Kyle Harrison
concept

Catron County

Catron County

One-line: The largest county in New Mexico by area (~7,000 sq mi) and one of its emptiest (~3,500–3,800 residents) — the county Luna sits in, in the state’s southwestern corner near the Arizona line.

The containing place for Luna, New Mexico and the geographic frame for the The Luna Landing program’s land / water / tourism research. Where county-level context (hydrology, forests, governance, economy) aggregates.

What we know

  • Largest NM county by area (~7,000 sq mi, bigger than four U.S. states) and one of the emptiest (~3,500–3,800 residents) (source: Water in Catron County).
  • The Continental Divide runs through it, splitting it between the Lower Colorado River Basin (west — Gila, San Francisco, Tularosa rivers) and the Rio Grande Basin (east), plus closed interior basins like the Plains of San Agustin (source: Water in Catron County).
  • Reserve is the county seat (grew out of the 1870s “Frisco” / San Francisco Plaza Hispanic settlements); the name “Reserve” comes from the surrounding forest reserves — Gila, Apache, Cibola national forests (source: Water in Catron County).
  • Settled in three overlapping 1880s waves — mining (Mogollon, Cooney), Hispanic acequia farming, and Mormon settlement at Luna (1883); ranching became and remains the dominant land use (source: Water in Catron County).
  • Created February 25, 1921, carved out of Socorro County, and named for Thomas B. Catron (1840–1921), the land lawyer who became one of New Mexico’s first two U.S. Senators at statehood — he died three months after the county took his name (source: Wikipedia, Catron County, New Mexico; Thomas B. Catron). Anything in this country before 1921 is a Socorro County record.
  • Pre-county landmarks: Fort Tularosa stood near the present-day town of Aragon, which was formerly called Tularosa and also Joseph; the mining town of Cooney was named for Sgt. James Cooney, killed near his Mogollon claims in the Apache raid of April 1880 (source: Catron County Historical Society, Centennial History Part 2, April 2022).
  • The Frisco shootout — Elfego Baca against a mob of Texas cowboys for roughly 33 hours — happened at what is now Reserve in December 1884 (source: Wikipedia, Frisco shootout).
  • Ranching, and the county’s largest outfit. The Slaughter Ranch, later branded the V+T, was the largest ranch ever to operate here and the county’s main employer, headquartered at the present-day Adobe Ranch and spilling into Socorro and Sierra Counties; homesteading and the range wars ended it. The Frank A. Hubbell family ran sheep at Horse Springs, on ground now part of the Y Ranch (source: Catron County Historical Society, Centennial History Part 3, April 2022).
  • Pie Town, in the north of the county, was photographed by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration in 1940 — the most complete visual record of this country in the Depression.
  • Water-constrained and drought-prone: structural scarcity, an interstate surface-water cap since 1964, and the 2000–present Southwestern Megadrought — see Water in Catron County for the full 140-year history.

Where it shows up

(auto-populated by lint)

Referenced in