A Woman of the Century, Frances Minerva Nunnery (1898–1997): Her Story in Her Own Memorable Voice as Told to Cecil Dawkins

4: A Runaway Wife

It took me two days to get from Las Vegas to Taos. It was dark when I got down to the foot of US Hill. I didn’t know how far it was to Taos, so I decided to camp where I was. I pulled off beside the Little Rio Grande in the canyon above Ranchos de Taos. I must have come into Taos down the same road Blumenschein and Phillips,those earliest of the Taos painters,took back in 1898,the year I was born. It was a few days before I was born that their wagon broke down just north of Taos.I heard they flipped a coin to see who would unhitch the horse and ride into town for help getting their wagon fixed.Phillips won the toss (or lost it,depending on the horse), and he liked the place so much he talked Blumenschein into settling in Taos instead of going on to Old Mexico. While I was setting up camp here comes an old Mexican couple with a team and wagon. They pulled in there and made camp, too, in the clearing by the river. The old lady came over and picked up the baby and took her out of the car, all the time trying to talk to me in Spanish. That scared me. I didn’t know what they were going to do. Maybe they were going to kidnap the baby. But she rocked Anita in her arms and got her to grip a finger with 4 ❙ A RUNAWAY WIFE ❙ 40 ❙ ❙ A RUNAWAY WIFE ❙ her little hand, and I finally caught on she just liked the baby. She fixed something to eat in a big iron skillet and insisted that I eat with them. Tired as I was, I was happy to oblige. The next morning the Spanish lady got up and fixed pork and eggs and tortillas for breakfast,and they fed me again.Then her husband turned their horses loose and, when I’d made up the bed in the car,they just came on over and climbed in the back seat.The old man slapped with his hands like shoving flies off his knees and said, “Vamos a Taos.” I figured that meant,“Let’s go to Taos.” So we went to Taos. Taos was just a little old mud town then, hardly any buildings were stuccoed.The street around the plaza was just dirt,and crowded with horses and wagons and saddled horses tied up to the hitching posts. Pretty soon a bunch of Spanish people crowded around the Model T.I’d never been around Spanish people before,never heard the language .At first I was afraid of them, but finally I realized that all they wanted was for me to ride them around the plaza in the car, and for half a day that’s what I did. First one group and then another, I rode people around and around Taos plaza in the Ford. I guess it was one of the first cars ever seen in the streets of Taos. Low on money, later I went into the Columbian Hotel to see if I could get a restaurant job. But when I saw a rough-looking bunch of cowboys in the lobby playing poker,I decided this wasn’t the kind of place my mother would want me to be. The owner, a man named Pooler, had some time before been shot by a drifter claimed to be a traveling watch repairman who’d been kicked out of the bar earlier for being drunk and disorderly. The Columbian hotel was just a one-story affair faced up to the south side of the plaza. It was the principal hotel in Taos until Don Fernando opened up in 1926. Later the Karavas brothers remodeled it, but they ran it as the Columbian Hotel for some years before rechristening it La Fonda de Taos. However, I didn’t know all this at that time. 41 ❙ A WOMAN OF THE CENTURY ❙ I spent the day with the old couple. They loaded up with groceries , and I bought a few little staples and fingered warm blankets I couldn’t afford. Then late afternoon I brought them back up the canyon. We all slept there by the river that night. The next morning they caught their horses and hitched up the team and took off back to...