Stand on Main Street in Red River today and you will hear river water under the bridges, see visitors strolling past galleries and shops, and smell coffee drifting from the cafes. It is easy to imagine the street has always looked this inviting. It has not. One hundred and thirty years ago, this same stretch of road was the commercial heart of a raw mining boomtown that went by a different name: River City.
By the nineteenth century, this canyon was known as River City, a place first roamed by Ute and Jicarilla Apaches and then found by explorers, fur trappers, and prospectors, according to the town's official history. The mountains were carved with hundreds of gold, silver, and copper mines, including the Golden Treasure, Silver King, and Black Copper. The town of Red River was laid out in 1894, around a small milling and smelter operation. It was never a rich district, mostly small-scale operators working the rugged gulches and canyons, but for a few rip-roaring years the money and the men flowed.
The town was teeming with miners and others, the town's history recounts, and Main Street served them all: more than a dozen saloons, a dance hall, hotels and boarding houses, and a red light district, where gambling and barroom brawls were frequent. Behind the whiskey came the machinery of civilization. River City supported two general mercantile stores, two newspapers, a sawmill, and a livery stable, everything a mountain camp needed to keep miners fed, clothed, informed, and moving.
Then the ore played out, as ore always does. When the boomtown faded, the town's history says, homesteaders replaced prospectors, and River City took on new life by renting out the abandoned miners' cabins to visitors from the flatland who wanted to escape the summer heat. The saloons gave way to summer cabins and tourist lodges. By the late 1920s, Red River's reputation as a mountain playground was established, the town's second act, built for summer visitors instead of miners.
The buildings on Main Street have changed many times since, and the street now doubles as state highway NM 38. But the shape of the town is the same: a single busy street following the river through the canyon, serving whoever has come to the mountains. River City built it for miners. Red River keeps it for everyone else.
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