American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (20 page)

The ring was also involved in the most famous New Mexico feud of the era—the Lincoln County War, in which Billy the Kid (the famous outlaw, not the lesser one of Sister Blandina’s acquaintance) made his name in the late 1870s. The battle began as a conflict between ranchers competing for army beef contracts and expanded into full-scale bloodshed. Scrambling to protect their interests in government contracts in the area, Catron and the Santa Fe Ring were drawn into the battle. L. G. Murphy, who led one of the warring factions and is considered one of the “bad guys” of the conflict, happened to be Abraham’s supplier of flour for the nearby Indian reservation and army fort. Abraham sided with him.

Ultimately, the US Department of Justice sent an investigator from New York, the attorney Frank Warner Angel, to figure out what was going on. In his notebooks, he tallied his assessments of the many New Mexico players he met on his travels. The list was arranged alphabetically, sort of. “Ayers, John,” a federal Indian agent, he considered “Honest—Liquor his worst enemy.” Axtell, S. B., the territorial governor at the time, was “Conceited—egotistical easily flattered Tool unwittedly [
sic
] of the ring—Goes off half cocked.” And on it went up the alphabet, the notebooks revealing more about the investigator than the New Mexicans he attempted to assess. Angel, this man of the East, had his rules: people were “reliable” or “not reliable”; “honest” or “weak”; “shrewd” or “of no standing”; acting “for the right” or dreadfully wrong. Stephen Elkins was “Silver tongued—further comment unnecessary.” The Spiegelbergs, who serviced the flour contract on the Mescalero Apache reservation in Lincoln County, he deemed “not reliable . . . use them against Z. Staab Bros & vice versa.” Abraham, as
the New Mexico face of “Staab Z & Bro.,” had “Axes to grind,” Angel wrote: “Not reliable—use them against Spiegelberg Bro & vice versa”—to what purpose, exactly, I don’t know.

Abraham would probably have laughed if he’d seen Angel’s notes, so earnest and naive. Because Abraham knew that “reliable” was beside the point in territorial New Mexico. Loyalty was the least of it. Bravado, charm, deception, ruthlessness, gunplay, grit: this was how you got things accomplished. Abraham and his Spiegelberg cousins played the territorial power game and played it well: Staabs with the Spiegelbergs, Staabs against the Spiegelbergs—it changed all the time. This was New Mexico.

Flora Spiegelberg.

Courtesy of Felix Warburg.

I
hadn’t known much—anything at all—about Abraham’s Spiegelberg cousins until my first trip to the archives in Santa Fe. I hadn’t known that they were the first German Jews to settle in New Mexico; I hadn’t known that they had employed Abraham when he first arrived. I hadn’t even known that they were relatives. But on the same day that I found the slim file containing Abraham’s citizenship
declaration, I discovered three much larger folders devoted to the Spiegelbergs. Flora Spiegelberg—the wife of the youngest Spiegelberg brother, Willi—had compiled them, and I found myself immersed in the blizzard of letters and articles and papers that told her story, and in the remarkable manner in which she seized the choices she was given in life and made them hers. It seemed that she had something to tell me.

Flora had arrived in Santa Fe in 1875, nine years after Julia, following a large wedding in Nuremberg and a yearlong trip in Europe. While Julia had spent the first days of her marriage on the Santa Fe Trail, Flora had stayed at the finest hotels and bathed in the finest spas. It was a honeymoon altogether different from Julia’s.

Flora’s appearance and temperament also stood in stark contrast to Julia’s. Flora was tall, red-haired, and boundlessly peppy. She was, it was clear from her files, a
doer
—community oriented, a prolific writer and fervent memorializer of all things Spiegelberg. Her New Mexico exploits were celebrated in the
Jewish Spectator
, the
American Hebrew
, the
Jewish Historical Quarterly
, and a number of New Mexico historical journals. In her dotage—she died in 1943 at the age of eighty-seven—Flora wrote letters to librarians and archivists, dispatches from her New York apartment—heavy typeface, lots of typos. She was, said an interviewer from the
American Hebrew
, “a tall, straight old lady, with a most remarkable memory.”

“I was born in New York in 1857,” the
Jewish Spectator
article begins. Her mother had taken her back to Germany, however, after her father’s death, and she met Willi Spiegelberg there in 1874—she was seventeen years old, he thirty. “I was young and he was handsome and in a very short time, I became Mrs. Willi Spiegelberg,” she told her interviewer. After their European honeymoon the couple traveled from St. Louis “in very primitive steam cars” to the rail’s end near Trinidad. The train had advanced swiftly in the nine years since Julia
had traveled the trail, cutting off six hundred miles of prairie that Julia had had to travel by stagecoach. Still, Trinidad was rough. “The only hotel was a shabby, two-story building,” Flora told the
American Hebrew
, and as she and Willi entered, “they found the enormous main hall filled with the tobacco smoke of a hundred cowboys,” heavily armed and riled up after a roundup. When Flora entered the room, “probably the first of her sex that they had seen in a year,” she speculated—“they arose as one man, swung their sombreros, and shouted with lusty enthusiasm, ‘Hello, lady, sure glad to see you!’” Flora slept in her clothes that night.

The next morning, she rescued herself from a runaway stagecoach—slamming the door shut to avoid being thrown out when a train spooked the horses—then continued on to Santa Fe, eating chiles, beans, and buffalo tongue along the way. She did not relish the food, but she appreciated the novelty of it. She found the journey terrifying, but also considered it a wonderful adventure. She feared cowboys and Indians, but welcomed the sight of her first adobes. She miscarried along the way; this did not set her back, either. She seemed an altogether more durable woman than Julia, suited to such a life.

When Flora and Willi’s stagecoach galloped into Santa Fe, a military band awaited them, playing Wagner’s wedding march to welcome her to her new home. She was, she told the
American Hebrew
, the eighth “American” woman in Santa Fe, by which she meant non-Indian and non-Hispanic. In other reminiscences she declared herself the thirteenth. In others, the first.

Either way, she arrived in the desert with a splash. “Willi has a girl at last,” noted the
New Mexican
. “She stands in the doorway of the handsome retail store of Spiegelberg Bros. to attract the eyes and arrest the attention of the passerby.”

She placed herself quickly at the center of things. She threw parties that featured German cuisine and fine champagne; she collected
art and founded literary and dramatic clubs, started a Jewish school, taught Jewish and Catholic Sunday classes, and created a children’s playground in Santa Fe. It didn’t matter that she was cultured and European and Jewish while Santa Fe was not. She did not require rich soil in order to flourish. She bloomed in the desert. The family built a lovely territorial-style home in 1880, two years before Julia’s house was built. It was the first with running water and gas appliances, a sweet adobe blend of Europe and New Mexico, two stories with a pitched roof and territorial woodwork. Julia’s home, just across the street, rose to the skyline, three stories of high French ornament and cultural affront. The two women seemed in every way opposites.

Flora was proud of her family’s Western mettle: besides German, Spanish, and English, Willi spoke four Indian dialects, and he was, she said, an expert with the lariat and whip. He had traveled the plains fearlessly during the Indian Wars, Flora recalled, moving without an army escort and dodging throngs of “maddened redmen.” Flora was equally stouthearted; by her account, she single-handedly talked down a lynch mob intent on dragooning her husband into hanging a pair of murderers, kept an eye on Billy the Kid while he shopped in her husband’s store for a new cowboy outfit, and helped the author Lew Wallace, who was also New Mexico’s territorial governor, polish his soon-to-be-blockbuster novel,
Ben-Hur
. She also claimed she was the conversation partner to whom General Sherman first uttered the words, “War is hell.”

Flora, too, was close with the archbishop. He planted two willows in her front yard and they gardened together, speaking French. In her memoirs, she explained that the archbishop placed the Hebrew letters over the cathedral’s arch in honor of his friendship not with Abraham, but with her own family.

As I read through Flora’s files, I came to realize something: Flora was, as much as Julia—maybe more—the model for Paul Horgan’s German bride. She played the piano beautifully, spoke perfect French,
gardened with the archbishop, and entertained dignitaries. She was every bit the sparkling pioneer wife—comfortable, assured, adaptable—that Horgan described in his book. The German bride was a composite figure, I now remembered Horgan’s saying in the book’s introduction. The house in the illustration was Julia’s, certainly. But many—perhaps most—of the stories were Flora’s. Flora, not Julia, was the poised frontier woman in Horgan’s book.

Even so, the frontier wasn’t a place where Flora wished to live permanently. In 1893, she persuaded Willi to liquidate their assets and follow his brothers to New York, where her two daughters could live in a more cosmopolitan environment. In her new city, Flora was no less engaged. She organized the Boys Vocational Club and the Jewish Working Girls’ Club, served on the Bill Board and the Daylight Saving Commission, and advocated relentlessly for the creation of a modern system of waste collection in the city (she was nicknamed “The Old Garbage Woman of New York” for her efforts).

Later, she wrote radio screenplays and a children’s book,
Princess Goldenhair and the Wonderful Flower
. I managed to purchase it on the Internet: another artifact for my collection. It was whimsically illustrated in bright colors and with fine-lined detail, Yoda-eared dwarves and veiny-winged fairies dancing on mountainsides. My five-year-old daughter was fond of princesses, so I read it with her. The story involves a beautiful German redhead—similar in appearance, perhaps, to Flora?—named Princess Goldenhair. The young princess’s troubles are fairly conventional—she is kidnapped by a wicked, poisonous-flower-wielding step-grandmother. But the rest of the book was hardly what we expected. After the step-grandmother drops the captive Princess Goldenhair off with some dwarves, she returns home to find her daughter dying in bed and her neighbor dead in the cellar with a broken neck. Then she lies down and dies, too. After three people perished in three pages, my daughter’s eyes fogged with tears, and I decided that
Flora was probably a better fabulist of her own charmed life than of fictional princesses. We stopped reading.

Flora was also a peace activist: in 1919, after the First World War ended, she wrote a petition titled “The Ten Commandments for World Peace,” which demanded an amendment to the US Constitution requiring that all future wars be decided by popular referendum, and asked that all “national, racial, and religious hatreds should be eliminated.” She was tireless in her advocacy, mailing her petition to newspapers around the country and to the Library of Congress, and persuading the Veterans of Foreign Wars to discuss her petition at their annual meeting.

Even in her dotage, Flora found idleness unendurable. During the last thirteen years of her life, she engaged in exhaustive correspondence with New Mexico museums, historians, and archivists, building a record of the Spiegelbergs’ role in New Mexico and her own as New Mexico’s best-known German bride: “I presume I am the oldest living American Pioneer Woman of Santa Fe,” she wrote to one archivist. “Dear Friend, kindly pardon all corrections, for unfortunately I have but ONE EYE,” she wrote to another when submitting a chronicle. Her
New York Herald Tribune
obituary ran with the subhead “Once Ate Buffalo Meat.” I found myself both admiring her self-regard and fortitude, and also finding her slightly unbearable. I was jealous on Julia’s behalf.

It was as if Flora, born into the waning half of the nineteenth century, inhabited not only an entirely different generation, but a different world from Julia’s. They were conceived only thirteen years apart, but modernity itself seemed to separate them. Victorian languor was going out of style; women began to flee the fusty parlor. There are no reports of ghosts in Flora’s house; she was too busy with the present to linger in the past.

Whereas Julia led a quieter life. Besides her seven surviving children
and the distinguished brick home, she left little record of her passage through thirty years in Santa Fe. Julia didn’t see herself as a pioneer or a Western heroine; she was not one to love the view from such vast distances. In the newspapers, she always appeared as “Mrs. A. Staab.” She was an adjunct and helpmeet to her husband, cloistered and Victorian, a creature of both her waning epoch and her own reticent and melancholy constitution. Were it not for the stories they tell of her ghost, we’d know nothing of her life at all.

And yet she is now New Mexico’s most famous German bride—and the Staab we care about most.