THE BULLET HOLES in the ceiling will be missed. So, too, will the St. James Hotel’s bison burgers, ice-cold beers, and the sound of bootheels on the old wooden floor. The list of Old West figures who walked the halls—Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett—is about as long as the ghost stories and the frontier yarns spun by hotel staff and Cimarrón locals. Those spirits have the lace-curtained stop on the Santa Fe Trail all to themselves after the lodging house and saloon, built by French immigrant Henri Lambert, closed its doors on September 17.
While the town of Cimarrón, population 786, will feel the loss most acutely, so too will those who have stepped up to the long polished-wood bar, sat on the 19th-century furniture, or been handed a room key from the antique cabinet at the front desk.
The St. James Hotel lobby (where you might see a ghost), in Cimarrón. Photograph courtesy of the St. James Hotel.
When the St. James opened as Lambert’s Inn in 1872, New Mexico was still 40 years from statehood. From the beginning, the hotel and its accompanying saloon helped locate the community around it. As a stopover for passerby traffic, it served people traveling north-south along the trace of the Santa Fe Trail and people traveling east-west between the alpine communities of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (once mining towns, today Angel Fire and Eagle Nest areas) and everywhere east of there—places like Texas and Oklahoma.
At some point, the hotel became a destination in its own right. Purchased by the Express UU Bar Ranch, near Cimarrón, in 2009, it got a facelift and a new coat of paint when the Covid-19 pandemic shut the world down. When I visited in July for the October 2024 issue’s story on the state’s Old West saloons, people milled in the corridors and lobby as though they were visiting a museum.
One of the historic rooms at the St. James Hotel.
Photograph by Sergio Salvador.
One hundred and fifty-two years of history passed through those doors. When a place like that closes, the candlelight of the past dims from the public experience. The St. James more than represented a time and a place, it remained that time and place. Still serving whiskey after all those years. Never burned down, never bulldozed. The Old West institution survived, but could only hold on to doing business for so long.
Like the ghosts that famously occupied its rooms, the St. James has been relegated to linger in a state of unrest—until a new owner is found. Yes, the St. James is for sale. Interested buyers should simply drive to Cimarrón and start asking around. Don’t underestimate the value of the bullet holes in the barroom ceiling.
Read more: Wherever there were miners, trappers, cowboys, or railroads, there were places to gather, drink, gamble, dance, and take in the news of the day. Step back in time and order up a bit of history at these saloons, roadhouses, and hotel bars.
