Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell, whom I refer to as “The Real Mr. New Mexico” was possibly named after the first prince of Canino and Musignano, Lucien Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon. Maxwell owned almost 2 million acres through Spanish land grants, and it needed to be developed, worked and populated. He was called the boss of Cimarron and was indeed the real Mr. New Mexico.
Lucien Maxwell was born into a wealthy and successful family on September 14th 1818 at Kaskaskia, Illinois. He was one of 9 siblings. His father, Hugh Maxwell, was of Irish descent and his Mother, Odile Menard was of French-Canadian descent. Lucien’s grandfather Pierre Menard, was the first lieutenant governor of the state of Illinois. A cousin, Michael Branamour Menard, established a trading post that eventually grew into Galveston, Texas. His family was a huge success. Lucien wanted to prove himself. He may not have known where he was going, but fate blazed a trail and lit a lantern for him.
Maxwell set out on his own at age 17 heading west and dressed for success…
He soon found work, hunting and trapping for John Fremont’s expeditions and American fur company. This occupation is where he became friends with Kit Carson. During the hunting trips Maxwell ventured into the southwest which at that time was still Mexico. He met Maria de la Luz Beaubien at Taos, fell in love and was married in 1844.
A couple years after the wedding, Luz’s father Charles Beaubien and an investor named Guadalupe Miranda, were granted a large lot of land in Northern New Mexico. It also stretched into southern Colorado. It was Precisely 1,714,765 acres. In 1848 Beaubien lost interest in developing the new area and turned the project over to his son in law Lucien Maxwell. Maxwell’s success would be stunning.
Lucien and his friend Kit Carson built homes and started the town of Rayado. This was near the Rayado River on the southern portion of the land grant. Eventually hundreds of settlers made their homes along the waterways of the 1.7 million acres. Thousands of cattle and sheep were aso moved onto the land grant. Large fields of grains and vegetables were planted, farmed and harvested. The development was a huge success. Maxwell earned total respect from Beaubian and Miranda.
The ranchers would farm the land, raise stock and would make small payments to Maxwell on a share type basis. One man tasked with managing the ranches for Maxwell was Buffalo Bill Cody.
The people loved Maxwell, as he was caring, passionate and grateful. Maxwell didn’t mind enjoying the fruits of his labor. One thing he loved was keeping the best of the animals, always upgrading his personal stock of cattle, horses, sheep and goats. Eventually he had all the best of the best, including a fast set of race horses which he later enjoyed racing and gambling on.
By the early 1850s New Mexico territory became part of the United States and the Army established a post at Rayado. Maxwell rented out his home and some property to the soldiers for $200 a month. Maxwell then built a second home in the area and moved his family in. It was a large Mexican-style house around a large Courtyard and contained 16 rooms.  Lucien and his wife, Luz, were graced with 9 children. Pedro, Maria Guadalupe, Emilia, Maria Sofia, Verenisa, Paulita, Virginia, Maria Leonar and Odila. Lucien also had an illegitimate child with an unidentified native American woman. The child’s name was William Julian Maxwell and was born on October 7, 1858. The Maxwells would also take in an adopted daughter named Deluvina. 
In 1857, Maxwell bought Guadalupe Miranda’s interest in the grant for a sum of $2,745. The next year in 1858 Maxwell at 40 years young moved his family to start yet another new town. It was just 10 miles to the north to a place that they would later name Cimarron.
For the duration of the Civil War, (1861-65) the Maxwells supplied beef and produce to the soldiers at Fort Union.
Maxwell had a large gristmill built. The mill was capable of grinding 15,000 pounds of wheat per day. The mill provided jobs and supplied flour for the army at Fort Union.
The Indian agency of the Ute tribe was established at Maxwell’s Ranch in Cimarron and the government detailed a company of cavalry to camp there. Maxwell distributed supplies to the tribes, for which he was compensated by the federal government. Maxwell also acted as an Indian Agent.
The Ute tribe had a female they had captured from another tribe. Her name was Deluvina and she would be taken under Maxwell’s care. She would be known as Deluvina Maxwell from then on. She was very grateful and she served the Maxwells the rest of her life.
In 1864 Charles Beaubien died. The Maxwell’s inherited his land grant. Afterwards, Maxwell bought out all the other shareholders’ land and then owned the entire Grant.
Maxwell became a successful rancher, farmer, merchant and has proven to be a great leader. He had 1,000 horses, 10,000 cattle, and 40,000 sheep at the time. The Maxwells were also blessed with 2 more children, Paulita and Odilia. Life and the location at Cimarron was perfect. There was fresh mountain water, and plenty of firewood. Maxwell was highly respected here also, William Walker a stonemason recalls, “Maxwell’s disposition was to do what was right by everybody, and to treat everybody right. The Mexican people, men, women and children, and even the tribes, all called him father.”
Maxwell built a mansion as big as a city block. The house stood on a shaded plateau and was said to have had high, molded ceilings, deep and thick carpets, velvet drapes, paintings in gold frames, and four pianos, two for each floor. The mansion housed a hotel, gambling rooms, a saloon, dance hall, billiard parlor and a special area for the “ladies of the eve”. Maxwell housed a large force of servants. The servants were made up of a diverse mixture of humans.
Frequent visitor Colonel Henry Inman, who was stationed at Fort Union, wrote that “a retinue of servants” tended men and women in two separate dining rooms”, William Ryus recalls “tables thick with solid silver serving dishes were set daily for about 30 persons. Everyone who traveled the trail’s mountain route knew the name Lucien Maxwell.”
“His power was just as if he owned the whole outfit,” recalled longtime employee Calvin Jones. “But if a servant didn’t suit him or did anything against his orders, he took a board or plank or anything he could get hold of and whipped him with it. He generally ran his own court. A couple of men broke into his storeroom one night and took almost two hundred dollars worth of goods and started south, when their horses gave out, one was going to Rayado and one back to the house. When they found the man who had the goods, they brought him back to Cimarron. Maxwell took a big log chain weighing about forty pounds and a padlock and locked it around his neck…locked him to a block down in the cellar for forty-six hours.”
As wagons from the Santa Fe trail crossed the Cimarron River on the eastern slopes of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, travelers of the trail were in dire need of rest and Maxwell’s ranch and settlement would provide and heal.
There were a few disturbances such as shootings in the bar and gambling rooms of Maxwell’s house. The trouble makers were quickly removed. Maxwell would not tolerate scum.
As hospitality became very busy for Maxwell he convinced his friend and best cook to open an establishment to take some of the load off. The cook was Henri Lambert, and he would open a very popular hotel/saloon called the Lambert Inn, later known as the St. James Hotel.
Maxwell already knew about the gold on his land and needed to figure out plans for it. Gold was in every creek and gulch by Baldy mountain. Maxwell offered to sell the land to the United States government for the use of a reservation for the Ute tribe. This was to keep out newcomers but they declined.
It actually hit the fan when a tribe member from the Ute arrived at Fort Union with a handful of very colorful ones in the fall of 1866. He was looking to trade the rocks for winter supplies. Captain Moore recognized that the rocks were copper ore and had negotiated with the Ute man which included being led to where the ore was found. After leading three army prospectors from Fort Union, it was discovered that there was copper and gold at Baldy mountain. Supposedly the prospectors and the captain took an oath of secrecy…but by the time spring of 1867 came around there were hundreds or maybe thousands of miners swarming the Moreno valley. Elizabethtown boomed up and it was like a dream come true for Maxwell to be able to manage and control growth on his property. However the size and quickness of the influx, stressed Maxwell out.
Many miners brought their families and came to Maxwell’s land to settle. Maxwell reluctantly accepted the situation and had to rethink how he would profit from the newcomers. He didn’t want a bunch of strangers just coming to eat and run so to speak with all the gold from his mountain. He came up with the plan and charged Squatters a usage fee and a cut of each claim. He also charged miners a dollar per month for a 500 ft section, and $12 per year in advance for a placer or gulch claim, and 50% of the proceeds of a lode claim. Maxwell invested in resources and plenty of equipment for production. Maxwell had a 40 mile ditch dug that provided water for placer mining. He blazed a toll road through Cimarron canyon and leased some land for a toll road over Raton pass to Trinidad. These roads were necessary for the transportation to get the gold out of the valley into Trinidad Colorado. Soon a stagecoach route was made and arrived in the spring of 1868 with daily service between Elizabethtown and Cimarron. The route was a success and then added lines from Taos to Santa Fe.
Things began to change and at a fast pace. Maxwell’s wealth now increased significantly. Rumors say his children played with gold as toys. Another man saw at least 30,000 dollars in a drawer at the Maxwell palace including gold and silver. Maxwell once commented that he would hate to see what would happen to someone if they were caught stealing from him.
Another mining town, Virginia City boomed up on Maxwell’s land grant.
Maxwell pocketed his share for the first 14 months of that operation; he came out with 550 pounds of gold worth nearly $175,000 at that time. He sold claims and goods to miners and then built a few sawmills. More towns and railroads were being constructed which made Maxwell’s land grant a very desirable place to live and eventually the population of the land grant grew to about 90,000.
The boss of Cimarron then decided maybe it was time to cash in. Maxwell decided to sell his Grant and within a year the sale was completed. Maxwell then had $600,000 more dollars to add to his pile. That’s just $13.5 million in today’s money. About a month later the Maxwells sold their Cimarron house and the remainder of the Colfax County property for 125,000. Just after his 52nd birthday Maxwell purchased $150,000 in government bonds to capitalize the first national Bank of Santa Fe. He also invested $250,000 in the Texas Pacific railroad which he later lost.
In October 1870 Maxwell spent $5,000 to buy the buildings and properties on the abandoned army Fort at Fort Sumner, about 200 miles south of Cimarron. A couple hundred others also relocated with the Maxwells to Fort Sumner and was re-established as a community.
But back in Cimarron things were getting ugly. The Santa Fe Ring, a powerful group of politicians and land speculators, called themselves the Maxwell Land Grant and Railway Co. They then evicted people who had worked the land for many years, and the Ute tribes were forced to depart. As a result the locals organized a meeting on March 30th 1873. They agreed to arm themselves to protect their homes and properties. Reverend McMains and Clay Allison were the leaders and a range War started from 1873 to 1888. It was known as the Colfax County War.
At Fort Sumner, the Maxwells renovated the former officers’ quarters into a beautiful Spanish Colonial house, adding a second floor. It surrounded a large inner courtyard.
Fort Sumner included a corral, store houses and stables that had great grass and the free open range to the south and east. The Pecos river was on the southern perimeter and irrigation ditches were already in place, Ft. Sumner promised a good ranching opportunity. Despite Fort Sumner not having the best water and scarce on firewood it did provide enough ingredients for a market for beef. This could be why Maxwell invested in the railroad to get the cattle into the Midwest packing companies. The railroad T and P went bankrupt due to mismanagement and construction problems. Maxwell still had success in raising superior beef.
On November 21st 1870 the Maxwells became grandparents. Their daughter Virginia married lieutenant Alexander Keys and had a child.
Maxwell still had buddies from up north and had been meeting them in Las Vegas, which was about 100 miles to the north at a popular meeting place for all the cattle barons from southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. All such occasions were in the name of a big poker game.
Maxwell died at Old Fort Sumner on July 25th 1875, of possible kidney failure. He was just 56 years old and is buried in the Post Cemetery at Old Fort Sumner.
After Maxwell’s death his son Pete took over his affairs. He hired Pat Garrett to work the ranch and was soon after fired. Many others worked for Pete such as Charlie Bowdre who also rented a home for him and his wife. A frequent visitor and friend of the family was Billy the kid. Billy was allegedly shot and killed in the old Maxwell home by Pat Garrett. Although it isn’t too hard to consider the Maxwells were a wealthy well respected family, who liked Billy. Did Luz help Billy in any way? Billy’s grave is in the old Fort Sumner cemetery alongside his Pals Tom and Charlie. Not far from Lucien’s grave.
Maxwell’s wife Luz had a large number of sheep holdings, 17,000 to be approximate. In 1884 the New England cattle company bought her ranching operation and she moved into the new Fort Sumner area known then as Sunnyside into a wood frame adobe house that apparently still stands .
Luz Maxwell died on July 13th 1900. The Abreu family owned the house until 1979. If you drive the road out of new Sumner.
If you are in Sumner and are going on the road towards Santa Rosa, just under the underpass if you pull into the community center on the right and look west. That is where Sunnyside once was. 

Off an old dirt road south of the “new” Fort Sumner is where you will find the remains of Old Fort Sumner. Most of its structures were washed away by flooding. Sometime around 1950 a memorial was put up in Maxwell’s honor at Fort Sumner. There is also a statue honoring Maxwell at Cimarron.