[10] In 1541 Spanish conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado's expedition passed through the area searching for gold,[11] on its way to Cicuye Pueblo, later called Pecos, 30 miles to the west.

[9] During the early 1700s, the Jicarilla Apache followed a bi-seasonal mobility pattern, living on the plains during the warmer months and returning to the eastern foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains during the winter.

[15] In 1823, wealthy sheepherder Don Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca was granted 500,000 acres of land for himself and his 17 sons including the present-day Montezuma Hot Springs.

[10] The Las Vegas colonists were well-positioned to engage in trade with Santa Fe Trail travelers, and in 1840, they established a second community, Plaza de Arriba known as upper town or San Antonio, three miles to the north, closer to the hot springs.

[17] Brothers Julian and Antonio Donaldson petitioned the local alcalde, or government official in Las Vegas, for the site of the Montezuma Hot Springs, and received a grant of the property in 1841.

[4] The same year, the Jicarilla Apache officially lost most of their homeland, as the Mexican government granted 1.7 million acres to Charles Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda.

[18] From that time, the Donaldson brothers' small bathhouse at the Montezuma hot springs, accessible for a fee,[4] was five miles from a national road connecting the established United States to its new southwest territories, booming with commercial freight, stagecoach travel and military freight to supply southwestern forts,[18] and traffic on the trail increased exponentially.

[9] It increased military presence along the Santa Fe Trail, and established Fort Union 33 miles northeast of the Montezuma Hot Springs in 1851.

[4] During the Civil War, soldiers at Fort Union fought the Confederacy at the Battle of Glorieta, and then continued the U.S. campaign against Native people in the area, relocating them onto reservations.

Moore bought the hot springs and ran an establishment called The Adobe Hotel, where Jesse James and Billy the Kid spent three days as guests in July 1879.

[21] With the arrival of the railroad, the focus of the soldiers at Fort Union was no longer on protecting the Santa Fe Trail and was solely on removing Native people from the area and forcing them onto reservations.

[4] In 1882 Agua Pura, a company associated with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, built a dam on the Gallinas River, just above the Montezuma Hot Springs, to create a small reservoir allowing water to be piped into homes and to fire hydrants in Las Vegas.

[10] The railroad ran a nine-mile spur line from Las Vegas, along the area that is now Cinder Road,[10] past the hot springs two miles to the reservoir.

A 1901 railroad publication stated that guests could skate in midwinter on the ponds of the Gallinas in the perpetual shade of the canyon walls while at the same time ladies sat on the open veranda of the hotel sewing with their bare hands.

[10] The railroad spur also brought tourists to Montezuma,[2] and in 1881 and 1882, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway built the first of three large hotels on the site.

[22] At the time, railroads were designing luxury vacation destination resorts in naturally appealing settings along their lines that would create a symbiotic relationship between rail and hotel.

[5] It was designed in the Queen Anne style, a blend of Gothic and Elizabethan elements characteristic of American resorts near mineral springs and seashores, by Kansas firm Jerome, Rice, Moore & Emory,[5] and cost $150,000 to build.

Chicago architects Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root chose a location on a hill well above the bathhouses and landscaped area, commanding ample sunlight and a view of the valley below.

[4] The floor plan allowed for several hours of natural light in each of the hotel's 300[4] rooms daily, and the structure was one of the few buildings in the United States supplied with pressurized water.

The floor of the amphitheater is occupied by a pretty lawn of several acres, with firm turf, primeval pines, seats, flower-beds, and tennis and croquet grounds, while the steep slope up to the hotel is tastily parked with winding drives and walks.

[31] Montezuma also had a telegraph and telephone station, a railroad ticket office, and a public school managed by the hotel, for the children of guests.

[4][23] Ten miles of electric railway extended between the Montezuma Hot Springs and the Castaneda Hotel in East Las Vegas, New Mexico.

[23] Nonetheless, as business at the Montezuma Hotel was very slow by then, the trolley lines were mainly used for transporting ice on freight cars drawn by an electric locomotive, until the service ended in 1906.

Pierce, President of the board of the State Penitentiary in Santa Fe and also superintendent of the Agua Pura Company of Las Vegas, assigned 20 convicts to work on the road using black powder blasting.

[17] Around the same time, the Agua Pura Company built Peterson Dam, capable of storing 60 million gallons of water, above Montezuma.

To build the flume, workmen crawled along the face of the cliff on ten-inch planks supported by spikes driven into holes drilled into the granite wall.

[20] The college limited its immediate effort to making the Montezuma Castle weathertight, replacing broken windows, repairing the roof, and sprucing up the lobby for the dedication ceremonies in October 1982.

[20] In 1998, the White House Millennium Council designated the Montezuma Castle as one of America's Treasures, the first property west of the Mississippi River to receive this honor.

[20] Shelby Davis, the globally-minded philanthropist who endowed much of the project, accepted an outpouring of gratitude from UWC-USA students representing 83 nations and dressed in traditional costumes.

[38] Firefighters were able to save the community from the fire, but the Gallinas River, which serves as the water source for Las Vegas and some of Montezuma, suffers from ash and turbidity due to the burn scar in its watershed.