The most famous hotel in the Cimarron country was built by a French chef who had cooked for Abraham Lincoln. Henri Lambert's road from the White House kitchen to the Santa Fe Trail runs straight through the Moreno Valley.
Lambert was born in France on October 28, 1838, and learned his trade in the port city of Le Havre. Emigrating to America, his skill carried him to an extraordinary post: chef to President Abraham Lincoln. His service ended in sorrow — Lambert was relieved of his duties on April 14, 1865, the very day Lincoln was assassinated.
Like thousands of men after the Civil War, Lambert went west to try mining. He settled first in Elizabethtown, the booming gold camp at the head of the Moreno Valley. Mining did not pay for him — but cooking always had. In E-Town he revived a restaurant and saloon, feeding the miners better than they had any right to expect in a raw gold camp, and built a reputation that followed him.
In 1872, Lambert moved down to Cimarron, the grant headquarters town on the Santa Fe Trail, and built the Lambert Inn. The inn became the social center of the Maxwell Land Grant country — part hotel, part restaurant, part saloon — and Lambert's table drew ranchers, soldiers, outlaws, and lawmen alike. The building grew over the years into the St. James Hotel.
The St. James still stands in Cimarron today, one of the great surviving landmarks of the trail era, and guests still eat in the dining room Lambert made famous. It is a straight line from a Le Havre kitchen to the White House to a Moreno Valley gold camp to that dining room — and Henri Lambert walked every mile of it with a chef's knife in his kit.