St. James Hotel

Henri Lambert, a French chef who had cooked for Abraham Lincoln, came west after the Civil War to try mining near Elizabethtown, did better selling food and drink, and in 1872 opened an inn and saloon in Cimarron, then the headquarters town of the Maxwell Land Grant. Lambert's Inn, later renamed the St. James, stood on the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail and took in whoever came down it.

Its saloon was where the violence of a violent decade ended up. Through the 1870s Cimarron was fought over in the Colfax County War, the struggle between settlers who had long worked land on the grant and the investors, lawyers and politicians of the Santa Fe Ring who claimed it, and several of the killings happened in Lambert's bar. In 1876 the territory's chief justice complained that at least six men had died in that one room in nine months. Lambert's son Fred later counted twenty-six killings at the hotel.

When Lambert's sons replaced the roof in 1901 they found more than four hundred bullet holes in the ceiling over the bar; a double layer of heavy boards had kept the guests upstairs alive. Twenty-two are still visible in the pressed-tin ceiling of the dining room, which was the saloon, and the original bar survives. The rooms are named for guests the hotel claims, among them Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill Cody, Jesse James and Black Jack Ketchum.

After decades of decline and a restoration in 1985, the hotel closed in September 2024 when its owner retired, and reopened that December under a father and daughter who promised to leave the bullet holes alone. It stands in the Cimarron Historic District.