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

by Hannah Nordhaus

  PRINCESS GOLDENHAIR

  Flora Spiegelberg.

  Courtesy of Felix Warburg.

  I hadn’t known much—anything at all—about Abraham’s Spiegelberg cousins until my first trip to the archives in Santa Fe. I hadn’t known that they were the first German Jews to settle in New Mexico; I hadn’t known that they had employed Abraham when he first arrived. I hadn’t even known that they were relatives. But on the same day that I found the slim file containing Abraham’s citizenship declaration, I discovered three much larger folders devoted to the Spiegelbergs. Flora Spiegelberg—the wife of the youngest Spiegelberg brother, Willi—had compiled them, and I found myself immersed in the blizzard of letters and articles and papers that told her story, and in the remarkable manner in which she seized the choices she was given in life and made them hers. It seemed that she had something to tell me.

  Flora had arrived in Santa Fe in 1875, nine years after Julia, following a large wedding in Nuremberg and a yearlong trip in Europe. While Julia had spent the first days of her marriage on the Santa Fe Trail, Flora had stayed at the finest hotels and bathed in the finest spas. It was a honeymoon altogether different from Julia’s.

  Flora’s appearance and temperament also stood in stark contrast to Julia’s. Flora was tall, red-haired, and boundlessly peppy. She was, it was clear from her files, a doer—community oriented, a prolific writer and fervent memorializer of all things Spiegelberg. Her New Mexico exploits were celebrated in the Jewish Spectator, the American Hebrew, the Jewish Historical Quarterly, and a number of New Mexico historical journals. In her dotage—she died in 1943 at the age of eighty-seven—Flora wrote letters to librarians and archivists, dispatches from her New York apartment—heavy typeface, lots of typos. She was, said an interviewer from the American Hebrew, “a tall, straight old lady, with a most remarkable memory.”

  “I was born in New York in 1857,” the Jewish Spectator article begins. Her mother had taken her back to Germany, however, after her father’s death, and she met Willi Spiegelberg there in 1874—she was seventeen years old, he thirty. “I was young and he was handsome and in a very short time, I became Mrs. Willi Spiegelberg,” she told her interviewer. After their European honeymoon the couple traveled from St. Louis “in very primitive steam cars” to the rail’s end near Trinidad. The train had advanced swiftly in the nine years since Julia had traveled the trail, cutting off six hundred miles of prairie that Julia had had to travel by stagecoach. Still, Trinidad was rough. “The only hotel was a shabby, two-story building,” Flora told the American Hebrew, and as she and Willi entered, “they found the enormous main hall filled with the tobacco smoke of a hundred cowboys,” heavily armed and riled up after a roundup. When Flora entered the room, “probably the first of her sex that they had seen in a year,” she speculated—“they arose as one man, swung their sombreros, and shouted with lusty enthusiasm, ‘Hello, lady, sure glad to see you!’” Flora slept in her clothes that night.

  The next morning, she rescued herself from a runaway stagecoach—slamming the door shut to avoid being thrown out when a train spooked the horses—then continued on to Santa Fe, eating chiles, beans, and buffalo tongue along the way. She did not relish the food, but she appreciated the novelty of it. She found the journey terrifying, but also considered it a wonderful adventure. She feared cowboys and Indians, but welcomed the sight of her first adobes. She miscarried along the way; this did not set her back, either. She seemed an altogether more durable woman than Julia, suited to such a life.

  When Flora and Willi’s stagecoach galloped into Santa Fe, a military band awaited them, playing Wagner’s wedding march to welcome her to her new home. She was, she told the American Hebrew, the eighth “American” woman in Santa Fe, by which she meant non-Indian and non-Hispanic. In other reminiscences she declared herself the thirteenth. In others, the first.

  Either way, she arrived in the desert with a splash. “Willi has a girl at last,” noted the New Mexican. “She stands in the doorway of the handsome retail store of Spiegelberg Bros. to attract the eyes and arrest the attention of the passerby.”

  She placed herself quickly at the center of things. She threw parties that featured German cuisine and fine champagne; she collected art and founded literary and dramatic clubs, started a Jewish school, taught Jewish and Catholic Sunday classes, and created a children’s playground in Santa Fe. It didn’t matter that she was cultured and European and Jewish while Santa Fe was not. She did not require rich soil in order to flourish. She bloomed in the desert. The family built a lovely territorial-style home in 1880, two years before Julia’s house was built. It was the first with running water and gas appliances, a sweet adobe blend of Europe and New Mexico, two stories with a pitched roof and territorial woodwork. Julia’s home, just across the street, rose to the skyline, three stories of high French ornament and cultural affront. The two women seemed in every way opposites.

  Flora was proud of her family’s Western mettle: besides German, Spanish, and English, Willi spoke four Indian dialects, and he was, she said, an expert with the lariat and whip. He had traveled the plains fearlessly during the Indian Wars, Flora recalled, moving without an army escort and dodging throngs of “maddened redmen.” Flora was equally stouthearted; by her account, she single-handedly talked down a lynch mob intent on dragooning her husband into hanging a pair of murderers, kept an eye on Billy the Kid while he shopped in her husband’s store for a new cowboy outfit, and helped the author Lew Wallace, who was also New Mexico’s territorial governor, polish his soon-to-be-blockbuster novel, Ben-Hur. She also claimed she was the conversation partner to whom General Sherman first uttered the words, “War is hell.”

  Flora, too, was close with the archbishop. He planted two willows in her front yard and they gardened together, speaking French. In her memoirs, she explained that the archbishop placed the Hebrew letters over the cathedral’s arch in honor of his friendship not with Abraham, but with her own family.

  As I read through Flora’s files, I came to realize something: Flora was, as much as Julia—maybe more—the model for Paul Horgan’s German bride. She played the piano beautifully, spoke perfect French, gardened with the archbishop, and entertained dignitaries. She was every bit the sparkling pioneer wife—comfortable, assured, adaptable—that Horgan described in his book. The German bride was a composite figure, I now remembered Horgan’s saying in the book’s introduction. The house in the illustration was Julia’s, certainly. But many—perhaps most—of the stories were Flora’s. Flora, not Julia, was the poised frontier woman in Horgan’s book.

  Even so, the frontier wasn’t a place where Flora wished to live permanently. In 1893, she persuaded Willi to liquidate their assets and follow his brothers to New York, where her two daughters could live in a more cosmopolitan environment. In her new city, Flora was no less engaged. She organized the Boys Vocational Club and the Jewish Working Girls’ Club, served on the Bill Board and the Daylight Saving Commission, and advocated relentlessly for the creation of a modern system of waste collection in the city (she was nicknamed “The Old Garbage Woman of New York” for her efforts).

  Later, she wrote radio screenplays and a children’s book, Princess Goldenhair and the Wonderful Flower. I managed to purchase it on the Internet: another artifact for my collection. It was whimsically illustrated in bright colors and with fine-lined detail, Yoda-eared dwarves and veiny-winged fairies dancing on mountainsides. My five-year-old daughter was fond of princesses, so I read it with her. The story involves a beautiful German redhead—similar in appearance, perhaps, to Flora?—named Princess Goldenhair. The young princess’s troubles are fairly conventional—she is kidnapped by a wicked, poisonous-flower-wielding step-grandmother. But the rest of the book was hardly what we expected. After the step-grandmother drops the captive Princess Goldenhair off with some dwarves, she returns home to find her daughter dying in bed and her neighbor dead in the cellar with a broken neck. Then she lies down and dies, too. After three people perished in th
ree pages, my daughter’s eyes fogged with tears, and I decided that Flora was probably a better fabulist of her own charmed life than of fictional princesses. We stopped reading.

  Flora was also a peace activist: in 1919, after the First World War ended, she wrote a petition titled “The Ten Commandments for World Peace,” which demanded an amendment to the US Constitution requiring that all future wars be decided by popular referendum, and asked that all “national, racial, and religious hatreds should be eliminated.” She was tireless in her advocacy, mailing her petition to newspapers around the country and to the Library of Congress, and persuading the Veterans of Foreign Wars to discuss her petition at their annual meeting.

  Even in her dotage, Flora found idleness unendurable. During the last thirteen years of her life, she engaged in exhaustive correspondence with New Mexico museums, historians, and archivists, building a record of the Spiegelbergs’ role in New Mexico and her own as New Mexico’s best-known German bride: “I presume I am the oldest living American Pioneer Woman of Santa Fe,” she wrote to one archivist. “Dear Friend, kindly pardon all corrections, for unfortunately I have but ONE EYE,” she wrote to another when submitting a chronicle. Her New York Herald Tribune obituary ran with the subhead “Once Ate Buffalo Meat.” I found myself both admiring her self-regard and fortitude, and also finding her slightly unbearable. I was jealous on Julia’s behalf.

  It was as if Flora, born into the waning half of the nineteenth century, inhabited not only an entirely different generation, but a different world from Julia’s. They were conceived only thirteen years apart, but modernity itself seemed to separate them. Victorian languor was going out of style; women began to flee the fusty parlor. There are no reports of ghosts in Flora’s house; she was too busy with the present to linger in the past.

  Whereas Julia led a quieter life. Besides her seven surviving children and the distinguished brick home, she left little record of her passage through thirty years in Santa Fe. Julia didn’t see herself as a pioneer or a Western heroine; she was not one to love the view from such vast distances. In the newspapers, she always appeared as “Mrs. A. Staab.” She was an adjunct and helpmeet to her husband, cloistered and Victorian, a creature of both her waning epoch and her own reticent and melancholy constitution. Were it not for the stories they tell of her ghost, we’d know nothing of her life at all.

  And yet she is now New Mexico’s most famous German bride—and the Staab we care about most.

  twenty

  BOODLE AND PAYOLA

  The Z. Staab Brothers building in Santa Fe.

  Harmon Parkhurst, Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 10779, 1925.

  Back in the waning years of the nineteenth century, though, Abraham was the name on everyone’s lips. In the years before his trips with Bertha to California and with Julia to Europe, he was at the very top of Santa Fe’s social and political pyramid. In January 1890—a year before the family headed off to Germany for Julia’s cure—he at last changed the name of his firm from “Z. Staab & Bro.” to “A. Staab.”—he was his own man now. Abraham was fifty years old, Julia forty-five. Their family was, by all appearances, thriving. The children—Paul excepted—were healthy. They were marrying, courting, heading off to university. Julia was still making the social rounds, out in the world. Everything was right. If only the world could have stopped revolving.

  In November of that year, after a few years’ hiatus, Abraham again ran for county commissioner. The election was contentious; the local Democrats were not fond of Abraham. In the previous election cycle, the New Mexican reported, the talk at the Democratic county convention “consisted mainly of abuse of Mr. A. Staab.” This time, if anything, the malice had grown. The Democrats accused Abraham of pocketing money from county bonds issued a decade earlier to entice the railroads. The allegations rose to such a drumbeat that Abraham felt forced to reply. “The insinuation in the Santa Fe Sun”—the Democratic newspaper—“that I had any part in, or knowledge of, any ‘$16,000 bond steal of years ago,’ is willfully and maliciously false and unfounded. A. Staab,” he signed it. The New Mexican—the Republican newspaper—in turn accused the Democrats in power of embezzling county funds. “They hate an honest man with a deadly hatred,” opined the New Mexican. “They know that if Mr. Staab is elected, their career of crime and corruption is at an end, and that if there is any law in this country they will be punished.”

  And so it went.

  When the votes were tallied on election day, Abraham was found to have tied his opponent, a fellow dry goods merchant named Charles M. Creamer. The Democratic election judges, however, had thrown out a dozen votes for Abraham because they had been written in lead pencil instead of ink. To resolve the tie, the two candidates’ names were put in a hat, and Abraham’s was chosen.

  All hell broke loose. The Democratic county clerk, insisting that both of the names in the hat had been Abraham’s, refused to certify the election. The previous Democratic county commissioners also refused to step down. In order to take office, Abraham and his fellow Republicans formed a “shadow commission” and elected Abraham chairman. They must have had the sheriff on their side, because they managed to send the Democratic commissioners and county clerk to jail for contempt of court. The contested election eventually made its way up to the US Supreme Court, which ruled on Abraham’s behalf.

  At the same time, the Democrats were in a lather about militia warrants. These were IOUs that funded armed squads the territory had raised to fight the Indian Wars in the late 1860s—money promised to volunteers at a later date if they joined the militias. After the battles subsided, however, the territory had no money to reimburse the volunteers, and the federal government had no interest in doing so, either. A few years later, Abraham, Thomas Catron, and some of their associates bought hundreds of such warrants for pennies on the dollar, hoping to cash them in later for dollars on the dollar. To persuade the legislature to recognize the warrants, many of which were probably fraudulent, Abraham offered, in a letter someone turned over to the Santa Fe Sun, $150,000 in payments to the territory’s legislators—$5,000 per legislator—to “defray the expenses” of their work in legalizing the warrants. Democrats believed it was a “bribing fund”—“a gigantic scheme,” the Sun wrote, “to debauch the legislature.”

  The legislature formed a special committee to look into the militia warrants and the “Staab letter,” as it came to be called. The committee asked Abraham to testify about his efforts to sway the legislature, but he said that he was sick and could not give testimony. Abraham may not have been “the Al Capone of Santa Fe,” as the ghost stories suggested, but there was indeed a whiff of corruption about Julia’s husband. In early January 1891, the Sun reported that Abraham “has been recommended by his physician to go to sea level as soon as possible.” Abraham ignored the advice at first. He recovered inside his Palace Avenue home, while the Sun continued to accuse him of “payola schemes,” of redirecting campaign money, and of general “boodle.” In mid-February, Abraham’s health grew worse. “A. Staab is quite ill again,” reported the Deming Headlight, “and will, in all probability, leave for California during the coming week, to consult a specialist upon his ailment.”

  This time, Abraham did leave, repairing to Los Angeles, Redondo Beach, and San Diego. This was the same trip on which he and Bertha went wine tasting and saw the Great Pacific, on which Bertha duked it out with the Miss Pullmans for the meager supply of young gentlemen. Though Bertha had mentioned that Abraham was ill at times, he had seemed well enough to enjoy their travels. Yet while in California, he resigned his spot on the board of commissioners, citing his fragile health.

  The papers fell quiet until early April, when the Albuquerque Democrat, keeping tabs on Abraham in California, brought forward a scandalous charge: “A. Staab, of Santa Fe, who is in California with his daughter on a health-seeking trip, recently lost $30,000, playing poker at Redondo Beach; and after giving his checks for that amount, he telegr
aphed home to stop payment on them.” Thirty thousand dollars—1891 dollars—in one night.

  Aunt Lizzie wrote in her family history that every time Abraham played poker, he left a twenty-dollar gold coin under all his kids’ pillows. She believed it was to persuade them—and Julia—that he always won. Julia’s husband was a gambler, in every way. That’s how you made it in America. He had gambled on crossing the ocean at the age of fifteen; he had wagered on the hazards of transporting people and goods on the Santa Fe Trail; he had ventured to import a wife he barely knew; he had speculated in real estate and irrigation schemes and mines and militia warrants. Likewise, he gambled at the table.

  But he didn’t always win. He lost thirty thousand dollars in that one sitting in Redondo Beach. He had lost the army headquarters, too, and the lucrative contracts they provided. He had selected a wife unsuited to the intrepid life he had chosen. And he had wagered that when New Mexico was admitted to the union, the militia warrants he had purchased would be paid off by the legislature. If they were, he stood to make more than a million dollars on the redemption.

  The warrants never paid, however. I found some of them, yellowed and forgotten, in an envelope in Abraham’s slim folder in the New Mexico state archives, crowded alongside Flora Spiegelberg’s more expansive reminiscences. The warrants meant nothing to me when I first discovered them; only after reading the newspaper accounts of Abraham’s scandalous efforts to collect those IOUs did I understand just how much they meant to him. They obsessed and plagued him, these promises of easy riches—and they almost undid him.

  Abraham had always been a careful curator of his reputation. Now, for the first time, he was a figure of ridicule. In every life, lucky streaks end. Lives go from golden to cursed, or merely to ordinary. The tide turns; the gods become mortal. “A. Staab, the Santa Fe merchant, whose speculations in New Mexico militia warrants and poker games, have become common talk in the territory, passed through to-day journeying home from the west,” wrote the Las Vegas Optic as he returned from California with Bertha in April 1891.