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

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 cockfightsand 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 dancingwomen 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