American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (5 page)

The Santa Fe Trail.

From
Santa Fe Railroad: By the Way
(Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1922).

I
n the real world, things weren’t yet so dire for Julia. In the life I could trace through newspapers and archives, Julia was still freshly married and setting out to make a new future in the New World.

Still, the trip to Santa Fe must have involved increasing degrees of shock: the steamboat from Bremen to Liverpool, German-speakers crowding the decks; the luxury liner from Liverpool to New York, with all its strange languages and the ocean, broad and wind-whipped; the trip via train and steamboat from New York to Kansas; the arduous journey across the plains. Julia was twenty-one years old, and had left her family and home for the first time on a journey that was long and irrevocable, with a husband she had yet to decipher. Everything was foreign; everything was new.

When Abraham had first traveled the trail to New Mexico, the trip had been long—two to three months, a laborious, uncomfortable, and uncertain journey following a disjointed thread of commerce and conquest from the jumping-off point in Missouri through the unsettled Indian territories into what had recently been northern Mexico. Julia’s trip was faster; the railroad now extended to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. She and Abraham—Adolph—rode the Burlington, and then the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad to its end, and then boarded a steamboat to Kansas City, where the trail began.

It was winter. The plains were colored ochre, the grasses sharp and dead, the view flat to forever across the great speckled plains. In the earliest years, the wagon trains set out from St. Louis, banded together in caravans for safety: wagons and carriages, tents and drivers, hundreds of oxen, mules, and dogs, and very, very few women. Susan Magoffin, an eighteen-year-old bride who traveled the trail in 1846 with her merchant husband, was among the first. She wrote of leaving amid a “cracking of whips, lowing of cattle, braying of mules, whooping and hallowing of men”—as well as other utterances that Magoffin dared not transcribe. The wagons moved slowly west, several abreast on parallel tracks, rolling like cloud shadows across the contours of the land.

Nineteenth-century Germans were voracious consumers of travel literature, especially about the American West, and Julia would certainly have known about the trail. She would have heard about all manner of tribulation and discomfort: about runaway horses, and windstorms and snowstorms and interminable rainstorms, about hailstones “larger than hen’s eggs,” as Magoffin described them, and swarming mosquitoes that knocked against the carriages like a hard rain, and “troublesome quagmires” that could trap a wagon to its hubs in mud. She might have read of the rattlesnakes: “One hears almost a constant popping of rifles or pistols among the vanguard, to clear the route of these disagreeable occupants,” wrote Josiah Gregg, who first
traveled the trail in the 1830s and whose books were widely read in Germany.

Julia was lucky compared with these early travelers, and compared with Abraham on his early trips. There was now a stagecoach route from Kansas City. So instead of nine or ten weeks on a wagon train at the plodding pace of oxen, Julia traveled in a Barlow and Sanderson coach, covering the nearly seven hundred miles to Santa Fe in about fifteen days. Not that it was a comfortable journey. The seats were stuffed with hay to keep contusions to a minimum, but it wasn’t much help, with the wheels jolting over ruts and pits and stones, the coach moving at the pace of a trotting or cantering horse on a trail not yet a road but only a suggestion of one. Hay lined the floor to warm Julia’s feet, and buffalo robes warmed her lap. To keep out the cold air, the side flaps were fastened. Julia rode in the dark.

By the time Julia traveled the trail, there were places to stop for food, water, provisions, and sleep—log-raftered, mud-plastered, dirt-floored huts serving cuisine that insulted the memory of the fine viands of the Cunard Line, or the
Wurst
and
Brötchen
Julia knew from Germany. She ate beans and tortillas, dried buffalo, stew, salt pork; she drank bitter coffee. Kosher was no option here. Julia dined with fellow travelers: cowboys, mostly, toting pistols and straight-bladed daggers. Everyone, cowboys and German brides alike, slept on the floor, or in dirty, bug-bitten lofts reached by rope ladders. Room partitions might be muslin sheets strung from wall to wall. Julia must have been glad to have Abraham, the seasoned plains traveler, by her side.

The winter of 1866 was a season of deep snows on the plains. It was, said old-timers, “the hardest winter they ever experienced.” The Arkansas River froze twelve to eighteen inches thick. Twenty wagon trains were halted by blizzards that obscured all sight and passage; stagecoaches were delayed for days. Two trainmen building the railroad that would, in a decade’s time, approach the Rockies, froze to
death on Bear Creek in Kansas. Natives were also a problem for European settlers. Julia’s journey took place during the height of the Indian Wars; the plains were dangerous. After the Civil War, the Indians had stepped up their campaigns against travelers through their territory—emigrants were streaming west and the tribes knew that they would bring only trouble. Caravans were regularly beset by large groups of warriors, and most wagon trains and stagecoaches traveling the trail were now accompanied by federal troops to protect them. The Comanche and the Kiowa were feared above all, and the lore of the trail grew like an attenuated game of telephone, with stories of victims staked to the ground, bellies slit and organs sliced and eaten. Women were warned that capture by the tribes would be far worse than death.

The winter that Julia traveled the trail, six soldiers were scalped four miles from Fort Dodge. A few months later, five nuns—Sisters of Mercy—left for a mission to Santa Fe accompanied by Jean-Baptiste Lamy, Santa Fe’s first bishop. About six weeks into the journey, the bishop sensed something. He ordered a corral to be made. All the wagons in the caravan were arranged to form a circle, and the oxen, nuns, teamsters, and other travelers took shelter inside. “None too soon,” wrote Sister Blandina Segale, a young nun whom Julia came to know and whose journals were later published in a book,
At the End of the Santa Fe Trail
, “For the Kiowas’ death whoop preceded the sling of hundreds of arrows.”

The Indians were hidden in the trees across a small stream, shooting their arrows; the priests and teamsters returned fire with guns. It was hot, and the travelers ran out of water. The river was only a few dozen feet away, but the group could not reach it. The next day, cholera broke out. One young sister died. “Whether it was from cholera or fright the victim gave up her soul to God,” Sister Blandina wrote. The arrows kept coming. A young teamster also contracted cholera, and began “pitifully calling for his mother.” Sister Augustine, an elderly
nun, crawled from under one wagon to the next as the arrows zipped and dropped around her. “Sister Augustine reached the dying young man and tried to soothe his last moments as his mother would have done.”

A plan was formed: if they couldn’t hold out, the men would shoot the four remaining sisters to save them from the unimaginable fate of being captured. But at the next sunset, the Indians withdrew for the night, and when they did, the bishop’s men hauled a barrel of whiskey across the stream to a spot near the Indians’ camp and quickly retreated to their wagons. The Indians chopped the barrel open with a tomahawk and drank all the whiskey, and while they did, the nuns and their escorts, “like the Arabs, ‘Stole silently away.’” The young nun and the boy who had died were buried together farther along the prairie, “strangers in every way.”

This was the path Julia traveled.

The trail rose too slowly, at a glacial pace, through the furrowed grasslands along the Arkansas River. For Julia, bundled against the raw cold and peering out of the chinks in the window coverings, there was nothing to suggest that her new life would be a comfortable one. The grasses grew shorter, the land flatter, stonier, drier, incised now by winding buffalo paths. A lone cottonwood here, a hidden creek there, a frozen mudhole, a geometric tossing of shrubs, the vacant sky that seemed to crush the earth below it—the land wasn’t flat, really, it only appeared that way, swallowing the gullies and rolls in its immensity, size distorted by distance.

Julia had never seen such a land without trees, without water. It was not so much featureless, the novelist Willa Cather wrote sixty years after Julia had traveled the trail, as “crowded with features, all exactly alike.” In Lügde, there were no such expansive views—just valleys
and gentle peaks, thick woods, occasional breaches of open field. But in a matter of weeks, Julia would now have seen two vast seas: the Atlantic, whipped with winter waves, and this undulating American desert. As Julia’s stagecoach crested a small rise, she could, if she peered out of the curtains, see the curvature of the earth.

From Bent’s Fort, a ruined earthen trading post at the border between Colorado and Kansas, sand hills began to disrupt the dead plain, the stony knolls stretching progressively higher, the tangled shrubs growing more treelike as the land rose. And then on a day four or five mornings into her trip, Julia would have peeked out of the side flap and seen something new—a silvery strip of azure-footed, white-capped peaks looming like a line of chalky clouds.

The stage passed through Trinidad, a frontier town of dugouts in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. A few scattered houses ran the length of two blocks, along with a couple of stores, a mud church, a one-room school. The place was a “rendezvous for the outlawed,” wrote Sister Blandina of her own journey west shortly after Julia’s. Justice there was of the frontier sort: there were regular lynchings of outlaws white and black and Hispanic, dead bodies dangling on display.

Julia climbed her first mountain pass, “the Raton,” soon after leaving Trinidad. It was a twenty-mile trail of steep hillocks and loose rocks and scree, and a tooth-jarring ride. At the top, the snow-covered Rockies spread west, the mountains higher than any that a village girl from Lügde could have seen. Descending, Julia and Abraham saw foothills scalloped in snow and dotted with wind-maimed piñon and juniper; they saw the hematite-seeped sandstone glow bloodred in the low winter light.

They passed through Mora, a humble village in a broad valley propped against the foot of Hermit’s Peak—the same cliff face that I looked out on as I first read Lizzie’s book about the family. Julia saw her first adobe homes in that valley. She ate, perhaps, her first
chili verde
,
and rode on, skirting the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos, through Apache Canyon, past barrancas of stone, mountains upon mountains. The largest peak near Lügde was Mount Köterberg, “mutt mountain,” nicknamed “Mount Bow-Wow,” a broad mound of softened limestone five hundred meters tall and densely wooded all the way to its flattened crest. Now Julia learned sterner labels for the jagged crags around her, named for martyrs and warring Spaniards and Indians: Blood of Christ, Mountain of Thieves, Starvation Peak.

These peaks were rocky, wooded, hazy, volcanic, composed of greens and blues and darker blues, Gothic red-rock mesas and chisel-topped
cerritos
and now and then the lonely inselberg—an “island mountain” of more-resistant rock that rose alone from the flat desert floor—alone, as I always imagined Julia to have been in New Mexico, never quite eroding into place.

Burro Alley, Santa Fe.

C. G. Kaadt, Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 11070, circa 1895.

I
magine Julia in Lügde, surrounded by family. It was a compact village, walkable from end to end in a matter of minutes, and she was familiar with every building, every cobblestone, every neighbor. The people there knew her, and had since she was a child.

Now imagine her in New Mexico, riding in the stagecoach with her unfamiliar husband, along and among those inhuman peaks, the
sky uncompromising, the ground stark and cloaked in snow and the clumped suggestions of the rocks and spiny flora underneath—cactus, greasewood, Spanish bayonet. Most Germans who visited New Mexico in the early days found it unbearable—an ugly, “bleak and sandy high plateau,” in the words of one German newspaper.

They found Santa Fe, New Mexico’s largest city, to be equally disappointing. Friedrich Adolph Wislizenus, a Thuringian explorer and naturalist, was the first to express his disappointment with Santa Fe in the mother tongue. The city was, he wrote in 1846, merely a collection of “mud-built, dirty houses.” Balduin Möllhausen, a Prussian who visited around the time that Abraham arrived in the late 1850s, also noted that Santa Fe held “little appeal.” It is true that, later in the nineteenth century, Karl May’s fanciful and wildly popular novels about German cowboys and their Indian blood brothers would inspire Germany’s infatuation with all things Wild West. But when Julia climbed out of her stagecoach in 1866, Santa Fe was not yet a place that captured German hearts.

It simply didn’t seem a
place
. The flat adobe structures were plunked down at random, built of the same dusty red earth that characterized the streets and yards and fields. When Josiah Gregg first advanced toward Santa Fe in 1831, he saw what he thought was a rather unusual collection of brick kilns in the cornfields. A friend corrected him: “‘It is true those are heaps of unburnt bricks, nevertheless they are
houses
—this is the city of Santa Fe.’” It was a colony of mud. “It was possible to be utterly disgusted with it at first sight, second sight, and last sight,” wrote the Vermonter R. L. Duffus. “To enjoy it thoroughly one had to have a flair for such things. Literal-minded persons did not, puritanical persons did not.”

What Julia thought of the city—whether she had a flair for such things—I don’t know. Her new hometown squatted at the western base of the mountains, from which flowed a stream that trickled to nothing in the summertime. It was small compared with St. Louis but substantial
compared with the settlements Julia had passed on her way: three or five thousand inhabitants, depending on who was counting. It had been founded by invading Spaniards in 1609 and had been standing for more than 250 years. But it still looked barely there, houses randomly interspersed with cornfields, hay and grit sheeting from the houses’ mud exteriors to the ground—“flat and uncouth,” Gregg described the layout. Portal-shaded buildings lined a dirt plaza at the center of town. There was the low-slung governor’s palace, the jail, the military chapel, and a few shops—an apothecary, a printer, a baker, two tailors, two shoemakers, two blacksmiths, and a handful of Jewish merchant houses, including, of course, Z. Staab & Bro., which was lodged in a mud building like all the others.

The houses that spread out from the Plaza were squat, with thick clay walls and rounded sills. They were dark inside, their interior walls whitewashed with a chalky dust that rubbed off on anyone who leaned against them, the beds rolled up during the day to provide seating for visitors. Into just such a home—mud, with a walled-off courtyard and a carved portal—came Julia, with her silver soup tureens, her fish knives, and her cake services.

Julia’s house would have been no different from all the others. The windows would have been small and deep, the door openings covered with coarsely woven horse blankets, the floors lined with buffalo robes. Tallow candles provided light in the evening. There was no proper stove, just a square opening in the corner where the fire was built. A patina of smoke would have stained the ceiling and nearby walls. For “strangers to the country, the customs, and the language” stepping for the first time into such a house, wrote Sister Blandina, “do you wonder that a lonesome feeling as of lingering death came over them?”

The streets of Julia’s new city likely held no more comfort. The Plaza was crowded with carts, wagons, teamsters, camp cooks, roustabouts, horses, mules, burros, pigs, and goats. There were cockfights
and gunfights. The town was a confusion of commerce, a Babel of languages. There were only a handful of Jews among the Spanish settlers and Pueblo Indians, among the Navajo, Apache, freed slaves, soldiers, veterans, fortune-seekers, herders, cowboys, dry-land farmers, merchants, consumptives, investors, land-grabbers, miners, and shysters who lived there. Church bells pealed riotously at all hours of the day. Letters from family took weeks to arrive; the first telegraph line wouldn’t be strung for another three years. Dust coated everything. The streets were piled with garbage, though in that respect—garbage piles and scavenging animals—Santa Fe probably wasn’t all that different from Lügde.

What was different to Julia, as she began to venture out and tried to understand this place she must now call home: the language, Spanish, clipped and rat-tat-tat; the food, tortillas, mutton fat, chili con carne made with months-old meat, sun-dried and malodorous. The people were darker than the Jews of Lügde, and their clothing was garish. The men wore brightly striped shoulder blankets—serapes—over cropped jackets and ruffled shirts; they wore high-heeled, silver-spurred riding boots and enormous hats, their tight, silver-studded trousers held up by wrapped silk sashes. The women wore short-waisted shirts with large sleeves, ruffled skirts and rebozo shawls that served as bonnet, apron, veil, and bodice all in one. They didn’t, noted an aghast Susan Magoffin, even wear bustles.

There were perhaps fifty Anglo women—white women—in Santa Fe when Julia arrived in 1866. The rest of the women were of Hispanic and Indian descent. They smoked cornhusk cigarettes and danced in the streets, their arms and necks bare, cleavage brimming, faces painted with a white flour paste to protect them from the sun. Their children ran naked. “I am constrained,” wrote Susan Magoffin, “to keep my veil drawn closely over my face all the time to protect my blushes.” Julia likely avoided Santa Fe’s nightly fandangos, packed with dancing
women who painted their faces with the bright red juice of a flowering cockscomb—the current fashion.

It was a good-time town. The dance halls had dirt floors, and when the dust got too thick, the music stopped and the serving girls sprinkled down the floor so that the dancing could resume.
DON
’
T SHOOT THE MUSICIANS
, begged signs on the walls. Whiskey flowed at all times of day, and on the streets and in the saloons the gambling never stopped. “The governor himself and his lady, the grave magistrate and the priestly dignitary, the gay caballero and the titled señora may all be seen taking their doubloons upon the turn of a card,” wrote Josiah Gregg.

Parties often ended in gunfire. There were beatings and lynch mobs and ears bitten off. With the Indian Wars swirling around the city, scalpings were not uncommon, either. The
Santa Fe New Mexican
reported that a man killed his cheating wife with an ax soon after Julia’s arrival—but this did not seem at all shocking. There were shootings and pistol duels on the backstreets and in the alleys, even on the Plaza in broad daylight. At breakfast each day—if the newspaper in the nearby town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is to be believed—citizens greeted each other with a resigned “Well, who was killed last night?” This half-civilized town was situated in a territory of the United States, but it was not yet American.

Reading accounts of Santa Fe in the years after Julia’s arrival, I did begin to wonder whether Abraham had been completely honest about his circumstances when arranging for Julia to leave her known world. The home that Abraham readied for Julia—the adobe that she moved into upon arriving in Santa Fe—lay on Burro Alley. The street was only a few blocks long but housed all manner of iniquity: gamblers, drinkers, and whores, obvious and numerous. The city’s most notorious casinos and bordellos were all on Julia’s street, which also hosted the local market for donkeys and wood. A photo from the 1880s shows
a bare dirt road closely lined with rough adobe walls, with cockeyed peeled-bark viga fences, wood-laden burros, and scrofulous men—no women, none outdoors anyway, and not a speck of vegetation in sight. It was no place for any self-respecting bride.

Susan Magoffin, the young diarist and newlywed, lodged on a more respectable street. She stayed only two months in Santa Fe before continuing south into Mexico and finally home to Kentucky, but even in that short time, the city’s limited charms wore off. “I am most tired of Santa Fe & do not regret leaving,” she wrote. Julia was a slight twenty-two-year-old from a milder world, who knew neither English nor Spanish and nothing at all about the arid, naked place into which she had been imported. She could not comfort herself with the thought that this was temporary.