American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest by Hannah Nordhaus Read Free Book Online

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 valleysand 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