Drive to the west end of Red River, where Main Street gives out toward the canyon, and you reach 110 acres of river meadow that have been hosting travelers for nearly ninety years. Today the property is 4K River Ranch, at 1501 West Main Street. In 1936 it became Lewis Ranch — and the little slab-sided cabins its founder built there are still taking guests.
The land had a working life before it had a resort one. It belonged first to Orin Mallette, the Main Street blacksmith, who ran a brick kiln on the property from about 1894, turning out soft, pinkish-orange bricks for the booming mining town. In 1925 Mallette sold the 110 acres to Santiago Ortega of Questa for 4,500 dollars. Ortega died four years later, and in the 1932 division of his estate the land passed to Jose E. Ortega, who sold it to L. S. Lewis in 1936.
Lewis established a tourist resort on the place and named it Lewis Ranch, with cabins and horses for rent. He put up a sawmill on the property to build with — Lewis and Burt Phipps drove a steam engine some 85 miles from Dawson to power it, a trip of ten to twelve days that drew watchers from Red River to Eagle Nest as the engine came down the old Red River Pass. With his own milled lumber he built seven small cabins for the ranch, siding them with the rounded log slabs left over from the mill — a rustic, bark-edged look that became the ranch's signature. In town, Lewis also ran a large gambling and dance hall, and the Lewis family made the old Orin Mallette cabin on the property their home.
Lester Lewis, who arrived with his parents, L. S. and Jessie, in 1936 at the age of five, grew up working the ranch — milking cows, tending the rental horses, and cutting ice off Tall Pines Lake in winter to sell in summer. His memoir, Growing Up in Red River, New Mexico, preserves Lewis Ranch life in his own voice, from the steam engine's slow arrival over the pass to the wild-and-woolly dance hall days.
The Lewis family kept the ranch until the 1950s, when the Luce family bought the Mallette cabin and the entire River Ranch site. Bill and Monda Hafley bought the property in 1994, and the Kiker family in early 2019. Renamed 4K River Ranch, it still rents cabins on the river — including the slab-sided cabins L. S. Lewis built in the 1930s, among the oldest tourist cabins in Red River still in use. The resort he started in 1936 never really closed; it just changed names.