109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and the Denver and Rio Grande railways opened the West to many more artists and collectors, and they came in droves in search of the unspoiled land and simplicity they could not find elsewhere. The new arrivals discovered Santa Fe, turning it into a thriving cultural center. The city’s first resident artist was Carlos Vierra, a photographer who came from California in 1904 seeking relief for his lung problems in the arid climate, and liked it so much he made it his home, opening up a studio on the Plaza. As Santa Fe’s reputation spread, Sunmount prospered, playing host to a stream of well-known figures: among them the New York painters Sheldon Parsons and Gerald Cassidy; the architect John Gaw Meem; and the poet Alice Corbin, who prior to her illness had been an associate editor of the highly influential magazine Poetry.

  Alice Corbin Henderson was thirty-five when she traveled to Sunmount in 1916 accompanied by her husband and daughter, and she feared she would never leave the tuberculosis sanitarium, writing that she “had been thrown out in the desert to die, like a piece of old scrap iron.” Unexpectedly, she survived, and she ended up building a home nearby on Camino del Monte Sol and inviting colleagues such as Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, and Witter Bynner to visit and give readings at the sanitarium. Bynner, who briefly stayed at Sunmount while recuperating from an illness, found life in Santa Fe so pleasant he remained for the rest of his life and, with Corbin, helped establish the writer’s colony. In 1917, Corbin, Bynner, and Sandburg helped publish a special issue of Poetry magazine inspired by the chants and spoken poems of the Pueblo Indians. Meanwhile, Corbin’s husband, the painter William Penhallow Henderson, went on to found the Canyon Road art colony and contributed significantly to local architecture and design, becoming a leading figure in town. The couple’s busy, productive life encouraged others. Many Sunmount patients stayed on for years, receiving aftercare treatment in town, ultimately choosing to settle permanently in the area, and, as in the case of John Gaw Meem, building large airy houses, carrying on extremely active careers, and using their well-heeled connections at the sanitarium to secure an abundance of commissions. “Sunmount was really a magical place,” explained Meem’s daughter, Nancy Wirth. “Its founder, Frank Mera, wanted much more for his patients than just a cure. He pushed them to do more, to get out and explore. Many patients, like my father, became imbued with passion for the place.”

  The avant garde art scene lured a string of early Modernist painters from New York, most notably Robert Henri and John Sloan, members of the Ashcan school, who became frequent visitors to the city. In the 1920s, the penniless young Philadelphia painter Will Shuster founded the Santa Fe Art Colony with four other aspiring artists, known locally as the Los Cinco Pintores (“the five painters”), and developed a communal artists’ compound, where for five years they studied and showed their work together. Other young artists soon followed, including the watercolorist Cady Wells, as well as Charles Barrows and Jim Morris and the writers Mary Austin and her friend Willa Gather, who came and went, and whose novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, based on the life of Santa Fe archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy, was published in 1927. By the end of the decade, when Georgia O’Keeffe spent her first summer in the area, eventually purchasing a seven-acre spread at Ghost Ranch in the village of Abiquiu, Santa Fe’s Roaring Twenties art scene had acquired international fame.

  Like Corbin, Dorothy had come to Sunmount expecting to die and was greatly surprised to find herself enjoying her exile. She was captivated by the romantic aura of the place, the artists in their bright smocks and blue jeans and the Santa Feans themselves in their cowboy clothes, silver belts, silk scarves, and fringed deerskins. She attended poetry recitals, lectures, political discussions, and amateur theatricals. “Raymond Duncan, the brother of Isadora Duncan, appeared in a sack cloth and shepherd’s crook and told of his experiences and hopes,” Dorothy wrote in an unpublished memoir. “People from Russia enlivened us with stories of their theatre and ballet. I fell in love with the place because of its beauty and the cultural and intellectual atmosphere.”

  Dorothy put her time at Sunmount to good use, hobnobbing with the most interesting patients, as well as with the healthy clientele in town, former “TBs” who were busy making a name for themselves in Santa Fe. One such friend was George Bloom, who would later become head of the First National Bank. Another was Katherine Stinson, who was already something of a celebrity when Dorothy met her at the sanitarium. In 1912, at the age of twenty-one, Stinson had become only the fourth woman in the country ever to receive a pilot’s license, and a year later she had founded her own company, Stinson Aviation. She proceeded to bust records of every kind in the ensuing decade: she was the first woman to fly at night; the first to fly to China; the first to perform skywriting, spelling “C-A-L” over Los Angeles. Toward the end of World War I, she contracted tuberculosis in France, and spent seven years on and off at Sunmount gradually regaining her health. Although Stinson’s barnstorming days were over, Dorothy admired her independence and fearlessness, even in confinement, and they would become lifelong friends.

  Dorothy spent eleven months at Sunmount and was pronounced “cured.” Joe McKibbin renewed his attentions to her, after being given permission to visit her toward the end of 1926, by which time her health had substantially improved. In the spring of 1927, he proposed again, and she accepted. When she compared herself with Katherine Stinson, Dorothy knew she had much to be grateful for. But she was also keenly aware of the time she had lost, and that all her schoolmates and cousins had married and moved on with their lives. It was only natural that a young woman, after watching her sisters die and then falling under the same shadow herself, and after having seen so many friends languish and fail, would come away with a certain mental toughness. What may have begun as a defensive posture in Dorothy became a deeply ingrained characteristic, and her stoicism and stubborn optimism would be her chief assets in the years ahead, always within reach, no matter how trying the circumstances.

  On October 5, 1927, Dorothy and Joe McKibbin were married in the garden of her parents’ home. She often joked that she had a small wedding owing to its belatedness and their advanced ages—she was nearly thirty, and he was thirty-four. The Kansas City society pages diplomatically covered the restrained celebration, observing that the bride demonstrated her “distinct individuality in her wedding gown … [and] chose a sapphire blue velvet dress and wore a small hat to match.” The couple honeymooned in Rio de Janeiro and then settled in St. Paul. Joe continued to manage the fur trade at McKibbin, Driscoll & Dorsey, while quietly reassuring his Princeton friends he would soon be joining their brokerage business. Those plans had to be postponed again when Dorothy discovered she was expecting a child. On December 6, 1930, they welcomed their son Kevin into the world.

  For Dorothy, it was a time of pure and unexpected joy. “None of this valley of the shadow of death but peaks of excitement of life,” she wrote days after his birth, putting her feelings to paper as she often did during fraught moments in her life:

  There is nothing personal about happiness. It is an aliveness. It is a oneness with nature and humanity. It is a deep knowledge of suffering and desolation. It is an intenseness of feeling, of understanding good and evil. Compassion. Vital awareness of being a part of the universe in all its manifestations. Harmony. Acute knowledge of kinship with all the peoples of the earth. Recognition of true values. Preoccupation with truth.

  But even as she wrote those lines, Dorothy knew that she had not escaped the “shadow of death” for long. She had already had a harbinger of the dark days that lay ahead. A year and a half into their marriage, Joe McKibbin was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, a progressive cancer of the lymph system. Unlike tuberculosis, it was then considered incurable. His condition was hopeless from the start, though neither Dorothy nor his doctor ever told him of his terminal illness. His death, when it finally came, was hard and long. Dorothy endeavored to be as strong and steadfast in her husband’s sickness as he had been in hers
, and she nursed him over the last painful year to the end. He died on October 27, 1931.

  Before her husband became bedridden, she had taken him on a trip across Colorado to New Mexico, hoping it would improve his health. He had taken to the luminous landscape as quickly as she had and, with his strength already faltering, had agreed that “someday they would settle there where they could have horses and dogs and raise their family under the incredible blue skies and golden sun.” This had always been more her dream than his, and now it was hers alone. “I was ten months old, and she was suddenly on her own,” Kevin reflected years later. “She folded up everything in St. Paul and went down to Kansas City to her parents’ house. She stayed a couple of months, but she couldn’t stand it. In April of 1932, she loaded me up in the little Model A coupe she had and we drove out to Santa Fe.” The trip took almost a month. Although he was too little to understand, Dorothy told Kevin they were going away to a place “where they would sit under a piñon tree and spend all their days in peace and happiness.”

  Dorothy was drawn to Santa Fe as a refuge, and by the memories of her days at Sunmount and of the interesting people she had met there. She had fraternized with a very different sort than she had known in her Kansas City milieu, and those experiences and friendships had awakened a fascination with the region’s unique culture and redemptive climate. Something in the atmosphere, in the strangely beautiful windswept landscape and extravagant purple twilights, encouraged a sense of well-being and possibility. In Santa Fe, there was a ready-made community to welcome her, people who were no strangers to pain and loss, who had gone there to recover and had remained because they had discovered a new way of life. She had felt more alive there, more aware of every breath she took and the feel of the sun on her back, than she ever had been before. “She saw staying in Kansas City as being trapped,” said her nephew Jim Scarritt. “Getting away was liberating.” She seemed to feel as O’Keeffe did when the artist observed of New Mexico, “The world is wide here.” Eager to escape the pitying faces of family, and the suffocating loss of freedom she experienced at being back under her parents’ roof again, Dorothy headed west.

  “I think she may have missed the independence that she had when she was in Santa Fe,” said Kevin. “It was a very creative community and kind of unusual in the way it operated. It had some real characters in it, and everyone went their own way. She felt right at home.”

  When Dorothy arrived in Santa Fe, she found little had changed in the bustling little city at the base of the mountains. Many of the streets lacked paving, the old Spanish women still wore their traditional long black skirts over wide boots, and the familiar, pungent smell of piñon from all the small wood-burning fireplaces in the shops filled the air. Piñon wood heated the city, and she had not realized how much she had missed its smoky perfume. The Indians continued to hawk their wares every day on the sidewalk in the shade of the old Governors’ Palace as they had for centuries. The Woolworth’s was new, and there were more curio shops and dry-goods stores, two drugstores, and innumerable small cafés. In the Plaza, the oldest residents of the region mingled with the new European immigrants, the poorest of people with the wealthiest, the illiterate with the highly educated. The supporting cast consisted of the same oddball mix of artists, writers, consumptives, neurotics, speculators, adventurers, escapists, and dreamers of every description. It was the colorful crossroads she remembered so well, with everyone in his or her own way making a last stand for rugged individualism. Presiding over it all was the dignified bronze statue of Archbishop Lamy in front of St. Francis Cathedral, a dramatic Romanesque structure that always struck her as somewhat incongruous amid all the humble Pueblo architecture.

  Despite its historic position as the terminus of the Santa Fe Trail, the city had stubbornly resisted growth, and even after the admission of New Mexico to the union in 1912, the city had consisted of only 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants. In the 1920s, the tourist trade had brought some development, and by the time she returned in 1932 the population hovered around 11,000. But since the Great Depression, business was down. The rich private collectors had all but disappeared, and many of the roughly one hundred artists living in town were in dire straits. The dry years had only compounded the problems. A sustained drought and particularly brutal winter had driven the local economy even further down, and many homesteaders in the middle Rio Grande area were fighting for survival. There were not a lot of good jobs to be had, but former patients had the advantage over the local residents because they were generally better educated, and Dorothy was no exception. She soon found work as a bookkeeper at the Spanish and Indian Trading Company. Kevin teased that sitting up at that high desk with her pencil and heavy ledger, she “looked like Scrooge.”

  Over time, it became Dorothy’s job to balance the books while the two shop owners, Norman McGee and Jim McMillan, went on buying sprees around the state. They thought nothing of writing $10,000 checks for consignments of art treasures, but could never quite remember to pay the rent. They were far too much in demand to attend to such mundane matters and increasingly relied on Dorothy to keep the business end of the trading company functioning. It was the most noted store of its kind in New Mexico, or for that matter the entire Southwest, and Indians from the surrounding pueblos, Navajo reservations, and Hopi villages brought their finest blankets, pottery, and woven baskets to sell or barter. Spanish traders brought hand-carved furniture and the rarest of old santos (images of saints), bultos (carved wooden sculptures), and retablos (painted wood or tin altarpieces). The store was always busy and lively, and along the way Dorothy was receiving a first-class education in Spanish and Indian arts and crafts and developing an astute collector’s eye. She earned fifty cents an hour keeping “a very complicated set of books with 14 columns,” but the workday was flexible and allowed her time to look after her little boy. She had the small insurance pension her husband had left her, and in a small town like Santa Fe, the little money she earned went a long way. It was enough for them to live on.

  Dorothy’s father, who had never ceased to admire his daughter’s spirit and courage, came out to visit several times. He had lost much of his fortune in the Depression, but he scraped together enough money to buy her a house. Instead of purchasing a home, however, Dorothy was intent on building one. She was inspired in part by her friend Katherine Stinson, who in the intervening years had married Miguel Otero, Jr., a New Mexican attorney and aviator who was the son of one of the state’s territorial governors. During her many years in Santa Fe, Stinson had become fascinated with the local architecture. No longer strong enough to fly, she had taken up her new hobby while at Sunmount, where she met John Gaw Meem, who had become a reknowned local architect and had offered to act as her mentor in what would become her new career. Stinson had built her own large adobe house in Meem’s Pueblo Revival style, and Dorothy asked her if she would design a modest home for her and Kevin on one and a half acres of piñon-studded land on the Old Santa Fe Trail road. The house was in a rural area on the outskirts of town, two miles down a dusty, red-dirt road, and many of her friends thought she was mad at the time. But the price was right—the land and construction came to $10,000—and Dorothy loved the view, which took in the blue Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and the Sandia and Manzano ranges curving off to the south. On clear days, even Mt. Taylor, the legendary “Sentinel of the Navajo Land,” was visible, its snowcapped peak glittering in the winter sun.

  Dorothy and Katherine Stinson designed the house together, working every morning at the Oteros’ kitchen table. Dorothy had her heart set on an exact replica of an ancient Spanish-style farmhouse, laid out in a U shape with a traditional patio or interior courtyard, flat roof, thick walls, and a long sheltering portal. She insisted on incorporating into the architecture the old beams and other antique pieces she had collected, giving it the intentionally wobbly silhouette and rounded corners of time-worn adobes. She and Stinson went on shopping sprees while the construction was under way, scouring th
e countryside for distinctive elements. They salvaged the front portal from a crumbling rural farmhouse and found the rare, hand-carved corbels used to support it in the neighboring village of Agua Fria. A centuries-old door was bought for five dollars. To Dorothy’s delight, Stinson covered the living room floor with dark red bricks made by prisoners at the old penitentiary. The cozy 1,800-square-foot structure was completed in 1936, and Dorothy furnished it with native woven hangings and tinwork lamps she had acquired at the trading company. Thanks to the Depression, it was possible to find beautiful hand-woven Navajo and Chimayo rugs for three to five dollars at roadside gas stations on the outskirts of town, where the Indians sold them or traded them for fuel. She had one obsessive goal as she put in her garden and planted yellow Castilian roses on the border of her patio—that it be “a happy house.”

  The adobe house was a rare luxury. On the last Saturday of every month, Dorothy would take Kevin to town and settle her accounts at all the shops where she had charged things. By the end of their rounds, there was usually just enough left over for them to buy Cokes at the Capital Pharmacy before heading home. “Money was tight,” said Kevin. “My father left her pretty well fixed-up in that she had some stock, and a little something put away, so we were comfortable. But it wasn’t much.”

  In those days, there was only a small group of prominent “Anglos” in town, and as Dorothy already knew a number of them from Sunmount, she was quickly ushered into their tight-knit social world. She was close to John Meem, as well as his brother, both of whom lived in adjacent houses on the same street, only a short distance from her home. “She was never part of the ‘horsey’ set of well-to-do women from back east who kept ranches just outside town,” recalled Bill Hudgins, a boyhood friend of Kevin’s. “You could always tell those women by their tailored wool suits and mannish hats. Dorothy wasn’t like that at all. She was fun and informal and liked to wear bright Navajo skirts and fiesta blouses. She really knew the local culture and was part of it. I’d have sworn she was born in Santa Fe and lived here all her life, if I didn’t know better.”