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“bastard” to pass as his. . . . Julia could not kill her own child, so the men came and drowned the child—I believe—and poor Julia came to retreat into madness.
    Lynne told this story with such authority; there wasn’t any question in her mind. I asked her how she knew about the men drowning the baby.
    A dream, she responded. She’d seen it in a dream.
    She had been sleeping in her casita at La Posada and had awoken in tears, unable to shake the vivid images. The nightmare had haunted her for days—it still haunted her.
    “Julia,” she wrote, “died in her bathtub.”

three
THE PRAIRIE OCEAN

    The Santa Fe Trail.
    From Santa Fe Railroad: By the Way (Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1922).
    I n the real world, things weren’t yet so dire for Julia. In the life I could trace through newspapers and archives, Julia was still freshly married and setting out to make a new future in the New World.
    Still, the trip to Santa Fe must have involved increasing degrees of shock: the steamboat from Bremen to Liverpool, German-speakers crowding the decks; the luxury liner from Liverpool to New York, with all its strange languages and the ocean, broad and wind-whipped; the trip via train and steamboat from New York to Kansas; the arduous journey across the plains. Julia was twenty-one years old, and had left her family and home for the first time on a journey that was long and irrevocable, with a husband she had yet to decipher. Everything was foreign; everything was new.
    When Abraham had first traveled the trail to New Mexico, the trip had been long—two to three months, a laborious, uncomfortable, and uncertain journey following a disjointed thread of commerce and conquest from the jumping-off point in Missouri through the unsettled Indian territories into what had recently been northern Mexico. Julia’s trip was faster; the railroad now extended to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. She and Abraham—Adolph—rode the Burlington, and then the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad to its end, and then boarded a steamboat to Kansas City, where the trail began.
    It was winter. The plains were colored ochre, the grasses sharp and dead, the view flat to forever across the great speckled plains. In the earliest years, the wagon trains set out from St. Louis, banded together in caravans for safety: wagons and carriages, tents and drivers, hundreds of oxen, mules, and dogs, and very, very few women. Susan Magoffin, an eighteen-year-old bride who traveled the trail in 1846 with her merchant husband, was among the first. She wrote of leaving amid a “cracking of whips, lowing of cattle, braying of mules, whooping and hallowing of men”—as well as other utterances that Magoffin dared not transcribe. The wagons moved slowly west, several abreast on parallel tracks, rolling like cloud shadows across the contours of the land.
    Nineteenth-century Germans were voracious consumers of travel literature, especially about the American West, and Julia would certainly have known about the trail. She would have heard about all manner of tribulation and discomfort: about runaway horses, and windstorms and snowstorms and interminable rainstorms, about hailstones “larger than hen’s eggs,” as Magoffin described them, and swarming mosquitoes that knocked against the carriages like a hard rain, and “troublesome quagmires” that could trap a wagon to its hubs in mud. She might have read of the rattlesnakes: “One hears almost a constant popping of rifles or pistols among the vanguard, to clear the route of these disagreeable occupants,” wrote Josiah Gregg, who firsttraveled the trail in the 1830s and whose books were widely read in Germany.
    Julia was lucky compared with these early travelers, and compared with Abraham on his early trips. There was now a stagecoach route from Kansas City. So instead of nine or ten weeks on a wagon train at the plodding pace of oxen, Julia traveled in a Barlow and Sanderson coach, covering the nearly seven