Test Source — Pinos Altos founding (Phase 2 smoke test)

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Pinos Altos sits in the foothills of the Pinos Altos Range in northern Grant County, New Mexico. Gold was discovered in Bear Creek in 1860 by a party of prospectors led by Birch, Hicks, and Snively, drawing several thousand miners to the area within a year. The camp's population briefly rivaled that of Mesilla before Apache resistance and the outbreak of the Civil War scattered most of the inhabitants. The Battle of Pinos Altos was fought on September 27, 1861, when a force of roughly four hundred Apache warriors under Mangas Coloradas and Cochise attacked the small settlement. The defenders, numbering perhaps thirty men, held the line at a fortified store owned by Samuel J. Bean, repelling the attack after several hours of close-quarters fighting. The engagement is sometimes counted as the southernmost battle of the Civil War, though it predated the formal Confederate Arizona campaign. By 1866 the camp had largely emptied. A second wave of mining revived Pinos Altos in the early 1870s, when Roy Bean briefly operated a saloon there before his eventual relocation to Texas. The Hearst Mining Company, owned by George Hearst, acquired the principal claims in 1882 and operated them through the 1890s.