Trappers

Just east of the Taos Plaza, on a quiet stretch of Kit Carson Road, stands a modest single-story adobe house — and few buildings in New Mexico have sheltered a bigger life. Built in 1825 in the Spanish Colonial style, an east-facing U wrapped around a central courtyard, the house was purchased in 1843 by frontiersman Kit Carson as a wedding gift for his young bride, María Josefa Jaramillo.

Long before Red River was a town, the valley belonged to hunters and herders. Utes and Jicarillas chased elk and bighorn sheep across the high meadows, and sheepherders from Questa, Costilla, and Taos grazed their flocks where Main Street runs today. Prospectors drifted through in the 1870s and found the silence of the valley restful — and kept drifting, because the great strikes were all over in Elizabethtown. Then came three French-Canadian trappers with gold pans.