American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (16 page)

Bertha Staab as a young woman.

Courtesy of Museum of New Mexico Press, circa 1895.

R
everend Conklin had had more misses than hits, but he was right about one thing: Julia was prudish. Bertha felt so, anyway. While in Los Angeles, she mused about it in her diary. A few days after the Annie Abbott performance, Bertha had been sitting in her hotel room writing letters when, she wrote, “I opened the window and looked out upon the porch nearby.” There, standing on a ladder right beside her
window, was a certain Mr. Parkinson—a young fellow who had recently checked into the hotel. “I had not noticed a ladder coming right into the window; Chinaman had been washing windows. . . .” Bertha’s first reaction was to draw her head back; her second was to lean back out and chat with her visitor. “Mr. Parkinson sat on the ladder and [I] sat at the window. Not very aesthetic to have a young gentleman looking in at a young girl’s window, but of course we, like idiots, did not see into that till afterwards. . . . I know what mamma would have said!”

She didn’t actually say what Mamma—Julia—would have said, though I got the sense from Bertha’s diary that it probably would have been expressed in German—sternly, and with disapproval. “How differently we are brought up from most American girls,” Bertha wrote. “Miss Keck”—another hotel guest—“calls her mother Old Curiousity! And sometimes Beauty etc. Respectful! Yet she is a very nice girl. She simply does not think anything of this way of talking to her mother—not her fault—but mistake in bringing up.”

A clue, here: Julia was a creature of the Old World, her ideas of propriety formed in Germany and hardly altered by twenty-five years in America. Even after so many years, she didn’t seem much interested in bending herself to fit. Blandina’s diary and the long visits to Germany suggest that she had never quite been able to; as she grew older, she would only have become less supple. Bertha would never have called Julia “Old Curiousity,” though she might have found her mother a curiosity—an old-fashioned woman in a newfangled country. Bertha was a proper girl, of course, but she might have liked to expand the definition of what a girl could do. “I think in some cases,” she wrote, “we ought to have more freedom for mistakes in accepting invitations. I think we ought to be able to do as we like, except if there are grave reasons to the contrary.” The ladder-side chat, it seems, was as close as she got to rebellion in Los Angeles.

Bertha and Abraham left the city soon after. On Abraham’s birthday,
February 27, 1891, he called on a General McCook, who delivered bad news about the Santa Fe army base. “Said he had been in favor of keeping post in Santa Fe,” Bertha wrote, “but had been asked by Gen Schofield whether it was a military necessity, and had replied no.” The next day, Abraham’s health again took a turn for the worse—his spells seemed to coincide with bad news from the US Army. Maybe his nerves weren’t as steely as they seemed. The prospect of losing the patronage of the army fazed him even more, it seems, than had Billy the Kid and his “broncho maneuvers.”

Or perhaps it was just something going around—Bertha, too, was feeling unwell. “I have a vile cold,” she wrote. “Feel dreadfully about everything, about myself, about Santa Fe about—I don’t know what not. I am thinking how dull it will be in Santa Fe with all the officers away—oh!”

On the advice of a friend, Abraham traveled to see a Dr. Millard in Redondo Beach, who counseled him to stay there under his care for a month or two. Abraham agreed, and he and Bertha packed for the move to Redondo. “Lost my sapphire ring,” Bertha wrote, “looked everywhere and could not find it.” She worried that Abraham would be angry. But while he may have been a tough businessman—and if the ghost stories are right, a domineering husband—he could be an indulgent father. “Papa is so good; instead of scolding me as I deserved, said, ‘Well! If you don’t find it I’ll buy you another one.’” This Abraham—the doting father, the winning travel companion, the anxious army supplicant—seemed more human than the man I’d encountered through the psychics and the ghost stories. I was starting rather to like him, and it felt a relief to think that he might not be as bad as the ghost stories made him out to be.

While Abraham convalesced, Bertha struggled to entertain herself. “Tried a hand at billiards,” she wrote, “and made a fool of myself.” Redondo was considerably less lively than Los Angeles. “No gentlemen
to dance with,” she lamented. She started to read a new novel—
Daniel Deronda
, George Eliot’s long, weird story about an English gentleman who rescues a drowning “Jewess” and finds out that he is also a Jew. After learning that Bertha had read it, I did, too, hoping in some way to see the world as she saw it. It’s a tale of the drama and expectation of youth, peppered with elaborate proto-Zionist digressions. But Bertha had nothing but time. She consumed it far more quickly than I did.

When a new batch of young men finally arrived at the hotel, Bertha found that she had competition for their attention. The railroad sleeping-car tycoon George Pullman, who had invested in land with Abraham in northeastern New Mexico and was a friend, was staying at the same hotel in Redondo with his daughters. “Get mad,” Bertha wrote, “because there’s music here every night and nobody to dance with.—generally two Miss Pullmans have the floor—dance very well—elder has hard face. Younger more pleasant face and animated.” The Miss Pullmans, she noted, dressed beautifully. “They have beaux coming out to visit them all the time. Probably invite them.”

The Staab family’s primmer code of behavior didn’t allow Bertha to invite young men, as the Miss Pullmans did. But it was a testament to how far the Staabs had come that Bertha was writing about them at all. She had, until age twelve, lived with her Jewish-immigrant parents and six siblings in a dirt home on Burro Alley. Now she was jockeying with the Miss Pullmans for dance partners on the California coast.

Between unproductive forays to the dance floor, Bertha wrote and received lots of letters. She corresponded regularly with a “Col. Frost,” and with her brothers Teddy and Julius, who were at boarding school in Philadelphia. Teddy got the measles; Julius won a silver cup for best athlete. Bertha played tennis with her friend Miss Keck—she lost four games to three—and finally, at long last, found some young men to dance with: a rather haughty Englishman and a very nice “Scotchman”
who danced “horribly—round and round until you get ‘giddy’ as he expresses it.” But after a few nights, the Brits, too, felt the pull of the Miss Pullmans. “Last night in ball-room the Scotch and English thingamagigs danced with the Misses Pullman—did not come near us. Do not consider that very gentlemanly behavior especially as they knew us first. . . . But so goes the world!” When the two men left a week later, however, Bertha confessed to her diary that she missed them “very much.”

Abraham wasn’t very much in evidence in Bertha’s diary during this period in Redondo—recovering from his ailment, perhaps. Nor did Bertha mention Julia, though I found her in every line Bertha wrote—in how Bertha saw and responded to the world around her; the world her mother had helped to shape. On Julia’s birthday—March 11, her forty-sixth—Bertha and Abraham sent a telegraph, and later, a bouquet of wild onions and protea flowers.

Finally, one very long and kabbalistic George Eliot novel, dozens of letters, and too many empty dance cards later, Bertha reported that Abraham was feeling better. They moved on to the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego for a few days, visiting with friends from home and catching up on the Santa Fe gossip, “which could have been compressed into a nut-shell,” Bertha wrote—while Abraham sought, one last time, to convince the army to keep the post in Santa Fe.

It was to no avail, the troops would go. “What will Santa Fe do?” Bertha lamented. And what would Bertha do, with all the officers, and presumably her suitors, hauled off to another post? She suffered from enervating, excruciating boredom, and also a touch of despair. “I’m so fatigued,” she wrote, “why cannot I have the person I love”—and whose identity she never revealed. “Why am I poky and horrid?” And then, at long last, they took the train home, where the soldiers were leaving, and Julia was ailing.

Nineteenth-century doctors associated the womb with mental illness.

From Joseph Buchanan,
Outlines of Lectures on the Neurological System of Anthropology
(Cincinnati: Journal of Man, 1854).

B
ertha didn’t stay in Santa Fe long. A month later, on May 10, 1891, Abraham, Julia, Bertha, sister Delia, and brother Paul—the disabled eldest son—boarded a train bound for Philadelphia.

This time, the trip was for Julia’s health. She seemed to have recovered, for a time, from the spell of depression that Sister Blandina tended to, and also from the loss of Henriette. She had, for a few years, at least, rejoined the world. But now, Julia wasn’t at all well. “In Chicago mamma was sick for 3 days and we were all frightened, especially about having her travel in her poor condition,” Bertha wrote.

Was it Julia’s sadness resurfacing? Or was she suffering now from something more physical in nature? Bertha’s diary notes only that the family hoped that a visit to Germany could improve Julia’s condition. Once again, Germany was where she went to heal.

When Julia had recovered enough to move from Chicago, the family forged on to Philadelphia, where they visited Arthur and Julius and Teddy, who were in prep school there. The family then spent another ten days in New York, shopping for dresses and silver spoons, visiting with their cousins, and packing. They sailed for Europe on the twenty-sixth of May. “First two days of our journey were pretty fair,” Bertha wrote.

Delia was sick, the rest well. The third day was horribly rocky, the next also; mamma was dreadfully sick! Delia and I also—Papa during one night. . . . Met several pleasant people but did not make friends—Max Foster from Berlin, glove man was the nicest gentleman we met. The rest of the first cabin passengers were horribly poky and stiff.

They docked in Liverpool, then Bremen, and set off by train to Hanover. Julia’s father had died some years before, and her mother, Henriette—Jette, they called her—and Julia’s remaining unmarried sisters had relocated from Lügde to Hanover. In fact, all of Julia’s siblings had left Lügde. The brothers, Ben and Bernhard, emigrated to America. The married sisters—Adelheid, Sofie, Auguste, Bernhardine,
Amalie, and Emilie—moved with their husbands to the nearby cities of Paderborn or Hanover. Their families owned mills, department stores, and legal firms, and their children went to elite Catholic gymnasiums and Swiss finishing schools. Since Germany’s unification in 1871, Jews had enjoyed the rights accorded to all of the country’s citizens. Julia’s sisters were city Jews now, living in grand houses in the hearts of German cities. Their homes boasted music rooms, Renaissance art and modern masters, and libraries lined floor to ceiling with leather-bound books.

There was no reason to visit Lügde anymore, so Julia and family went straight to a hotel in Hanover. The European hotels did not, in Bertha’s esteem, live up to the grandeur of those she had visited in New York and California. “No carpets in hotels in Europe, no running water, no gas—but feather beds and candlesticks and little mats in front of wash stand and bed,” she wrote.

After a few days’ visiting, the family split up. Abraham set off for Carlsbad, the famous spa and mineral springs in what is now the Czech Republic. The spa was a regular stop on the European vacation circuit, frequented by the ill and healthy alike. Abraham went to Carlsbad regularly—he had, the
Denver Post
reported, “been able, for a long time past, to take his rheumatism annually to Carlsbad and leave it there.” Abraham’s brother Zadoc had also been a frequent visitor; in fact he had died there, in 1884, while being treated for a liver “affection.” Most visitors, however, had more encouraging outcomes. Spas were where the well-heeled went to rest and restore themselves. Which Abraham did, promptly, upon the family’s arrival in Europe, while Bertha stayed in Hanover “to take gymnastics,” and Julia, accompanied by Bertha’s older sister Delia, went to Berlin. There, Bertha wrote, “mamma consulted Olshausen.”

Robert von Olshausen, I learned from a quick Internet search, was a German gynecologist and surgical innovator. While neither Bertha
nor Sister Blandina elaborated on Julia’s particular ills, here, in Bertha’s diary, was a clue: Olshausen’s department at the Berlin University
Frauenklinik
was the leading women’s surgery hospital in Germany, and Olshausen had been a pioneer in vaginal hysterectomy. Julia, then, suffered “female problems,” as the Victorians put it—a physical malady, related, perhaps, to her many pregnancies and miscarriages; or perhaps her approaching “change of life” (menopause) had set off another cascade of hormones that left her feeling unbalanced and unwell. Whatever the cause, she was considering having a surgery to remedy the problem.

There were good reasons that she traveled all the way to Berlin to seek medical help: the doctors there were the best in the world. Germany had, by the time Julia fell ill, developed rigorous medical programs that involved years of university study, experimental and clinical work based on scientific method, and surgery using new antiseptic techniques. Physicians in the United States, by contrast, were marginally educated, poorly compensated, ill-trained journeymen peddling purgatives and patent medicines, advising on disease-causing vapors and “exhalations,” and delivering what the historian David Dary called the “dreaded triad of heroic medicine”—bloodletting, purging, and emetics—to expel and rebalance bad “humors” in the body. American doctors had, since the Civil War, begun to discover and embrace germ theory, anatomy, and empirical inquiry, but much more slowly than in Germany. Things took even longer on the frontier.

There were few doctors in Santa Fe when Julia lived there. She saw two that I know of: Dr. Symington, the physician who had accompanied her and Sister Blandina to Trinidad in 1877, and W. S. Harroun, who would remain Julia’s doctor at the end of her life. I had found Dr. Harroun’s papers at the history museum in Santa Fe on one of my early trips to the archives: a folder of small notebooks, their sides burnt with age like lightly browned marshmallows. I leafed through them hoping
for notes on Julia’s ailments and the reasons she traveled to Germany to consult Olshausen. Harroun’s ledgers noted such expenses as rent, heating wood, a saddle, a bay gelding, a bathtub, hay, shoes, horseshoes, club dues, and pants. He also listed payments from patients. When they paid their bills, he marked the entry with a smiley face, along with the ailment for which they’d consulted him. He frequently treated “pistol shot wounds.” One bullet hole, he noted, was large enough to admit his little finger.

The notebooks told me plenty about what it was like to be a doctor in nineteenth-century Santa Fe—there were no receptionists, or insurance companies, or stainless-steel instruments—but nothing about what it was like to be Julia’s particular doctor. None of Dr. Harroun’s entries, sadly, mentioned visits with Julia. I imagined the doctor staying late in his office, scribbling his notes by gaslight. A messenger might come, and Dr. Harroun would grab a saddlebag of instruments, mount his bay gelding, and ride across the Plaza to see Julia, ailing again.

Even if Dr. Harroun’s papers had mentioned Julia’s complaints, they mightn’t have told us much: doctors then treated
conditions
—fevers, catarrhs, dropsies—rather than specific diseases. In the journals of the Staabs’ friend Adolph Bandelier, he notes, with astonishing regularity, the ailments for which he and his wife, Josephine, sought treatment from local doctors—dizziness; strange inflammations; “bilious attacks”; headaches; chin pain; agonized feet, hands, elbows; catarrh; rheumatism; lumbago. Illness was a matter of course, survival often a matter of luck.

If the diagnoses were suspect, the treatments were even worse. When cholera was detected in the early days of the Santa Fe Trail, doctors first advised bed rest, and if that didn’t work, they administered calomel—mercurous chloride—a powerful “cathartic” that caused diarrhea, vomiting, excessive salivation, and hair and tooth loss (as
if the violent catharsis brought on by the cholera bacterium weren’t enough). If that failed, they’d soak victims’ hands and feet in scalding water containing mustard and common salt. Next came bloodletting to “clear out” the infected blood—using (not at all sanitized) syringes, lancets, or leeches applied to veins in the forearms, neck, or temples, or a terrifying spring-loaded device called a “scarificator.” They then dispensed a few spoonfuls of oil of vitriol, a concentrated and highly poisonous sulfuric acid compound. Then came an enema of chicken tea with a tablespoon of salt. If the patient was still alive, they would next try a Hail Mary concoction of calomel plus camphor plus quinine plus morphine. Next, typically, came coma, and death.

The historian Merrill J. Mattes estimated that one of every twelve immigrants died on the overland trail; the presence of doctors did little to improve the odds. In fact they probably made them worse. Nor had treatments improved all that much in the two and a half decades since Julia had first arrived in Santa Fe.

No wonder she sought treatment in Germany.

After an initial consultation in Berlin with Olshausen, Julia returned to Hanover. There, she visited with her mother and four of her sisters—Adelheid, Sofie, Regine, and Auguste. A cousin, Paul Schuster, called on the Staab women in their hotel almost every day. “We like him very much,” Bertha wrote, “he is lively and quite good looking.” Bertha noted, too, that Tante Auguste gave her a spoon. Souvenir-spoon collecting, I learned, was a fad in the late nineteenth century; they were collected like postcards, or Beanie Babies.

On Julia’s next visit to Dr. Olshausen, Bertha accompanied her, diary in tow. “Mamma has had an operation,” Bertha wrote, “performed in Berlin.” Bertha made no mention of what the operation was or what condition it set out to treat—perhaps such things were simply too delicate
to discuss in that era, even in the private pages of a journal. I suspect, however, that it was a hysterectomy, since that was the surgery for which Olshausen was most famous.

It is clear that Julia was unwell, and that her problem was gynecological. But this still tells us little about her suffering, because in the late nineteenth century, nearly everything involving female health was considered gynecological. All sorts of ailments—and especially emotional ones—were lumped in the general category of “female problems.” The word “hysteria”—that diffuse mental diagnosis common among genteel white women in the nineteenth century and characterized by convulsive fits, trances, and tearing hair—derives from the Greek word “hystera,” which means uterus. The womb was linked indelibly in the medical mind to mental illness. Plato had believed that a woman’s uterus roamed the passages of the body like a ghost, unleashing emotional disturbances.

Nineteenth-century diagnoses were more clinical than Plato’s wandering womb, but they were essentially similar: the Irish physician Thomas More Madden, in his 1893 book
Clinical Gynaecology
, described female mental illnesses as “the reflex effects of utero-ovarian irritation,” while Joseph R. Buchanan, a mid-nineteenth-century American neurologist, argued that the woman’s womb was her “region of insanity.” “The organ of baseness,” he wrote, “lies along the posterior margin of the abdomen, and between the ribs and ilium, connecting above with irritability and below with melancholy, through which it approximates the region of mental derangement.” An illustration from his book,
Outlines of Lectures on the Neurological System of Anthropology
, superimposes the map of that terrifying region on a lithograph of Praxiteles’s
Aphrodite of Knidos
. Dr. George Beard, the nineteenth-century American neurologist who invented the diagnosis of neurasthenia, suggested that all women with mental problems should undergo a gynecological exam.

Thus, hysterectomies such as the one that Dr. Olshausen may have performed on Julia were expected to alleviate not only diseased wombs but also distressed female psyches. Doctors removed the womb to treat hysteria, “excessive female desire,” as well as neurasthenia, another nervous disorder common to middle- and upper-class women in the nineteenth century. The symptoms of that disorder were even more diffuse: they included languor, sleeplessness, nightmares, headache, noises in the ear, heaviness of “loin and limb,” palpitation, flushing, fidgeting, “flying neuralgia,” spinal and uterine irritation, hopelessness, claustrophobia, germophobia, and general morbid fear.