Did you know that one of the most famous innkeepers in northern New Mexico started out cooking for a president? Henri Lambert, later known as Henry, was born in France in 1838 and served as a personal chef to President Abraham Lincoln. He also cooked for General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War. In 1864, like so many hopeful men of his generation, he drifted west dreaming of gold, and his road led him to the same Baldy Mountain rush that shaped Red River country.
Lambert settled first in Elizabethtown, the booming gold camp just over the pass from Red River, in country then held by Lucien B. Maxwell as part of the vast Maxwell Land Grant. He found very little gold there. What he did have was a skill every mining camp needed, so he opened a restaurant and saloon in Elizabethtown and fed the prospectors instead of joining them. It was a wise trade. The camps around Baldy were hungry, rough, and growing fast, and a good table was worth as much as a promising claim.
Maxwell soon enticed Lambert south to Cimarron, and in 1872, on the recommendation of President Grant, Lambert built the inn that would bear his name. Local histories put the cost at 17,000 dollars, a fortune for the time, for a saloon, restaurant, and 43 rooms. The Lambert Inn later became the St. James Hotel, and it quickly became the social center of a very wild town, the place where miners, ranchers, soldiers, lawmen, and travelers all ended up at the same tables.
The guest list is part of the legend. Wyatt Earp and his brother Morgan stopped on their way to Tombstone, Jesse James favored Room 14, and Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, Clay Allison, and Black Jack Ketchum all passed through its doors. Cimarron folks joked darkly about how often violence followed Lambert's guests into the night. When Lambert's sons replaced the roof in 1901, they reportedly found so many bullet holes that only a double layer of hard wood had protected the sleepers upstairs. About twenty holes are still visible in the dining room ceiling today.
The St. James faded as the railroad changed travel, the Santa Fe Trail quieted, and the gold gave out. From 1926 to 1985 it passed from owner to owner before being restored, and it stands today in the Cimarron Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. For Red River visitors, it makes a perfect Enchanted Circle side story: begin with the gold camps above town, roll through Elizabethtown, and finish at Lambert's table in Cimarron, where a French chef who once cooked for Lincoln fed the frontier instead.