Jack & Marge Lambert

EXPLORERS OF TRAILS AND CULTURES

Honored August 1988

Everett 'Jack' Vey & Marge Lambert

Jack and Marge Lambert--the cowboy and the anthropologist--stand out as the kind of memorable people who gave Santa Fe its special character.

Born in 1898 on a ranch near Ocarche, Oklahoma, Everett Vey Lambert, always known as "Jack," left home at fourteen to go cowboying in Wyoming, Utah, and on the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma. But when he found New Mexico, he found home. He and his brother bought the Bishop's Lodge in Santa Fe, where they ran a dude ranch. Later they ran pack trips out of Hacienda San Gabriel near Alcalde. Many easterners who fell in love with New Mexico and moved to Santa Fe, got their first look at the country with Jack as their guide, Mary Cabot Wheelwright and the White sisters included.

Remembering that time, Jack said, "There was no pavement and not one fence between here and Gallup or the Grand Canyon."

When Amelia and Martha White's DeVargas Development Company sold lots on 385 acres in the Garcia Street area, Jack supervised the road building. He became manager of the Whites' estate, now the School of American Research.

The first woman curator of archaeology in the United States, Marge Lambert, born in 1911, came from a family of Scottish Colorado pioneers. She first met Jack at a dance in a boxcar at Seton Village while she was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico. "I thought I was pretty sophisticated, but then, I'd never been to a Santa Fe party!

"When Jack was courting me, I lived in one of Mrs. McComb's historic chicken houses. He had a cream colored roadster, and he'd drive me to picnic on the Pajarito Plateau where he took his dudes. He always looked so wonderful in his crisp, spotless khaki clothes, his big Stetson, and his polished boots! He'd cook roasting ears, steak and coffee for us, and through all the years he's taken me all over the Southwest, even to the Cody water tower where he woke up after his clash with apricot brandy." The two were married in 1950.