OUR HISTORY

Red River, NM, is a real ski town, built by miners, not developers.

ORIN MALLETTE HISTORY

Mr. Orin Mallette is listed in the New Mexico business directories from 1905 to 1915 as a blacksmith. His shop was located in town, on Main Street, on property that adjoined the log cabin home of his brother Sylvester. In addition to his blacksmithing, farming, and mining activities, Orin operated a brick kiln on his property at the western end of the valley, our current location. He established the kiln about 1894 to provide bricks for the mining boom town. They were pastel pinkish-orange in color, and were soft. As far as is known, only one structure in Red River was constructed of brick, the Brigham J. Young House, on Main Street. However, the brick was also used for chimney construction in Red River. (Orin Mallette's kilns no longer stands.) In 1925, Orin Mallette, by then a widower, sold his 110 acres in the western end of the valley to Santiago Ortega of Questa for $4,500. Ortega died four years later and his estate listed the 110 acres as grazing land, along with "83 breeding sheep, 28 small sheep, and 3 rams." In a division of Santiago Ortega's estate in 1932, Jose E. Ortega received the 110 acres. He sold the property in 1936 to L. S. Lewis who established a tourist resort there, named Lewis Ranch. He had cabins and horses for rent, and operated a large gambling and dance hall in the town. He established a sawmill on the property in order to construct the cabins and dance hall. He used the refuse of log-slabs from the mill (the rounded, bark-covered ends of the logs that remain after the boards have been sawn from the center of the log) to side his rustic tourist cabins. The cabins are still in use! Log-slab siding had been a popular building material in the mountains of northern New Mexico since the establishment of sawmills there. The Lewis family made the Mallette Cabin their home in 1936 and kept it until the 1950s, when the Luce family purchased it, and the entire River Ranch site. Bill and Monda Hafley bought River Ranch in 1994, and now it is owned by the Kikers, who bought it in early 2019 from Bill and Monda.

The Orin Mallette Cabin was not being used by guests since the Kikers purchased the property in 2019, and was unstable. Plans were made and discussions to move it to a central location in town for all to enjoy, and so it was donated to the Red River Historical Society shortly thereafter. The work of lovingly and laboriously disassembling and moving it was undertaken in the fall of 2021. Unfortunately, taking the logs apart to restack and rebuild was too much for the ancient structure: the cabin could not be salvaged. The Mallette brothers' outdoor spirited lifestyle--rustic, adventurous, mountain-strong--lives on at 4k River Ranch. Just pause, and you can feel it in the pines, the river flowing through, and the wildlife that all grace our spot.