In January 1841, Guadalupe Miranda of Santa Fe and Charles Beaubien of Taos petitioned Governor Manuel Armijo for possession of a large tract of land east of Taos along the Cimarron and Canadian Rivers, extending westward to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Beaubien, a French Canadian, had come to New Mexico in 1823 and by 1841 was a wealthy merchant in Taos. It is not surprising that he formed a partnership with Guadalupe Miranda. Miranda, born in Chihuahua, had held several important positions in New Mexico, but the one of interest to Beaubien was Miranda’s current position as Governor Armijo’s private secretary. Therefore, it was also not surprising that Armijo took only three days to award the land grant to Beaubien and Arimijo’s colleague and secretary, Guadalupe Miranda. In February 1843 Beaubien and Miranda took official possession of the grant and immediately deeded Governor Armijo one-fourth interest in the land, which insured the latter’s support against future conflicting claims. They also deeded one-fourth interest to Taos trader Charles Bent in exchange for his supervising colonization efforts on the grant.
Soon thereafter Father Antonio José Martínez of Taos protested against the granting of the vast lands to two foreigners, Beaubien and Bent. He stated, with the support of Taos Pueblo leaders, that the grant illegally included traditional communal grazing and hunting lands of the Pueblo. He also stated that the grant was detrimental to the Hispanic people of the Taos area and that the lands should be available to poor farmers for grazing. Here began the first of many conflicts in the history of the Maxwell land grant between the needs of small farmers and the aims of large entrepreneurs. By February 1844 Armijo had been replaced as governor by Mariano Chavez who was no friend of foreign entrepreneurs. Chavez suspended the grant, but in April acting governor Felipe Sena re-considered the case. Beaubien falsely denied that Bent was a partner, and the Departmental Assembly re-instated the grant, again placing Beaubien and his associates in possession. The next month the new governor Mariano Martínez again denied the grant on the basis of an 1842 law which prohibited foreigners from owning land in departments bordering another country. A new governor in May 1845 ruled that foreigners could own and settle on the grant, and in November 1845 Manuel Armijo returned to the post of governor and renewed his previous support of Beaubien and Miranda.
Meanwhile in 1843 Beaubien, in the name of his thirteen-year-old son Narciso and his son-in-law Stephen L. Lee, a trapper from St. Louis, increased the size of his already large land holdings by successfully petitioning for the Sangre de Cristo grant in the San Luis valley. Beaubien later sold this grant to Governor William Gilpin of Colorado. The American occupation of 1846 tragically presented Charles Beaubien with a new situation. First, two of his partners in the Beaubien-Miranda land grant, Guadalupe Miranda and Governor Manuel Armijo, had with the coming of the Americans moved to Mexico. Then in January 1847, his son Narciso, son-in-law Stephen L. Lee, and Governor Charles Bent were all killed by members of the Taos Rebellion, a response in opposition to the American occupation. Beaubien himself most likely would also have been murdered but he was away from Taos at the time of the rebellion.
Beaubien continued to want to develop the grant, and he turned to another son-in-law, Lucien Maxwell, to assist him. Maxwell, a former Taos trapper born in Illinois in 1818, helped establish Beaubien’s ranch on the grant and served as its manager for ten years. At the same time he was instrumental in founding the community of Rayado, twelve miles south of present-day Cimarron. One of the first settlers of Rayado in 1849 was Maxwell’s friend and colleague on the Fremont expeditions, Christopher (Kit) Carson. Rayado was frequently attacked by Ute, Jicarilla Apache, and Cheyenne Indians, and during several periods in the early 1850s U. S. Army troops were stationed there to protect the settlers. In 1857 Maxwell moved his headquarters to the present site of Cimarron where he established a store close to the Cimarron route from Bent’s Fort to Taos. The same year Beaubien and Miranda received conditional approval for their grant from New Mexico Surveyor General William Pelham, and the next year Miranda, now living in Mexico, sold his share to Lucien Maxwell.
