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

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.

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GOOD-TIME TOWN

    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, thesky 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 substantialcompared 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