American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (8 page)

Sister Blandina Segale.

Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 67735.

I
n early 1877, Abraham sought additional assistance for Julia. He was still concerned about his wife’s condition. He wasn’t able to send to Europe this time, so in place of a real sister, he decided to procure a Catholic one. In March 1877, Sister Blandina—the young nun whose diaries recounted her days at the end of the Santa Fe Trail—was asked by her superiors to look after Julia. “A lady, Mrs. Adolph
Staab, and her children are here,” Blandina wrote in her diary. “I have been asked to entertain them after school hours. I am perfectly at home with the children, but I have no attraction for entertaining wealthy ladies. However, since it is given me as a duty, I’ll do it. Mrs. Staab really needs attention. She is in a depressed condition, and I must cheer her up.”

For a few weeks, Blandina spent afternoons with Julia. She must have done an adequate job of improving Julia’s mood, because in late April, Abraham asked her to accompany Julia and the children to Germany. Julia planned to travel there to see her family.

But Sister Blandina found even the suggestion an affront. “I believe he thinks money can do anything and he expects me to accept the offer,” she wrote. “When he was convinced that I could not go to Europe, he said he would be satisfied if I would accompany them to the city of New York. But I am satisfied to remain in Santa Fe.”

Sister Blandina’s superiors, however, were not satisfied: at the end of May, she reported a compulsory change of heart. “Sister Augustine tells me that the most Rev. Archbishop Lamy”—the archbishop of Santa Fe—“wishes me to go with the Staab family to the terminus of the railroad.” The railroad was now five miles from Trinidad, the scruffy frontier town at the base of Raton Pass. It was a five-day, two-hundred-mile stagecoach ride from Santa Fe, much shorter than the seven hundred miles Julia had traveled on her first journey across the plains, but a difficult trip nonetheless. The plan was for Blandina and another young nun, Sister Augustine, to ride with Julia and two of her children; the others must have stayed behind in Santa Fe, or perhaps traveled ahead of them. The women would be accompanied in another stagecoach by Julia’s physician, Dr. Symington, Abraham, and “two gentlemen who are going to Chicago.” Men in one coach, women in another.

It was a hazardous time on the trail. Billy the Kid was terrorizing Colorado and northern New Mexico with a gang of criminals,
stealing horses, robbing stagecoaches, and raiding settlements, guns ablaze. (This was not the famous Billy the Kid, but a less famous Colorado outlaw who preceded him—also young, also named William, also rampaging in the late 1870s.) “Everyone is concerned about our going,” Blandina wrote. “Mr. Staab spoke to Sister and myself about the danger of travel (at the present time) on the Santa Fe Trail, owing to Billy the Kid’s gang. He told us that the gang is attacking every mail coach and private conveyance.” Abraham wanted to make sure that Blandina was comfortable with the prospect of a run-in with the region’s most notorious outlaw. “‘We will have many freight wagons well manned, but if you fear to travel, we shall defer the trip,’” he told her.

Blandina found Abraham’s chivalry touching, but she told him that she had “very little fear of Billy’s gang.” This was not only because of her abiding faith in God, but also because she knew—though she didn’t explain this to Abraham—that she could offer the family some protection: she was already acquainted with Billy the Kid.

Only a few months before, in late 1876, she had been teaching at a church school in Trinidad when word came that Billy’s gang had been wreaking havoc on the other side of the mountains. One of Billy’s thugs had “painted red the town of Cimarron,” Blandina wrote, “mounting his stallion and holding two six-shooters aloft while shouting his commands, which everyone obeyed, not knowing when the trigger on either weapon would be lowered.” A few days later, the same gunman arrived in Trinidad. Sister Blandina watched him approach from her schoolyard. “The air here is very rarified,” she wrote, “and we are all eagle-eyed in this atmosphere.”

We stood in our front yard, everyone trying to look indifferent, while Billy’s accomplice headed toward us. He was mounted on a spirited stallion of unusually large proportions, and was dressed
as the Toreadores (Bull-Fighters) dress in old Mexico. Cowboy’s sombrero, fantastically trimmed, red velvet knee breeches, green velvet short coat, long sharp spurs, gold and green saddle cover. A figure of six feet three, on a beautiful animal, made restless by a tight bit—you need not wonder, the rider drew attention.

The thug passed on through the town, but a few weeks later a member of the local “Vigilant Club” had come to fetch Sister Blandina. “We have work on hand!” he told her. The same outlaw—Schneider was his name—was again in the vicinity. This time, however, he was doing no parading. He had been shot in the thigh after a quarrel with his partner, a man named Happy Jack. The two former compadres had been “eyeing and following each other for three days, eating at the same table, weapon in right hand, conveying food to their mouth with the left hand.” Finally, at dinner one night, there came a lull in which each man thought the other off guard. They fired simultaneously, and both were hit. Happy Jack was shot “through the breast” and killed. Schneider was grievously wounded, nursing his injuries in an unused adobe hut in Trinidad. “He has a very poor chance of living,” the man from the Vigilant Club told her.

But Schneider lived for quite some time. Sister Blandina had vowed, as a Sister of Charity, to care for anyone in need—outlaws, despondent Jewish wives—and so she brought him food, water, castile soap, and linens, and she ministered to him for months. The two developed a friendship of a sort. He confessed his sins—they were many, including befriending and then murdering inexperienced travelers on the Santa Fe Trail, scalping an old man who had once shown him mercy, and shooting cows for their hides—but he did not repent. “What will my pals think of me?” Schneider told the Sister when she spoke of absolution. “Me, to show a yellow streak! I would rather go to the burning flames!”

A few weeks later, Schneider’s pals, including Billy the Kid, showed up in town, planning to scalp four Trinidad physicians who had refused to extract the bullet from Schneider’s thigh. Sister Blandina met with them in Schneider’s sickroom. “The leader, Billy, has steel-blue eyes,” she wrote, “peach complexion, is young, one would take him to be seventeen—innocent-looking, save for the corners of his eyes, which tell a set purpose, good or bad.” She declared the rest of the gang, “all fine looking young men.” Billy announced that he wished to repay Sister Blandina for her work caring for Schneider. Blandina was six years younger than Julia, but she trafficked easily in the currency of the gritty frontier. “I answered, ‘Yes, there is a favor you can grant me.’”

The favor she asked was that Billy refrain from scalping the Trinidad physicians, and though he wasn’t too keen on it, he agreed and stood by his word. “Not only that, Sister,” he told her, “but at any time my pals and I can serve you, you will find us ready.”

The gang rode off, and a few weeks after that, Schneider, Sister Blandina’s “poor desperado,” approached “the shores of eternity,” she wrote. “He has become more thoughtful, even his tiger eyes are softening.” She fetched his mother, who helped care for him, and in early December 1876, he echoed her prayers, “which included an act of contrition”—repentance at long last—and said good-bye.

Abraham often saw luck go his way; he couldn’t have known how smart a decision he made when he insisted that Sister Blandina travel with the family to Trinidad.

The group—the two Sisters, Abraham, Julia, her two children, the two Chicago-bound travelers, and Dr. Symington—left Santa Fe on the first or second of June in a caravan of well-armed freight wagons. They stayed a night at the Exchange Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where Sister Blandina received an unsavory proposition “to leave the
convent and go out to enjoy some of the pleasures of the world. Do you wonder at my indignation?”

They traveled on through Tiptonville, a “map-forgotten place” with a dozen mud-thatched adobe houses, and then through Agua Dulce (Sweetwater), arriving safely in Trinidad on the sixth of June. “The greater part of the day was given to making things comfortable for Mrs. Staab and children to travel to New York City,” Sister Blandina wrote. The next morning, Julia and the children boarded the train.

Abraham and Dr. Symington planned to return to Santa Fe, and Sisters Blandina and Augustine, their duties to the archbishop dispatched, were also free to go home. Seeking a speedier return, Abraham and Dr. Symington asked if the nuns were willing to travel back to Santa Fe with them in a hack—a smaller, faster four-wheeled coach. They hoped to break the record for travel from Trinidad to Santa Fe. There were risks, Dr. Symington explained, because “the Kid” was attacking “coaches or anything of profit that comes in his way.”

Sister Blandina again told the men that she had no fear. On June 10, they set off, arriving that evening at the stage station at Sweetwater. “It did not take us long,” Sister Blandina wrote, “to see that extraordinary preparations were being made.” The stage driver and his passengers were loading and cleaning their revolvers, and everyone expected Billy and his gang to attack that night. Blandina, unfazed, took a long walk in the fields outside the station. The next morning, they left early. About an hour or so after lunch, the coach’s black driver yelled back to Abraham, his voice “trembling with suppressed fear,” as Sister Blandina described it. “Mas-sah,” Sister Blandina wrote. “There am som-un skimming over the plains, coming dis way.”

Abraham and Dr. Symington took out their revolvers. The rider came closer. “By this time both gentlemen were feverishly excited,” Blandina wrote. How I love the image of Abraham, all five-foot-two Jew of him, with his suit vest and watch fob and German accent, hanging
from the coach, steely eyed, revolver at the ready. “I looked at the men,” wrote Blandina, “and could not but admire the resolute expression which meant ‘To conquer or die!’” But Sister Blandina advised that Abraham and the doctor should instead “remain passive,” and put their guns out of sight. “They looked at me as if to say that a woman is incapable of realizing extreme danger. The darkey in his fright spoke again: ‘He am very near.’”

Sister Blandina again advised them to put their guns away. Abraham listened to her this time—to a woman!—and the men put their guns down. A “light patter of hoofs” drew near the carriage opening. Sister Blandina looked out, and shifted her bonnet so that the rider could see her, as she suspected he had the night before when she took her walk. “Our eyes met; he raised his large-brimmed hat with a wave and a bow, looked his recognition, fairly flew a distance of about three rods, and then stopped to give us some of his wonderful antics on broncho maneuvers.” This was Billy, of course.

Now free of desperadoes, the foursome rushed on to Santa Fe. They arrived on June 12, at a breakneck pace. “The record is broken,” Sister Blandina wrote. “We made the fastest trip ever known from Trinidad to Santa Fe”: the doctor, the nuns, and the Jew.