North Commercial Street Tour
This was the route of the Santa Fe Trail wagons that chose to rest beside the river before tackling Raton Pass. Notably, you’ll see Holy Trinity Catholic Church, whose graceful spire enhances the city skyline, a once-important brewery built in Italian Tuscan style by a man named Schneider, the second oldest building still standing in Trinidad, the river itself with the interesting legend about its full name, The River of Lost Souls in Purgatory, and Firehouse No. 1 that was also city hall and the town jail.
No doubt, the two routes of the Santa Fe Trail did not join in the neat gridiron manner that Main and Commercial now have. Probably, the trail up to what is now Commercial curved right through the grand lobby of the Columbian and somewhere along that curve stood the first hostlery on this site, pre-dating The Columbian by 10 years or more. “Red” Bransford had her boarding house there and it was infested by some eye-opening characters, including “Red” herself. She was a handsome woman with flashing eyes and black hair parted in the middle and pulled back into a bun. An Oglala Sioux, she was sister to Chief Red Cloud and was married to one of Trinidad’s most beloved citizens, “Uncle Billy” Bransford. He was Trinidad’s postmaster and since there was no post office, carried the mail around in his hat. You had to track him down. He had made a large fortune, most of which he gave away to those in need. His epigraph reads, “Here lies the noblest work of God, an honest man.”
And then there was Judge Spruce M. Baird, an attorney, who for some reason often wore his bright red flannel underwear on the outside of his clothing. And Jabez M. Fisher, Jr., a short little man with a spinal injury who went around with a pillow strapped across his rear end. And George Simpson, a mountain man and scout who traded his fringed buckskins for a Prince Albert coat and other fineries he felt more suitable after he opened Trinidad’s first stationery store. He walked around reading a book but laid it aside (for a small fee) to write business and personal letters for the illiterate. And there was “Uncle Dick” Wootton, described as “200 pounds of hard muscle with a shock of bristling hair to match” who had settled down with his fourth wife, a 13-year-old, and built a toll road over Raton Pass, sometimes collecting his fee at the point of a gun. He was genial, boisterous, and shrewd. And then there was John Stokes, a driver for Barlow-Sanderson, who was so big that when he sat in the stagecoach driver’s seat, he looked like he was standing up. It was quite the town.
