American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest Read Online Free PDF Page A

empty ax crates intheir office. They made loans, dispensed promissory notes, even issued their own currency.
    When the Confederate army invaded Santa Fe in 1862, the Staabs and their Spiegelberg cousins sided with the Union. I could find no evidence that Abraham served in the Union army during the Civil War, though people sometimes called him “Colonel.” His campaign was commercial, keeping the Union forts stocked with grain and uniforms. A Confederate soldier who took part in the occupation of Santa Fe wrote of “smooth-faced Jews, that are our bitter enemies and will not open their stores or sell on confederate paper,” and suggested that “they ought to be run off from town themselves.” Perhaps the Jewish merchants sided with the North because of an antipathy to slavery—or perhaps they simply knew how to pick a winner.
    The Confederates didn’t hold Santa Fe long. In late March 1862, they fought the Union troops to a bloody draw at Glorieta Pass, twenty miles southeast of Santa Fe. Technically, the Confederates won the battle. But while they were fighting, a battalion of Colorado soldiers happened upon the Confederates’ lightly guarded supply train. The Union soldiers looted and torched sixty Confederate wagons, blew up ammunition, spiked a cannon, and slaughtered or drove off five hundred horses and mules. Soon after, the Confederates, lacking ammunition, shelter, blankets, and food—and without smooth-faced Jews willing to supply them with more—straggled back to Texas.
    After the Civil War’s last shot was fired, Abraham decided to become a US citizen. I found this information in the New Mexico state archives, which are hidden in an industrial cul-de-sac off Santa Fe’s busiest thoroughfare. I had driven down from Colorado, following a long stretch of highway that paralleled the route of Julia’s own voyage to New Mexico. It was an uncannily hot day. The birds and the flowers were confused, the crocuses lured out of the ground and returned to stalk, the tulips soon to follow. It was painful to go inside and installmyself in the archives—a stale, windowless place, as many public archives are. But I hoped that those lightless shelves might shed some light on Abraham, who left Lügde an inconsequential teenager and returned triumphant to claim his bride.
    I sat down in the collections room, put on the required pair of rubber gloves, and riffled through a box of folders dedicated to the Jewish “S” pioneers in New Mexico: Seligmans, Spiegelbergs, Staabs. The box was packed with material, but I could find only one disappointingly slim folder on the Staabs. It contained some ledgers detailing corn sales to the army, and an envelope addressed from Abraham to a son. The envelope had the words “Valuable Papers” scrawled in the lower left corner, and when I went to look inside it, the outer flap crumbled in my gloved hands. Carefully, I coaxed the two sides of the envelope open and pulled out a list of names and dates and numbers: “Militia Warrants,” it said. The list meant nothing to me. I would learn only later how these warrants had come to obsess Abraham, a dream of easy wealth that nearly destroyed him.
    What charmed me at the time, however, was Abraham’s citizenship declaration, dated July 10, 1865—four months before his marriage to Julia, who waited in Lügde for her new life. Abraham hadn’t, if his meager folder in the archives was an indication, kept much by way of documents to memorialize himself. But he had kept this one piece of paper all his life. It was proof of how far he had come from Lügde, proof that he belonged, and he had tended the paper carefully. A hundred and fifty years later, the parchment was still only slightly off-white. His age, when he signed the declaration, was twenty-six: his “stature” was small—five foot two, the declaration stated—his forehead “low,” eyes gray, nose “straight,” mouth “small,” chin and face “round,” hair brown,