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.
Their names were Orin, Sylvester, and George Mallette. Word came through the grapevine that the brothers were panning gold on the Red River, and as one old account puts it, the rush was on. Townsite promoters always have their ears to the ground, and E. I. Jones traveled up from Colorado Springs to visit the Malletes. If a gold camp was to be formed, he wanted to be its founding father. One brother was not convinced and suspected Jones of ulterior motives; the other two sold — for a dollar. They learned later that what Jones had in mind was homestead rights and townsite rights.
The fight that followed shaped the young town. Colorado land companies claimed the settlers were squatters camped on private grant land, and every morning a miner woke to find another shack pressed against his, the newcomer waving a deed from the grant company. The alleged grant had been rejected by the U.S. Court of Private Land Claims, and the town stood its ground. By 1895 Red River was a booming mining camp of some 3,000 people, with gold, silver, and copper in the ground and a mining peak still ahead in 1897.
When the town finally organized its affairs on August 15, 1896, the Mallette name was right there in the minutes: S. M. Mallette was elected road overseer by unanimous vote. That same year, neighbors packed a mass meeting to settle the townsite question once and for all — the meeting J. M. Phipps opened as the town's elected deputy sheriff with 64 votes, to E. I. Jones's one.
Orin Mallette stayed and became a fixture of the town he helped start. He is listed in the New Mexico business directories from 1905 to 1915 as a blacksmith, his shop standing on Main Street on property adjoining his brother Sylvester's log cabin. About 1894 he built a brick kiln at the western end of the valley to supply the boom town; his bricks were a soft, pastel pinkish-orange, and as far as anyone knows only one Red River structure was ever built of them — the Brigham J. Young House on Main Street — though the brick also found its way into many local chimneys. In 1925, by then a widower, Orin sold his 110 acres in the west end of the valley to Santiago Ortega of Questa for $4,500. A decade later the property became Lewis Ranch, with its rustic log-slab tourist cabins; today it is the 4K River Ranch.
The brothers' legacy is carved into the landscape. The Orin Mallette Cabin and the Sylvester M. Mallette Cabin both entered the National Register of Historic Places on February 23, 1984, as part of the Red River Multiple Resource Area, and the family name survives in Mallette Creek and Mallette Campground. In 2021 Orin Mallette's old cabin was donated to the Red River Historical Society in hopes of moving it to a central spot in town for everyone to enjoy — but the ancient logs could not survive being taken apart, and the cabin was lost. The cabin is gone; the brothers' story, and the town they helped raise out of a trappers' valley, are still here.
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