/
4. For more on Elizabethtown’s remarkable history, see New Mexico Nomad, “Elizabethtown,” New Mexico Nomad, accessed January 8, 2026, https://newmexiconomad.com/elizabethtown/
Elizabethtown was also the center of full-scale range war, the Colfax County War, which killed at least 200 people. For more on the war see “Colfax County War,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colfax_County_War
5. “Eagle Nest Dam,“ Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nest_Dam
And the name? Apparently eagles really did nest on the side of the dam at one point.
~~~
Copyright©2026 Michael Jay Tucker
Care to help out?
I provide these blog postings for free. That’s fine and I’m happy to do so. But, long ago and far away, I was told that if you give away your material, that means you don’t really think it has any value.
So, to get beyond that, I’ve decided to make it possible for you to leave me a “tip” for my posts.
If you like what I write or the videos I produce, and feel you could make a small contribution to support my efforts, please go here:
That will take you to a Gumroad page where you’ll have the option of leaving me a few pence by way of encouragement.
Again, I don’t mind if you don’t. I just want to provide you with the option so that I won’t feel quite so much like I’m just tossing my works into the wind.
Either way, thanks hugely for dropping by the blog :-)
~mjt
#StampOutEnnui #MichaelJayTucker #MarthaTucker #MarthaAndMichaelChronicles #StompEnnuiLikeItWasABug #explosive_cargo #Xcargo #StampOutEnnui #MichaelJayTucker #MarthaTucker #MarthaAndMichaelChronicles #StompEnnuiLikeItWasABug #explosive_cargo #Xcargo #Saint_Michael #Michael_The_Archangel #NewMexico #Taos #Albuquerque #SantaFe #Kiva_fireplace #Ski_Area #Taos_Ski_Area #Nicolai_Fechin #Fechin_House #Eya_Fechin #Taos_Art_Museum #Vietnam_Veterans_Memorial_(New_Mexico) #Angel_Fire #Eagle_Nest
Comments