Sue Hallgarth

Willa Cather’s childhood home in Red Cloud, Nebraska, is fully renovated and now open to the public. Read more….

So many of the characters and events in Death Comes are based on the lives of actual people, readers might enjoy finding out more about them. The first two books, on John Dunn and Arthur Rochford Manby, are brief biographies. The third contains stories by D.H. Lawrence, one of which, “The Woman who Rode Away,” features Lawrence’s slanted, fictional view of Mabel Dodge Luhan. The fourth and fifth are memoirs about Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan: Winter in Taos is a lyrical depiction of her life there with Tony; Edge of Taos Desert recounts Mabel’s arrival and early experiences in Taos, including renting part of Manby’s house and meeting Tony. The last book, Spud Johnson & Laughing Horse, contains comments on Spud and samples from his periodical, “Laughing Horse.”

Long John Dunn

“Well, now, you’ll be Miss Cather and Miss Lewis?”  The high-pitched drawl came from a long face peering around the door and into the station’s waiting room.  The face was tanned and deeply creased, with steel-blue eyes and a bushy grey mustache that almost entirely obscured the stub of an unlit cigar. A long, thin body quickly followed and the face broke into a grin.

“Long John Dunn.”  Willa rose and strode across the waiting area to shake his hand. “Delighted to see you again.”

“Yep,” John Dunn nodded. The way he said it, yepcontained at least three syllables. “Drove the two of you up from Alcalde and after your visit put you on the train right here bound for Denver and parts east.”

“How good of you to remember,” Edith found her hand swallowed in John Dunn’s grip. 

“Couldn’t forget.  It was just a year ago July, same time as now.  Anyway, remember the two of you from ten years back.  You stayed at the Columbian and rode my horses.” Long John reached for their luggage.  

“You have a very good memory, Mr. Dunn.”  

“Yep. Where you going this time, the Columbian or the Luhans?”  

“Luhans, the pink adobe,” Edith’s grin grew as broad as Willa’s. “We loved it there last year.” 

“Nice little house, quiet place, much better than a hotel.” John Dunn continued to make conversation while Edith gathered up their few small items from the waiting-room bench, sure that John Dunn had already loaded their trunks from the platform. “Been out here long this summer?” 

* * *

For the first time Edith found herself looking directly into John Dunn’s steel-blue eyes.  Kindly eyes, Edith judged, but with depths reflecting more sorts of experience than she could quite believe possible for one man. Unladylike, her mother’s voice echoed from the past and immediately she dropped her gaze.  John Dunn didn’t seem to notice. 

A rustler, Mabel had assured them the previous summer…  A gambler and a desperado.  Years ago when he was a young Texan, Mabel had said, John Dunn shot a man to death and then ran until he got lucky with cards and finally made his way to New Mexico.  He’s been sort of honest since, Mabel shrugged.  Once he reached Taos he started a livery stable, bought a stagecoach, and began hauling people and mail from the train at Tres Piedras.  Wasn’t long before he bought the first car in Taos and upgraded his service.  

Of course, Mabel said, he’s always made quite a lot of money on the side with gambling.  The word is nobody can beat him at poker.  And nobody knows how many casinos he owns.  All around here.  Red River, Elizabethtown, even Embudo.  Partners with Al Capone according to the rumors. Capone? Willa and Edith echoed each other’s question.  Al Capone, that’s right, Mabel nodded.  He’s supposed to be hiding out all around here.  Anyway, whenever someone raises questions, Long John just closes his casino and opens a new one. The rumors may be wrong about Capone, but they are certain about Long John Dunn, Mabel grinned.  That was one of his casinos a few years ago, she pointed to an abandoned adobe set back from the road.  Now he’s sort of honest and sort of rich.  Better than most in Taos.  Successful, you know.  Mabel’s rich laugh ended her story.

Arthur Rockford Mamby

Arthur Manby had been parading around Taos for years in his jodhpurs and tall English boots cheating people out of land and money, but no one had quite gotten anything on him they could prove.  And he hung around women in the Mexican neighborhoods, especially Teracita Ferguson, who owned the tourist camp on the edge of town.  

But mostly Manby was crazy.  One of the local stories was that during the Great War, when that wealthy woman who married Tony Luhan first showed up in Taos and rented part of Manby’s house, she could hear Manby on the roof at night listening through a chimney to conversations at her dinner table.  Then he told federal officers she was a spy arranging for Taos to be invaded from Mexico. Well, Tony’s rich wife took care of that nonsense all right, but as far as the sheriff was concerned, all Anglos were strange, British or American.       

* * *

Once reminded, Edith remembered seeing Manby strut about Taos in his old-fashioned, high-laced British boots.  He was certainly a character and quite out of place.  What made him memorable was that he had come from England with the singular purpose of turning Taos into his very own kingdom. And he had almost pulled it off.  Mabel told them that no one took him seriously until they found out he had gained control of thousands of acres through speculative dealings and fraudulent land-grant transfers. Then, just as unexpectedly, he lost everything except his twenty-room house, the same house Mabel had rented part of when she first moved to Taos in 1917.  

Manby had also given his name to some hot springs on the Rio Grande where he built an odd stone bathhouse next to the river and drew up plans for an enormous hotel and spa.  Mabel had taken them there when she knew Manby was elsewhere, and the three of them had hiked down to enjoy a long soak. But they really hadn’t learned many details about Manby. Mabel seemed to think he was more humorous than dangerous. Tony had been even more tight-lipped today. 

D. H. Lawrence

[Note: While D.H.Lawrence does not appear in Death Comes, several characters refer to him and visit his ranch in San Cristobal, NM. An additional book for further reading is Mabel Dodge Luhan. Lorenzo in Taos. Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2007, Mabel’s memoir of her tumultuous relationship with Lawrence, which took place before the events in Death Comes.]

Spud’s way of dealing with human turmoil had always been through satire. Others often joined him, contributing their commentary to his Laughing Horsemagazine. Even Lawrence, who couldn’t win his argument with Mabel about the eternal battle of the sexes turned to fiction to kill her off in “The Woman Who Ran Away.” End of argument. Through satire, not fisticuffs or murder or war. But satire, Spud had to admit, would do nothing to help catch the men who killed three women and buried them in shallow graves. At the very least, Spud thought, those women should have gravestones as substantial as Carson’s.

* * *

 “I still love this vase,” Willa was chatting to her through the wall as she moved about, changing the location of dishes and pots to clear a small table for use as a desk. Edith could picture the vase precisely, tall, thin and oriental with a phoenix painted on its side and a bright red chrysanthemum, whimsical with touches of yellow and orange, leaning from its mouth. It was not a real vase at all but one D.H. Lawrence had painted on the door of the room’s only cabinet the year he and his wife Frieda occupied the pink adobe.  Soon after they had moved to Kiowa, the ranch near San Cristobal that Mabel gave them in trade for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers.  

“Yes, I do, too,” Edith responded. “Maybe if Tony’s feeling up to it we could arrange for another trip to their ranch this summer.” She remembered the view of the mountains from the porch of Lawrence’s small rustic ranch house near the tiny town of San Cristobal, twenty-five miles to the north and five hundred feet above the seven-thousand foot elevation of Taos. 

* * *

Their visit with the Lawrences and the deaf young woman who moved with them from England had been delightful.  Brett, Dorothy Brett, Edith remembered the young woman’s name, a painter.  Slight and blond, she used an ear trumpet and read lips.  She seemed devoted to Lawrence, almost more than his wife Frieda, who clearly enjoyed a good argument.  

But then, so did Lawrence, Edith chuckled.  An odd threesome, not exactly Jack Spratt, but a skinny, talkative, red-bearded Englishman with a hearty wife whose gusts of conversation came in a German accent, and a slim assistant who simply did whatever she was told.  Mabel brought them to New Mexico where they hoped Lawrence would find relief from the tuberculosis that ravaged his lungs, and where Mabel hoped Lawrence would write so brilliantly about Taos the world would finally grasp its magic. 

But Mabel had quarreled with Lawrence and the Lawrences had gone off to Mexico.

* * *

It wasn’t until the spring after the Lawrences left for Mexico that they came back to Taos with Dorothy Brett and began to fix up the Kiowa ranch. Lawrence had hoped then to found a utopian colony, a new world in the new world, but Brett turned out to be his only colonist. The three of them, Brett, Lawrence, and Frieda, managed to make the ranch more or less habitable and lived there until British residency requirements forced Lawrence to return to England. 

Mabel Dodge Luhan and Tony Luhan

Mabel, rich and Anglo, was a socialite and rabble-rouser with three previous husbands and one flamboyant lover. Tony, married and a man of tradition, was a spiritual leader in his pueblo.  Mabel had often created scandals, living lavishly in Italy with her second husband, establishing a salon for labor leaders and intellectuals in her Fifth Avenue apartment, and in 1913 helping to organize demonstrations at Madison Square Garden and Paterson, New Jersey for the silk workers’ strike.  If that weren’t enough, she was also behind the 1913 Armory Show in New York City that introduced modern art to the country and shocked all of America.  And now she expected Taos to transform the world. 

* * *

Mabel had not always been agreeable, Willa and Edith knew from the many stories they heard about her over the years.  Rabble-rouser, suffragette, unionist, commie!  Charges against Mabel had been loud and various and to some degree true. She had held salons in her Fifth Avenue apartment where labor leaders and anarchists fomented rebellion and plotted the Patterson strike.  She had supported the crusades of people like Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman, Big Bill Haywood, and Emma Goldberg.  She had been in a well-known sexual relationship with John Reed.  Several of Mabel’s New York friends had at some point been arrested for their political activity or fled the United States. The rumors about Mabel herself had been no less startling.  Insane, said some, a meddler who loves to disrupt relationships and embarrass even the most invulnerable, said others.  Mabel sparked so much gossip over the years that Willa and Edith had been wary of accepting her invitations to Taos and once they did, tried to distance themselves by using formal terms of address, referring to themselves as Miss Cather and Miss Lewis and to Mabel as Mrs. Luhan.  

But their reserve dissolved once they read Mabel’s memoirs, spent days exploring the country around Taos with Tony and occasionally Mabel, and learning from them about the history and culture of New Mexico, both past and present. Kindred spirits, Willa decided, except for Mabel’s desire to be the center of attention.  Willa wanted that only for her work, not herself.  Mabel had no need to earn a living.  Willa and Edith did.  They preferred to stay out of the limelight and let Edith’s editorial work at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency and Willa’s short stories and novels speak for them.

* * *

Mabel had lived many lives, all of them different and all of them undisciplined. Once her first husband died, she was freed from convention, which never had interested her or served her well. What she got out of her first marriage was a solid financial base and John, her son, who was all grown up now and married himself. She also got the freedom to do as she pleased. Which is exactly what she did, son or no son. So it was that…that made her marriage to Tony different. As a woman with freedom, she was Tony’s equal. She might believe in subservience to men but she never practiced it. Certainly not with Tony, who never expected it from her. That’s not how they connected. The irony is…their union is considered unequal because they mixed the red race with white. But exactly that difference balanced them. Mabel respected Tony as he did her, and they learned from each other and together whole new ways of being in the world.  

* * *

Tony was impressive, always neatly dressed and pleasant to be around.  When loose his shiny black hair fell to his waist, but he usually wore it in braids brightly decorated with colorful ribbons that draped down the front of his shirt.  He had a special smell, a sweet smell Spud guessed might have something to do with the herbs and grasses in his medicine pouch.  It was an odor Spud identified only with Tony.  Mabel placed tiny bowls of cinnamon throughout the house to fill it with scent and chase away mice.  But Tony’s scent was entirely his own, and he always wore a little smile on his lips.  His eyes reflected the same gentle kindness.  But Tony rarely spoke or looked at anyone directly, not at Spud anyway. Inscrutable is a real word, Spud decided.  Not a negative word, Tony was always pleasant, but a meaningful one.  

* * *

Cars are not safe, Willa had declared, with a statement that covered all New York cabs and Harvey Indian Detours.  Especially unsafe, Edith thought to herself, with drivers like Tony who drove wherever he wanted regardless of whether there was an actual road.  Tony also drove as fast as he could.  But in a place like Taos, Tony and his car were gold.  He was a wonderful guide.  He had so much personal knowledge about the mix of people and their rich history in northern New Mexico.  And without Tony they never could have reached the places he took them. And, Edith finished her rambling thought, his passengers usually arrived where and when they intended without injury. She smiled.  At least the two of them had experienced only mud and inconvenience when Tony’s car fell into a ditch near the ceremonial cave the previous summer.  

Tony was clearly never timid about driving.  Monsoons made no difference to him, even when the roads turned into deep slurry and threatened to carry the car into an embankment or slide it off into a ditch.  Not everyone was like Tony, of course.  They had had to wait for two and a half days at the Laguna pueblo before anyone dared to take them to Acoma less than twenty miles away.  Calicheclay, the driver explained.  Too slick, too sticky, too dangerous.  He was right, of course.  It rained hard for several afternoons in a row, and flash floods destroyed roads and cut new channels through arroyos.  

Even Tony might have delayed that trip.  Caliche, sand, and rock seemed to be the only footing for roadbeds in New Mexico and all three could prove dangerous.  But no matter what was happening, Edith knew that when Tony took the wheel he would remain unperturbed and even serene.  Tony loved his car and nothing pleased him more than an expedition.        

Spud Johnson

The stars were brilliant when Spud finally made his way home, a short walk cross lots from Mabel’s to the adobe he was renting on the main road through Taos. Main road, he chuckled to himself, better call it a dirt track leading out of town. Exactly what he loved about Taos, its lack of everything. No macadam, no streetlights, no fast cars, no people racing for the top.  No top even. What could be better.  

At twenty-nine Spud was happy to find a quiet life in Taos after Santa Fe with Wytter Bynner, sixteen years his senior and living in Berkeley when in 1922 he took Spud under his wing, as they said then.  Spud had already caused a scandal at the university when he and a couple of friends published the satirical Laughing Horse,a magazine he later brought with him to Taos, and Bynner had cheered him on.  

Before Spud quite knew what was happening, they had moved together to Santa Fe where almost immediately they met D. H. Lawrence and took off with him and Frieda for Mexico.  Heady stuff that, Bynner opening his world to Lawrence, boys on the beach, barefoot in the sand, exhilarating, tempestuous, insane, and finally, finally, too much for Spud.  Soon after they returned, Spud moved to Taos, a long and torturous seventy-miles north by car on a narrow rocky dirt road through the Rio Grande Gorge and then up, up to the wonder of Taos valley.

* * *

Spud’s way of dealing with human turmoil had always been through satire. Others often joined him, contributing their commentary to his Laughing Horsemagazine. Even Lawrence, who couldn’t win his argument with Mabel about the eternal battle of the sexes turned to fiction to kill her off in “The Woman Who Ran Away.” End of argument. Through satire, not fisticuffs or murder or war. But satire, Spud had to admit, would do nothing to help catch the men who killed three women and buried them in shallow graves. At the very least, Spud thought, those women should have gravestones as substantial as Carson’s.

Posted by Sue Hallgarth on February 18, 2014

For twenty years Willa Cather and Edith Lewis spent their summer months at Whale Cove Cottages on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, Canada. They reached Grand Manan by ferry. Current ferries are considerably larger and better equipped than the one Cather and Lewis used. The Grand Manan V pictured below just passing Swallowtail Lighthouse is capable of carrying semi-trucks and busses as well as cars and passengers.

Continue reading …

Posted by Sue Hallgarth on November 4, 2013

When I first visited Grand Manan in the 1990s and found the restored Cather Cottage at Whale Cove, this is what it looked like from the edge of the Red Trail (one of the many hiking trails on the island). Situated a few hundred feet from the edge of a cliff, the cottage faced the Bay of Fundy whose fifty-foot tides quietly rose and fell at the base of the cliff.

While there I taped several long conversations with Kathleen Buckley, who at that time owned and managed Whale Cove Cottages and took care of what has become called the Cather Cottage for Jim and Helen Southwick. Continue reading …

Posted by Sue Hallgarth on September 9, 2013

It is unclear why James Woodress twice chose to refer to Isabelle McClung as the “great love” of Cather’s life. But doing so set the stage for identifying Cather as a lesbian: a lesbian jilted by McClung, who by implication “returned” to the heterosexual fold through her 1916 marriage to the violinist Jan Hambourg. Ostensibly leaving Cather to mourn her “lost love” and settle for the devoted—and implicitly chaste—companionship of Edith Lewis.  Continue reading …