Long before prospectors named a mining camp Red River City, another community was already putting down roots on the same river, down the canyon where the water leaves the high country. Did you know that the Red River itself gave that first settlement its name? Rio Colorado is Spanish for Red River, and the families who built San Antonio del Rio Colorado, the village we know today as Questa, were farming and herding sheep along its banks a full generation before the gold rush remade the valley upstream.
Local oral history, told by Tessie Rael de Ortega, remembers how the first settlers came walking through the south Kiowa Trail, driving their herds of sheep before them. They camped beside the river, drank its water, and chose a name for the valley around the campfire. The next day they were raising little huts, then proper houses up on the mesa. As relatives followed, the families built plazuelas, big U-shaped homes with walled yards where livestock could be brought safely inside, each with its own hall for fiestas and dances. Four plazuelas anchored the young community, and their builders are still remembered by name: the Armentas, Lafores, Gallegos, Vigils, Martinez, Cisneros and Raels, joined by the Ortiz, Kronig, Cruz, Beaubien and Trujillo families, a mix of Spanish, French and German roots.
In January 1842 their settlement became official, when a petition from 35 families for the San Antonio del Rio Colorado land grant was granted by Juan Antonio Martinez, and the village was formally founded that year. Safety came first. A wall went up around the plaza, and watchmen kept guard from the high ground, including the peak east of town that has been called El Sentinel Peak ever since. Oral history says the sentinel watched every day, reading the dust of distant horses and signaling the village by smoke or flag if danger approached.
The families' first shared project was their church. Construction of the San Antonio church began in 1842 and took years to complete, and its thick adobe walls have stood at the center of the old plaza since the mid-1800s. When Bishop Lamy visited in 1860, he noted the beautiful new church on the plaza's north side. The little village grew steadily under three flags in turn, Spain, Mexico and then the United States, and by 1849 about 100 families were living there, harvesting side by side and helping one another, as the old accounts put it, like friends.
The name Questa arrived only in 1883, when a post office was established and the intended name, Cuesta, Spanish for a slope or ridge, was misspelled and stuck. Many of those earliest families never left, and their descendants continue to lead the village today. So the next time you drive down the canyon from Red River toward Questa, past the cottonwoods at the canyon's mouth, remember that the valley's founding story did not begin with a gold strike. It began with sheep, adobe, a sentinel on a mountain, and families who came to stay.