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

complexion “fair.” His signature was deliberate, an almost childish script, with a big looping “S.” With that forceful, fastidious flourish, he secured his statusas an American citizen, and promptly went back to Germany to look for a bride.
    Was the marriage a family arrangement? A love match? A bald transaction? I imagine that he and Julia had known each other casually before he left Germany, when she was a child and he a teenager. I picture their families greeting each other in the cobbled street after services at Lügde’s rented shul, the children awkward in their Saturday finery. Or perhaps their fathers did business together, or the children met in the meadows alongside the Emmer on a windless day, tossing stones that shattered the still reflections of the riverside’s willows. Or maybe Abraham didn’t remember Julia at all, since she was five years younger and one of many sisters. Perhaps he had simply hired a marriage broker to assist him in his bridal interviews—his Brautschauen —and Julia had been the right age and possessed the right dowry. Or maybe she had played the piano for him and had learned a word or two of English, and this endeared her to him.
    For the Schusters, Abraham was no doubt an easy sell: poor boy goes to New Mexico, makes a success of himself, promises a glorious American future. In whatever way Abraham arranged the marriage, he worked quickly, as I imagine he always did. The Civil War ended in April 1865; he became a citizen in July; he married Julia five months later. She folded away her high-necked dark wedding dress; packed her steamer trunks with stockings, jewelry, and bridal gifts; said good-bye to her parents, her sisters and brothers; said good-bye to everything and everyone she knew; and departed: Lügde to Bremen, Bremen to Liverpool, Liverpool to New York.

    They sailed on the RMS Scotia , a double-masted, double-smokestacked, red-hulled paddle steamer of the Cunard Line. It was a new ship, only four years old, the fastest on the Atlantic at the time—the journeytook nine or ten days. This is the very ship (a fictional version of it, anyway) that Captain Nemo’s submarine strikes in Jules Verne’s 1870 book, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , leaving a triangular perforation in the hull—but the ship, being so well built, survives the blow. It was considered the Cunard Line’s finest steamer. There was no steerage on the real RMS Scotia , only first class. Theodore Roosevelt and his family traveled on the Scotia to Europe for their first grand tour there, three years after Julia’s passage.
    The cabins were located on the main deck, nine feet in height. Two bright and spacious plate glass and mahogany-paneled “saloons” provided dining space for three hundred passengers. Guests on Cunard’s luxury ships could expect everything one might order at a fine hotel: halibut, oranges, petit filets de boeuf à la parisienne , French beans, littleneck clams, ox tongue, boar’s head, galantine of game, mince pie, roast potatoes, neapolitan ice cream, champagne jelly. There was a bakery, a butcher, an icehouse. An onboard medical office was available to treat sick passengers. Above decks, a promenade extended from stem to stern. But Julia’s was a January passage, and she was new to the rough winter sea. She may not have needed the doctor’s attention, but she probably didn’t spend much time out of doors.
    Of course, she must have gone above decks as the ship approached New York, to catch her first view of the American coastline: farms, forts, forests, telegraph pylons, homes, the lighthouses of Long Island, and finally New York Harbor and the spires of the city. Julia disembarked on January 12, 1866, and paused in the city to arrange her trousseau, buying clothes and furniture for her new home in New Mexico. Word of her arrival reached Santa Fe soon after. On January 20, this item appeared in the Santa Fe Weekly Gazette , with their name misspelled but