Red River's second founding did not ride in with a gold pan. It arrived in 1936 with a family looking for a living. L.S. Lewis brought his wife Jessie and their children Clifton, Evelyn and five-year-old Lester to the west end of the valley, and bought 110 acres that stretched from what is now River Ranch toward the Black Mountain Playhouse on Pioneer Road.
The land already carried an older story. Orin Mallette, the French-Canadian blacksmith and brick maker, had sold those 110 acres in 1925 to Santiago Ortega of Questa for 4,500 dollars. Ortega died four years later, and in the division of his estate in 1932 Jose E. Ortega received the land. In 1936 Jose sold it to Lewis, who established a tourist resort there and named it Lewis Ranch.
The family moved into the old Mallette cabin and set about building everything else themselves. Lewis put up seven small two-bedroom cabins for guests. There was no running water at first; the family hauled water from the river and cooked on a cook stove by the light of a coal lamp. Lester later recalled the day his father rigged two six-volt batteries to a small generator and lit their home with electric bulbs for the first time.
To mill his own lumber, Lewis bought a sawmill and, with Burt Phipps, drove a huge steam engine about 85 miles from Dawson to Red River. The trip took ten days or more. Crowds gathered at the top of Red River Pass expecting the machine, with its eight-foot rear wheels, to run away downhill. Lewis backed it down instead, using the engine's compression to creep slowly and safely into town. With that mill he cut the lumber for his cabins, for the Cliffside Cabins, and for the Playhouse.
The Playhouse showed how many businesses one family could run at once. In the 1930s it held a gambling casino, a bar, and a 6,000-square-foot dance hall, with John Dunn as head gambler and an old bar brought from Cimarron that still carried bullet holes. Lewis, serving as a deputy sheriff in a town with little formal law, was remembered for handcuffing troublemakers to trees to cool off overnight. After about four years he shut the gambling down and converted the hall into a four-lane bowling alley and skating rink.
Power was another Lewis enterprise. A diesel engine and generator supplied electricity to the Playhouse, the Pioneer Lodge and the Three Canyon Camp, an arrangement Lester called the town's first utility company. The children worked alongside their parents: gathering the family's 18 rental horses, milking two or three cows daily, setting bowling pins, renting skates, and cutting ice from Tall Pines Lake in winter to store and sell in summer for two cents a pound.
It was a thin living. The busy season lasted only 40 to 45 days, and only about eight families stayed in Red River year-round. Lester attended the Little Red Schoolhouse and later the molybdenum mine's school. In 1944 or 1945 Lewis sold 42 acres and the Playhouse for 15,500 dollars, but the family stayed, and its name stayed with the town. Lester grew up to record it all in his memoir, Growing Up in Red River, New Mexico, and his children Laura and Brett carried the family's entrepreneurial streak into the next generation. The log-slab cabins Lewis sided with sawmill waste at the ranch are, remarkably, still in use.
Planning a Red River getaway? Book your stay at the Claim Jumper A-Frame 6
