American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest

by Hannah Nordhaus

  We walked past an ice cream shop that occupied a house where some Schusters had lived long ago, and watched two small Turkish children playing tag. Around the corner, we found the home where Julia had lived as a child. It was another Fachwerk house—large, with brown timber and white plaster, many symmetrical windows, a tall peaked roof, and an arched door. An air-conditioning unit stuck out incongruously on the right side—not every house stands unaltered as a monument to the men who built it. It was now a clothing store, Herr Willeke explained, hands aflutter. The store was closed, so we couldn’t go in—it wouldn’t have resembled the home of Julia’s childhood anyway.

  Back at Herr Willeke’s house, in the upstairs sitting room that served as his archive, we pored over documents he had copied from the Stadtarchiv. We had climbed a steep set of low-ceilinged stairs and wound through many small rooms to get to the sitting room, where every available patch of wall space, every shelf, was covered in bric-a-brac: putti, knickknacks, portraits of family members in baroque frames. Herr Willeke served us tea and showed us his files. The Jews of Lügde had, of course, been erased as thoroughly there as they had everywhere in Germany, but their presence remained in the village that once abided them, and also in Herr Willeke’s papers—as letters and numbers, words and names. We spent the rest of the afternoon at his coffee table examining stacks of paper that Herr Willeke had diligently, tenderly copied from the archives: census records, a map of the graveyard, chronicles of Lügde’s Jewish families, whose histories ended mostly in America if they were lucky, or in the camps and ghettos of eastern Europe if they were not.

  The light was fading as Herr Willeke drove us home. We had spent a long day of searching for people long dead. But with the help of Herr Willeke—so formal and prickly, and also endearing—I had found something of Julia in Lügde. They were small clues, quiet whispers from the past. Her home did not stand apart like the mansion in Santa Fe; it resembled the homes to the left and right, up and down the street. The chronicle of the cholera epidemic in the town records reminded me starkly that the year Julia left for America, a Jew was still less than a person in her hometown. And the moss-and-ivy-draped stones of the Schustergarten informed me that, far from home, Julia had learned of her father’s death and set off, through wild lands rampaged by Billy the Kid, to pay her respects. We had unearthed in that Lügde cemetery one small fragment of her unhappiness.

  What we had learned of Abraham was less affecting, and it wouldn’t solve the debate as to how the Hebrew letters came to be carved above the Santa Fe cathedral door. But Herr Willeke’s description of the old Lügde church had given us this much: Abraham could hardly have been ignorant of the custom of the tetragrammaton. And perhaps he, like his wife, also valued some reminder of his village past.

  The next morning, the good Herr met us in the Fürstenhof breakfast room and drove us to the train station. His propriety in squiring us through Julia’s world was touching; he might have been a Bad Pyrmont gentleman of Bertha’s day. As we detoured past the Schloss Pyrmont, the large stone-and-plaster castle that loomed above the Kurpark, he repeated a saying: “Those who drive past the castle will always come back.” He regarded me for a long moment in the rearview mirror. “But don’t come back as a ghost,” he said. “We have enough ghosts.”

  eighteen

  THE MERCHANT PRINCE

  Abraham in his prime.

  Family collection.

  After nearly a month spent tending to her mother, Bertha traveled to Switzerland with Abraham, leaving Delia, back from her own jaunt with their father, in Bad Pyrmont to watch Julia. Now it was Bertha’s turn to explore. After five train changes and one Russian lamb cape left behind in a railroad car, she and Abraham arrived in Lucerne, “hungry as prairie wolves.” The next day, she saw the Alps for the first time: “It was a grand sight—the bluish-greenish water and the snow-capped mountains looming above it.” Bertha liked the Swiss people she met; she found them “courteous.” Freed from her mother’s infirmity, she behaved like a tourist rather than a health-seeker: sightseeing, visiting springs and lakes and castles and spas, hopping from hotel to hotel, shopping for dresses and spoons, and hiking among the sublime peaks on the Swiss-French-Italian border. (“Went for steep hike down slippery descent, Papa said, ‘It’s a wonder you didn’t fall.’ I kept my peace and didn’t tell him that I had fallen—his back was turned however and I picked myself up as fast as I could and walked on with an unconcerned face.”)

  Abraham continued to take “baths and douches” for his health, and he continued to spoil his youngest daughter; Bertha persisted in striking up a conversation with any “young gentleman” who crossed her path. She expressed dismay at the local table manners (“Shaking hands over the table and reaching for dishes in front of the other guests are common practice—Finger bowls are not to be had.”) She beheld the Alpenglühen—the setting sun reflecting on the peaks, the mountains “all afire.”

  In mid-August, Bertha and Abraham left for Frankfurt, where they attended an electric exposition—“mostly machines, very interesting for those who understand the mechanism.” For Bertha, the motors, lightbulbs, and electric waterfall, powered by a hydroelectric station one hundred miles away, were as mysterious as the “hidden power” she’d observed in Annie Abbott. Bertha also made a visit to Goethe’s house, where she accidentally spurned a Balkan prince. “The prince of Montenegro was there at the same time I was and asked me in French whether I could speak that language,” she wrote. “Having had a lecture from Papa in the morning not to be familiar with strangers, I answered him”—the prince—“in as few words as possible and went my way. Afterwards on walking to the register saw written down Prince de Montenegro Nicolai and was told that the gentleman who had spoken to me was the one. Tra-la?”

  On Tuesday, August 18, they left Frankfurt for Bad Pyrmont, and Bertha’s frolic ended. Julia and Delia met them at the depot. “Mamma is not well,” Bertha wrote—as she had written before, as she would write more and more as the weeks passed. The following day, Abraham boarded a train for Hanover. “Papa went . . . to see about rooms for us—see if mamma feels better there.” They joined him, taking rooms at the Hotel Royal, but Julia did not feel better there. “Mamma cannot stand the noise,” Bertha wrote. Abraham and Delia went to scout a health resort in the Harz Mountains of northern Germany. The Harzburg resort was a sleepier spa with saltwater thermal springs. They hoped Julia might find enough peace and solitude there to heal.

  Julia felt better on the day they packed their bags to depart from Hanover. She was looking forward to a change of scene, away from the clamor of the city. The family visited Julia’s mother, the widow Schuster. She gave Delia a beautiful spoon and Bertha “a lovely chatelaine”—a waistband clasp. A slew of aunts and cousins accompanied their New Mexico relatives to the depot. “The farewell was exciting,” Bertha wrote, “we all cried.” Not so much, though, that Bertha was unable to keep an eye out for suitable fellows. “I saw a young gentleman look at us as if we were curios and smile—we must have looked funny.”

  The farewells were also for Abraham, who would not accompany them on the next leg of Julia’s therapeutic journey. “Papa leaves Bremen for New York on the 25th.”

  He left Julia in the hands of his daughters and headed back to America, to New York and then Santa Fe—to the world of commerce and men, where he knew what to do and how and when to do it. These things were much easier than trying to repair his ailing wife.

  Even as he struggled to stanch Julia’s decline, Abraham remained vigorous. After Zadoc’s death in 1884 in Carlsbad of the “liver affection,” the Staab company had grown only stronger, the family only richer. The frontier suited Abraham’s sensibility. He would not have agreed with the assessment of another Jewish immigrant, Phoebus Freudenthal, who had written from Las Cruces, in southern New Mexico, to tell his brother in Germany that “the only thing New Mexico is good for is making money.” Freudenthal figured that the rugged country of the Southwest must have been one
of the last places that God created: slapped together thoughtlessly and hurriedly. It’s possible that Zadoc and the Spiegelbergs shared those antipathies—they’d all eventually relocated to New York, a backward journey of manifest destiny. But Abraham took to the desert. He made it his own.

  Back in 1881, when Santa Fe’s streets were still lit with turpentine torches, US Army captain John G. Bourke described its citizens as “a motley crew of hook-nosed Jews, blue-coated soldiers,” and “señoritas wrapped to the eyes in rebosos.” Outsiders may have seen Abraham as a damnable Jew. But insiders—the men who bought and sold and shaped Santa Fe—saw him as an ally. From early on, Abraham made powerful friends. He teamed up with the richest, best-connected men in Santa Fe: Thomas B. Catron, a local lawyer who became the state’s first US senator, and for whom New Mexico’s largest county is named; Stephen Elkins, New Mexico’s territorial delegate and later President Benjamin Harrison’s secretary of war; and a constellation of lesser luminaries, all pro-statehood Republicans. While Zadoc had been a Democrat, Abraham believed the future lay elsewhere.

  Abraham ran for public office for the first time in 1879, for Santa Fe county commissioner, against Solomon Spiegelberg. Although Abraham outpolled Spiegelberg 834 votes to 821, the local elections board—stacked with Democrats—ruled that Spiegelberg had won. The board did so by throwing out sixty-three votes in precinct number nine—populated by Hispanics, who tended to side with the Republicans—that were cast for “Abram Esstab.” The case went to the territorial supreme court, which ruled that the votes should be counted. Thus, when the railroad arrived a year later, it was Abraham who drove in the silver spike.

  Abraham was everywhere in Santa Fe’s business. He was president of the gasworks. He was a director of the Texas, Santa Fe and Northern Railroad. He helped commission the construction of, and then won the contract to supply, the territorial penitentiary. The New Mexican—the local Republican paper—was a big booster. “A. Staab, Esq.,” as the paper referred to him, was always “the most affable of gentlemen.”

  We can’t know what happened between Abraham and Julia within the confines of the marriage—newspapers tell little of a man’s inner life. We can’t know whether he loved her, whether she loved him, whether he understood her melancholia or tried hard enough to help her. But we do know that Abraham was, without dispute, a genial public man. He was a natural operator. When the railroad to Denver opened, a reporter from the Denver paper, the Rocky Mountain News, joined Abraham and other business and army leaders in one of the inaugural train’s private compartments. “They were telling stories, and there were some good ones told,” the reporter wrote. “It is conceded that Major Hooper is the boss story-teller as well as the best, but Mr. Cornforth will not take a back seat for anyone else, not excepting Colonel Staab, of New Mexico, who can tell a story with a Hebraic flavor to it that is hard to equal.” Abraham used his charm and his money, and later his “palatial residence,” to strengthen his social and business ties. “Strains of music from the piano and violin . . . mingled with the sound of popping champagne corks, and time passed on golden wings,” wrote the New Mexican about one railroad-wooing affair at the Staab house.

  The local newspapers reported Abraham’s comings and goings with near-tabloid voracity: “the merchant prince,” they called him. He went to Las Cruces to acquire wool, and to Las Vegas to buy corn. He went to Socorro to raise funds for the territory’s Republican convention. He went to Albuquerque to bid on county bonds offered at auction. He won, of course: “A. Staab, Esq, returned to-day from a successful business trip to Albuquerque,” wrote the New Mexican in December 1888. “The qualification, however, is quite superfluous, for all of this pioneer merchant’s trips are successful.”

  Successful in business, he certainly was; saintly, he wasn’t. This was the West, after all, at a time when opportunities were wide open and the laws and their enforcers could rarely keep pace with changing conditions. Sister Blandina had written that Santa Fe was full of “land-grabbers, . . . quacks, professional deceivers . . . . I could use a half a dozen more adjectives and yet not touch on all the methods of deception carried on.”

  I could find no evidence that Abraham himself was a “professional deceiver,” but it was clear that he knew how to exploit those gaps between what was and what should have been. He was a hungry, scrappy capitalist, and he didn’t shy away from competition or conflict—though he preferred official, court-sanctioned justice to the frontier kind. Not a month went by without a newspaper reporting that Abraham had filed a lawsuit. He sued customers who hadn’t paid their bills and local citizens who hadn’t paid up on promissory notes; he sued the Spiegelbergs regularly; he sued business partners, friends, nephews, a brother-in-law; he sued the territorial tax collection authorities; he sued Western Union once, for failing to deliver a message at nine in the morning. The message had come instead at noon. If Abraham won, he collected. If he lost, he paid up. If he didn’t like the legal reasoning behind his defeat, he set out to persuade the territorial legislature to pass laws more to his liking.

  He wasn’t the only Santa Fe player on the make: his colleagues Thomas Catron, who often served as Abraham’s lawyer, and Stephen Elkins were every bit as grasping and litigious. The group was known as the “Santa Fe Ring.” Catron was its brains; Elkins, Catron’s brother-in-law, its grandiloquent figurehead; Abraham, one of its behind-the-scenes financiers. The editors of the New Mexican were also known to be members: hence the fawning press about Abraham and other members of the ring. They weren’t an officially organized cabal, as far as history can tell—there were no officers, no minutes, no formal meetings—just a group of lawyers, politicians, judges, and businessmen who socialized and played poker together regularly and kept the territory’s business under their close purview.

  The group had been implicated in unseemly deals since its inception in the 1870s. The St. Louis Republican newspaper had noted in 1876 that a “Republican ring” in New Mexico was, with small amounts of cash, able to induce the legislature “to do its bidding.” In Colfax County, northeast of Santa Fe, Catron and Elkins presided over a company that gained rights to thirty-four Mexican land grants totaling nearly three million acres. The company was the largest landowner in New Mexico and among the largest in the nation. Abraham wasn’t directly involved in the company, but he did loan money and invest in land in the county.

  While Catron and Elkins kept their hands relatively clean, their company representatives in Colfax County played rough, acquiring the land by evicting Hispanic “squatters” from their ancestral lands and commissioning thugs to scare away or kill those who refused to leave. They sold worthless land that they didn’t own to incoming homesteaders, and foreclosed when the newcomers couldn’t make enough money from the alkaline soils to pay the mortgage. They bought off government officials and hired outlaw gangs to rustle cattle and kill off their enemies. Abraham’s business and political associates were part of those land grabs, even if Abraham wasn’t directly implicated. “Nothing was too rotten,” New Mexico’s territorial governor Miguel Antonio Otero wrote in his memoirs, “for the well-known Santa Fe Ring to undertake.” The ring knew how to game the system, because it owned the system.

  The ring was also involved in the most famous New Mexico feud of the era—the Lincoln County War, in which Billy the Kid (the famous outlaw, not the lesser one of Sister Blandina’s acquaintance) made his name in the late 1870s. The battle began as a conflict between ranchers competing for army beef contracts and expanded into full-scale bloodshed. Scrambling to protect their interests in government contracts in the area, Catron and the Santa Fe Ring were drawn into the battle. L. G. Murphy, who led one of the warring factions and is considered one of the “bad guys” of the conflict, happened to be Abraham’s supplier of flour for the nearby Indian reservation and army fort. Abraham sided with him.

  Ultimately, the US Department of Justice sent an investigator from New York, the attorney Frank Warner Angel, to figure out what was g
oing on. In his notebooks, he tallied his assessments of the many New Mexico players he met on his travels. The list was arranged alphabetically, sort of. “Ayers, John,” a federal Indian agent, he considered “Honest—Liquor his worst enemy.” Axtell, S. B., the territorial governor at the time, was “Conceited—egotistical easily flattered Tool unwittedly [sic] of the ring—Goes off half cocked.” And on it went up the alphabet, the notebooks revealing more about the investigator than the New Mexicans he attempted to assess. Angel, this man of the East, had his rules: people were “reliable” or “not reliable”; “honest” or “weak”; “shrewd” or “of no standing”; acting “for the right” or dreadfully wrong. Stephen Elkins was “Silver tongued—further comment unnecessary.” The Spiegelbergs, who serviced the flour contract on the Mescalero Apache reservation in Lincoln County, he deemed “not reliable . . . use them against Z. Staab Bros & vice versa.” Abraham, as the New Mexico face of “Staab Z & Bro.,” had “Axes to grind,” Angel wrote: “Not reliable—use them against Spiegelberg Bro & vice versa”—to what purpose, exactly, I don’t know.

  Abraham would probably have laughed if he’d seen Angel’s notes, so earnest and naive. Because Abraham knew that “reliable” was beside the point in territorial New Mexico. Loyalty was the least of it. Bravado, charm, deception, ruthlessness, gunplay, grit: this was how you got things accomplished. Abraham and his Spiegelberg cousins played the territorial power game and played it well: Staabs with the Spiegelbergs, Staabs against the Spiegelbergs—it changed all the time. This was New Mexico.

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