Named for Felipe Baca, a pioneer settler in Trinidad, this county (1889) forms the southeast corner of the state, bordering on Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. Sanora Babb, who wrote of her 1920s childhood here in
An Owl on Every Post (1970), observed: “While other parts of the United States moved swiftly ahead, the hopeful or desperate people who filed claims on these high western grazing lands were plunged a hundred years backward in our history, to live and struggle again like the early settlers.…”

One of the counties hardest hit by the droughts that created the Dust Bowl, Baca has never really recovered. The number of post offices has dropped from forty-nine to ten. “We have more ghost towns here than up in the mountains,” one inhabitant explained, “but we don't have the remains. They mostly blowed away, burned up, or got plowed under.”