The flat-topped mountain visible between the buildings when looking south on Commercial Street was an important landmark for wagon trains on the Mountain Route of the Santa Fe Trail, guiding them to the foot of Raton Pass. The mountain is called Fisher's Peak, though the name may be inaccurate. Geologically, the Peak and Raton Mesa behind it are erosional remnants protected by a cap of hard basalt, a lava flow that solidified almost 8 million years ago when all this land was level with the Peak. Since then, erosion has lowered the rest of the landscape, and the Peak now looms over Trinidad. Controversy over the mountain's name grew out of the Maxwell Land Grant, whose northeast corner was marked by Fisher's Peak. The land grant owners claimed this flat-topped mountain, though many pioneers testified that it was actually Raton Peak and that Fisher's Peak was a small conical mountain near the New Mexico Border. The case was appealed twice to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1887 and reconfirmed in 1895 in favor of the land grant company, giving it an additional 260,000 acres. This left many homesteaders west of here, including some with titles from the U.S. Land Office, with the bitter choice of leaving or buying their land from the Maxwell Land Grant Company. The U.S. Geological Survey officially named the mountain Fisher's Peak.