By the time Flora Spiegelberg reached Las Animas, Colorado, she was a continent away from the comfortable life she’d known in Germany. It was 1875; she was eighteen, newly married, and traveling to Santa Fe with her husband, Willi. They’d spent much of the previous year traveling through Europe after their wedding, staying in fine hotels and enjoying the comforts that came with belonging to wealthy families. Now the railroad had carried them as far as it could, and the rest of the journey would be made by stagecoach.
The hotel in Las Animas wasn’t much to look at; it certainly didn’t resemble the grandeur of European hotels. The modest sleeping quarters were upstairs…but there was no staircase, so guests had to climb a ladder. Flora discovered this precarious situation in front of a roomful of cowboys who hadn’t seen a woman in months. They watched as the young bride timidly climbed up to her bed, where sheets of muslin had been hung to separate her from the men. She slept in her clothes.
The stagecoach journey that followed was worse. For six days and nights, the coach rattled across the old Santa Fe Trail, stopping at rough stations to change horses and feed the passengers. Meals consisted of whatever the station keepers had available, often dried buffalo meat, beans, peppers, and occasionally bear or buffalo tongue. Willi ate without complaint. He’d lived in New Mexico for years and knew what to expect, while Flora was still getting used to the idea that this would be her life. The roads were terrible, and every rut sent another jolt through the coach. Flora suffered a miscarriage during the journey, with no comfortable place to recover and Santa Fe still days away.
Willi knew many of the station keepers along the route. They greeted him by his Spanish nickname, Don Julian el Bonito, "William the Handsome," and made a fuss over his young bride, giving her plenty of attention to make her feel welcome. When the couple finally reached Santa Fe, the Spiegelberg family was waiting. A band played Wagner’s wedding march from Lohengrin, and Flora was embraced into one of the wealthiest Jewish households in the territory. Her new home was on Palace Avenue, close to the center of town. It was comfortably furnished with the sort of luxuries she had known in Europe.
The Spiegelbergs had been in New Mexico since the 1840s, back when the territory still belonged to Mexico. Jacob Spiegelberg had come west to trade, bringing goods along the Santa Fe Trail at a time when the arduous journey from Missouri took weeks. Wagons carried cloth, tools, manufactured goods, and whatever else merchants believed they could sell. On the return journey, traders brought wool, hides, and other goods east. The roads were long, the weather could be brutal, and a broken wagon axle might leave a caravan stranded miles from help.
Jacob stayed, his brothers followed, and together they built a business supplying soldiers, ranchers, miners, and townspeople across New Mexico. When American troops entered Santa Fe in 1846 during the Mexican-American War, the merchants found new customers. Soldiers needed food, clothing, blankets, equipment, and almost everything else that couldn’t be produced locally. The Spiegelbergs sold them what they needed, and by the time Flora arrived, the family had stores, banking interests, and business connections that stretched well beyond Santa Fe.
Flora settled into Santa Fe society, although the town still had its rough edges. She became friends with Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy, entertained visitors, and helped organize schooling for children whose families belonged to different religious communities. In 1879, she helped open a school for Jewish and Protestant children. She also taught Jewish children on Saturdays and Catholic children on Sundays. One of her pupils was Arthur Seligman, who would grow up to become governor of New Mexico.
In 1876, a teenage outlaw known as Billy the Kid reportedly walked into the Spiegelberg store and bought a cowboy outfit. Flora remembered him years later, when his name had become famous throughout the country. The Spiegelbergs sold clothes to cowboys, miners, soldiers, and anyone else with money to spend, so it was nothing unusual for a young man to buy a cowboy outfit, even if he later became one of the most notorious outlaws in the West.
Santa Fe could be dangerous. One night in 1887, an angry crowd came pounding on the Spiegelbergs’ door. Two Mexican men had been accused of murdering a local doctor, and the crowd wanted Willi to join them in a lynching. Flora refused to let her husband leave, telling the men that she needed him at home with their young child. They went away without him.
Flora would live long enough to see Santa Fe change from a territorial town into the capital of an American state. She died in New York in 1943, almost seventy years after the journey that had brought her west. Her memoir, Reminiscences of a Jewish Bride of the Santa Fe Trail, preserved the ladder, the cowboys, the miserable food, and the six days of jolting stagecoach travel. The Santa Fe Trail had brought thousands of people into New Mexico before Flora ever set foot on it, including Jewish merchants who had begun arriving when the country was still Mexican territory. They came west with wagons of goods and discovered that there was money to be made in a place where almost everything had to be hauled in from somewhere else.
