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hundred miles to Santa Fe in about fifteen days. Not that it was a comfortable journey. The seats were stuffed with hay to keep contusions to a minimum, but it wasn’t much help, with the wheels jolting over ruts and pits and stones, the coach moving at the pace of a trotting or cantering horse on a trail not yet a road but only a suggestion of one. Hay lined the floor to warm Julia’s feet, and buffalo robes warmed her lap. To keep out the cold air, the side flaps were fastened. Julia rode in the dark.
    By the time Julia traveled the trail, there were places to stop for food, water, provisions, and sleep—log-raftered, mud-plastered, dirt-floored huts serving cuisine that insulted the memory of the fine viands of the Cunard Line, or the Wurst and Brötchen Julia knew from Germany. She ate beans and tortillas, dried buffalo, stew, salt pork; she drank bitter coffee. Kosher was no option here. Julia dined with fellow travelers: cowboys, mostly, toting pistols and straight-bladed daggers. Everyone, cowboys and German brides alike, slept on the floor, or in dirty, bug-bitten lofts reached by rope ladders. Room partitions might be muslin sheets strung from wall to wall. Julia must have been glad to have Abraham, the seasoned plains traveler, by her side.
    The winter of 1866 was a season of deep snows on the plains. It was, said old-timers, “the hardest winter they ever experienced.” The Arkansas River froze twelve to eighteen inches thick. Twenty wagon trains were halted by blizzards that obscured all sight and passage; stagecoaches were delayed for days. Two trainmen building the railroad that would, in a decade’s time, approach the Rockies, froze todeath on Bear Creek in Kansas. Natives were also a problem for European settlers. Julia’s journey took place during the height of the Indian Wars; the plains were dangerous. After the Civil War, the Indians had stepped up their campaigns against travelers through their territory—emigrants were streaming west and the tribes knew that they would bring only trouble. Caravans were regularly beset by large groups of warriors, and most wagon trains and stagecoaches traveling the trail were now accompanied by federal troops to protect them. The Comanche and the Kiowa were feared above all, and the lore of the trail grew like an attenuated game of telephone, with stories of victims staked to the ground, bellies slit and organs sliced and eaten. Women were warned that capture by the tribes would be far worse than death.
    The winter that Julia traveled the trail, six soldiers were scalped four miles from Fort Dodge. A few months later, five nuns—Sisters of Mercy—left for a mission to Santa Fe accompanied by Jean-Baptiste Lamy, Santa Fe’s first bishop. About six weeks into the journey, the bishop sensed something. He ordered a corral to be made. All the wagons in the caravan were arranged to form a circle, and the oxen, nuns, teamsters, and other travelers took shelter inside. “None too soon,” wrote Sister Blandina Segale, a young nun whom Julia came to know and whose journals were later published in a book, At the End of the Santa Fe Trail , “For the Kiowas’ death whoop preceded the sling of hundreds of arrows.”
    The Indians were hidden in the trees across a small stream, shooting their arrows; the priests and teamsters returned fire with guns. It was hot, and the travelers ran out of water. The river was only a few dozen feet away, but the group could not reach it. The next day, cholera broke out. One young sister died. “Whether it was from cholera or fright the victim gave up her soul to God,” Sister Blandina wrote. The arrows kept coming. A young teamster also contracted cholera, and began “pitifully calling for his mother.” Sister Augustine, an elderlynun, crawled from under one wagon to the next as the arrows zipped and dropped around her. “Sister Augustine reached the dying young man and tried to soothe his last moments as his mother would have