The Land of the Pueblos

Susan E. Wallace takes us into the heart of nineteenth-century New Mexico and its surrounding Indian Pueblos. Eagerly, she shares her adventures and observations about the land, history, customs and inhabitants. We start with her journey West first by rail and then by buckboard. We go with her to her first contact with Native Americans and attend an Indian ceremony. We share her excitement as she forces open a heavy wooden door into a locked and forgotten room in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. Her discovery? Not a treasure of gold or jewels but tumbled piles of written records, some of them dating from the early 1600s. This is only one of the many accounts Wallace wrote about her time in New Mexico. While her husband, Lew Wallace, was busy with his duties as the governor of the New Mexico Territory and working on what was to be his most popular book, Ben Hur, Susan was having her articles published in the popular magazines of the day. They were later collected and published in book form in 1888 and are now once more available in this facsimile edition.