March 21, 2022 • 39 mins
Doña Maria Gertrudis Barceló was a professional gambler and card dealer in New Mexico in the early 19th century. But the details of her life are all over the place, depending on the source.
Research:
- New Mexico History Museum. “The Gambling Queen of Santa Fe.” Press Release. 8/20/2009. https://media.newmexicoculture.org/release/91/the-gambling-queen-o
- Dominguez, Orae. “Maria Gertrudis Barceló, Doña Tules.” New Mexico History. State Records Center and Archives. https://newmexicohistory.org/2013/10/24/maria-gertrudis-barcelo-dona-tules/
- New Mexico Historic Women Marker Initiative. “Maria Gertrudis Barcelo.” https://www.nmhistoricwomen.org/location/maria-gertrudis-barcelo/
- National Park Service. “La Tules, María Gertrudis Barceló.” 3/11/2021. https://www.nps.gov/people/maria-gertrudis-barcelo.htm\
- Thwaites, Reuben Gold. “Early Western Travels 1748-1846, Volume XX - Part II of Gregg's Commerce of the Prairies, 1831-1839.” Cleveland, Ohio. The Arthur H. Clark Company. 1905.
- Magoffin, Susan Shelby, and Stella Madeleine Drumm. “Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico : the diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846-1847.” New Haven : Yale University Press, 1962.
- Lecompte, Janet. “La Tules and the Americans.” Arizona and the West , Autumn, 1978, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Autumn, 1978). https://www.jstor.org/stable/40168728
- Kendall, George Wilkins. “Narrative of the Texan Sante Fé Expedition.” New York : Harper and Brothers. 1846.
- Brewerton, G. Douglass. “Incidents of Travel in New Mexico.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. April 1854. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924080772092&view=1up&seq=599&skin=2021&q1=april
- Nogar, Anna M. et al. “Nuevomexicano Cultural Memory and the Indo-Hispana Mujerota.” Journal of the Southwest, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Winter 2016). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26310186
- Chávez, Fray Angélico. “Doña Tules, Her Fame and Her Funeral.” From “Santa Fe Nativa: A Collection of Nuevomexicano Writing.” University of New Mexico Press. 2009.
- Cook, Mary J. Straw. “Doña Tules: Santa Fe’s Courtesan and Gambler.” University of New Mexico Press. 2007.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today's episode
has one of the weirder back stories about how I
first heard of them, because it was in a puzzle
(00:25):
that was part of the m I T Mystery hunt.
I did not manage to solve this puzzle, nor did
the rest of my team. It remained unsolved, but it
did spark my curiosity about Donia Maria Gertrudis Barcello, who
was a professional gambler and card dealer in New Mexico
in the early nineteenth century. I worked on this puzzle
(00:48):
a few years ago, and I've circled back to Barcello,
who was known as Latulas or Donia Tulis, a few
times since then. It always seemed like there just was
not going to be enough information for a full episode.
But it turns out there was a book on her
that was published back in two thousand seven, and for
some reason, it did not come up in my searches
(01:10):
until it was reissued in paperback. In that said, though,
this book, which is Donia Tulis Santa fe Is Courtisan
and Gambler by Mary J. Strackhook is not a long
book at all because even though she did years of
research putting this book together, there's just not a lot
that's documented. And some of what Cook puts forth in
(01:33):
the book, like that Donia Tulis was definitely a courtisan,
is crowded a little bit more in rumor than it
is an established fact. But once I realized that, yes,
with this book and other sources and all of that together,
the information is mostly there, I decided to go for it.
So Maria Gertrudis Barcello was born around eighteen hundred, probably
(01:55):
in the Bovespa River valley in Sonora, Mexico. Her father,
on Ignacio Barcello, was a rancher and her mother was
Dolores Herrero. Gertrudez had a brother named Jose Trinidad and
a sister named Maria de la Luce. Spain had started
colonizing the area where they lived in the seventeenth century,
(02:15):
but we don't really know when members of Gertrudis's family
started arriving in the America's Beyond the fact that Barcello
is a Catalan surname, we just don't have a lot
of detail about the family history. For a long time,
one of the main sources of written information about Donia
Tulis was Josiah greg He was a merchant, a naturalist,
(02:38):
and a writer who grew up in Tennessee and Missouri.
We will talk a bit more about his account of
her later, but in terms of her early life, he
claimed that she grew up in Taos, New Mexico, in poverty,
but that does not appear to be true. As we
just said, she was likely born in Sonora, but beyond that,
(02:58):
Gertrudis got at least some education. She signed legal documents
with her full name and an embellished signature, at a
time when most women would have signed their name just
with an X. Sometime between eighteen fifteen and eighteen twenty,
the family moved from Sonora to the settlement of Valencia,
which was near Tomay, New Mexico. Church records in Tomay
(03:20):
list Gertrudis and her parents with the honorifics don and Dounia.
These titles were originally used for the royalty and nobility,
but by the nineteenth century they were also used for
gentry or other people who had acquired some kind of
political or financial means, and a note about the nickname
Dounia Tulis. A lot of accounts say that tu less
(03:42):
came from a Spanish word for read and was a
reference to her physical appearance, but interpretations of how she
resembled a read are all over the place, and Toulas
is also described as a common diminutive for the name Gertrudis.
There are some sources that say she acquired this nickname
(04:04):
as she became more well known later on in her life,
and that it was connected to her professions somehow, we
don't really know. It's also totally possible that this was
her nickname from childhood. We also don't really know why
the family moved from the Bevis Bay River Valley to Valencia,
but there are a lot of possible reasons. The traditional
homelands of multiple Apache nations are primarily north and east
(04:28):
of Sonora, but Apache forces had been raiding neighboring areas
for centuries. In terms of Sonora in particular, these raids
really peaked in the late seventeen hundreds, but they were
still ongoing in the early eighteen hundreds. Violent conflicts between
indigenous peoples and Spanish colonists, and between different indigenous nations
(04:50):
were pretty common. This was of course, not unique to
Sonora at all, so moving wouldn't necessarily mean that the
family would get away from these kind of conflicts, but
it may have been a factor in their decision. Also
the Mexican War of Independence it started in eighteen ten,
and although a lot of the major battles were south
of where the Barcelo family lived, it's possible that they
(05:12):
just wanted to be farther away from the violence, or
they may have been trying to anticipate what life was
going to be like in an independent Mexico. They might
have thought they could find business opportunities that they lived
closer to the border with the United States once the
war was over and trade opened up between the two countries.
(05:32):
The Year without a Summer took place in eighteen sixteen.
We have an episode on this global climate disruption, which
followed the eighteen fifteen eruption of Mount Tambora. Depending on
exactly when the family decided to move, it is possible
that the weather that year and its impact on their
ranch could have also been part of the decision, or
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it might have just been that life in a relatively
remote part of Mexico just felt too uncertain, and that
whatever they had heard from merchants and traders about life
farther to the north just seemed more appealing. Sometime after
the family arrived in Valencia, Juan Ignacio Barcelo died. Gertrudis's mother, Dolores,
(06:14):
remarried on August six, eighty three to Don Pedro Pino.
This was just a couple of months after Gertrudis's own
marriage to twenty one year old Don Manuel Antonio s
Narros that was on June three. We know a little
bit more about his family's history in the America's than
we do about hers. He was descended from a man
(06:37):
named antonio's Is Narrows, who had been driven out of
al Paso during the Pueblo Revolt in sixteen eighty. We
covered this revolt on the show in it was a
successful uprising bi Pueblo in People's which drove the Spanish
out of part of what's now New Mexico for twelve years.
At twenty three, Gertrudis was a little older than was
(06:58):
typical for a woman getting married for the first time.
She was also pregnant. After getting married, she kept Barcelo
as her last name, along with the right to keep
her own property and control over her own financial decisions.
There are a lot of articles and kind of brief
descriptions of her that frame this as a particularly astute
(07:21):
move on her part and as evidence that she already
had a really savvy business sense when she entered into marriage.
It's possible she did have a really savvy business sense
when she entered into marriage, but really this was just
how it worked in the Spanish colonies and in Mexico
after it became independent from Spain, especially for women of means.
(07:42):
Spanish marriage contracts usually included provisions that protected a woman's
existing property and her future income, and allowed her to
end the marriage if it was abusive. We should note, though,
that while this afforded European women in Spanish colonies rights that,
for example, European women in British colonies were typically denied,
(08:03):
it did not mean that Spanish law protected married women
across the board. As Europeans colonized North America, indigenous women
in many nations lost rights that they had previously held,
and none of these rights applied to enslaved women. At all,
since they were seen as property and their marriages were
not recognized as legally existing. Your Trudis's pregnancy at the
(08:27):
time of her marriage also was not particularly scandalous or
unusual for this part of New Mexico in the eighteen twenties.
Although a lot of Hispanic people in New Mexico were
devoutly Catholic at this point, a lot of couples just
never went through the formal steps of getting married. This
might have been related to the costs involved, or the
fact that while women could keep their names and their
(08:50):
property a lot of times, their social lives became more restricted.
After becoming lives. People were usually living in big extended
family is, with people's own children and their siblings, children
and children who had been orphaned or abandoned all being
raised together. There just wasn't a ton of focus about
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whether any of them had been born out of wedlock
or not. What was pretty unusual for Dona Tulas, though,
is that it seems like she kept a lot of
the social freedoms that a lot of women were more
likely to lose after she got married. She seems to
have kept on seeing whoever she wanted to see whenever
she wanted to see them and conducting her own business however,
(09:31):
she saw fit. Gertrudis's son, Jose Pedro, was baptized on
October ninete, but he died only about a month later.
She had another son, Miguel Antonio, who was baptized on
January nine, but tragically he died when he was about
four months old as well. Now we can assume this
(09:53):
was heartbreaking for the family, but we have no personal
recollections from any of them. Some time before the end
of Gertrudis and Manuel moved to a mining camp known
as Oro or Oro Springs that later became known as
Reality Dolores. The Mexican War of Independence had been over
for about four years. New Mexico was now a territory
(10:16):
of Independent Mexico. This seems to have been when she
really got her start gambling, and we will get to
that after a quick sponsor break. In early nineteenth century
New Mexico card games and the gambling that went along
(10:39):
with them were incredibly popular. The gambling part, though, was
also illegal. The government did not really do much to
try to stop people from gambling, though, They just find
people when they got caught doing it and everyone went
on with their lives. Maria Gertrudis Barcello was fined for
gambling for the first time that we know of, while
(11:01):
she was living in Oro, in the mountains south of
Santa Fe. That fine was for forty three paces and
it was levied in eighteen twenty six by one Virgilie Martinez,
alcalde of Santa Fe. The role of alcalde was like
being both the mayor and the magistrate, managing the administrative
functioning of the town as well as administering the law. However,
(11:24):
one Virgilie Martinez was also charged in connection to this
fine after a more senior administrator found that he had
kept about half of it for himself. It seems that
Donia Tules and her husband both enjoyed gambling. He was
fined for it while living in Oro as well. In
eighteen twenty six, Donia Tules adopted a daughter that was
(11:46):
Maria del Refugio, who had been either orphaned or abandoned
over the years. Donia Tules adopted other children as well,
including her niece Rafaela and possibly her niece's daughter Ritas.
Then there is about a ten year gap in the record.
It's possible that Donia Tulis and her husband went back
to Sonora or to Taos, New Mexico, where her brother lived.
(12:09):
If that's the case, it might explain why Josiah Gregg
described her as coming from Taos. But by about eighteen
thirty three, the family had moved to Santa Fe, including
Donia Tulis's mother and stepfather. If the Barcelo families moved
to New Mexico was motivated by the idea that they
might find some business opportunities after the Mexican War of
(12:31):
Independence was over. That was definitely true when they got
to Santa Fe. The war had ended in eighteen twenty one,
and that same year William Becknell had traveled from Franklin, Missouri,
to Santa Fe, New Mexico, along one of the roots
that became known as the Santa Fe Trail. Spain really
had not welcomed travelers and traders who had tried to
(12:53):
make their way southwest towards Santa Fe, but Mexico did,
and the Santa Fe tre all essentially became a commercial
highway connecting Mexico to the United States. As the southern
terminus of this trail, Santa Fe became an increasingly important city.
The Barcelo families business ventures included raising mules to sell
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to traders, and eventually Donia Tulis invested in trade goods
as well, and she ran a gambling salon. At first,
this was illegal, so her operation was probably a little
bit like a speakeasy, secret games being held in her
home or in back rooms, with people needing to know
a secret knock or a password to get in. But
(13:35):
in ety eight the government shifted its policy from finding
people who were caught gambling to charging licensing fees for
running gambling tables legally. Within a year, Donia Tulez had
opened a gambling salon, one described as being lavishly decorated
with chandeliers and plush carpets, and with mattresses draped in
(13:55):
blankets against the walls to serve as couches during the
day and pulled out to be used as beds at night.
There's also some speculation that she ran a brothel or
otherwise engaged in sex work. When she and her husband
first got to Santa Fe, they shared a house with
Lucious Thruston of Kentucky. In eighteen thirty five, their neighbor
(14:17):
Anna Maria Ren Dawn accused her of having an adulterous
affair with him, but when Donia Tulis confronted Anna, she
changed her story, saying that she had only said they
were living in the same house. Donia Tulis also took
another woman named Josepha Norio to court for slander in
eighteen thirty six. The details on this slander have not
(14:40):
survived to today, but some historians have interpreted the combination
of the adultery charge, the slander, and various rumors that
Donia Tulas had a lot of lovers as meaning that
she was running a brothel or otherwise doing sex work.
But a lot of the rumors about this came from
Anglo visitors and travelers who I don't really just found
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Donia Tulez to be scandalous. She was gambling, smoking, dealing cards,
and running a gambling salon that served alcohol to Santa
Fe locals. None of this was particularly disgraceful, and Don'tia
Tuleez was a prominent businesswoman, But in the minds of
most Anglos, of course, she must also be a sex
(15:21):
worker or running a brothel, because that went hand in
hand with those sinful things like drinking and gambling, and
while she may have been, it likely can't be substantiated.
At this point. We mentioned Josiah Gregg's account of Donia
Tulists earlier, and it's a really good example of these
attitudes and how people from the Eastern United States talked
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about New Mexico and the early nineteenth century. He wrote
a book called Greg's Commerce of the Prairies or the
Journal of the Santa Fe Traveler eighteen thirty one to
eighteen thirty nine. As that name suggests, This details Greg's
experiences and observations traveling along the Santa Fe Trail, including
observations of Santa Fe itself. These observations are often really negative.
(16:07):
Case in point quote, the administration of the laws in
Northern Mexico constitutes one of the most painful features of
her institutions. He also describes all kinds of incidents as outrages.
Volume two of this book uses the word outrage twenty
times to describe everything from Americans being beaten and robbed
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to people using the same musical instruments to accompany dances
as they would use to accompany hymns at church. Here
is how he describes the culture of gambling in Santa
Fe quote, the love of gambling also deserves to be
noticed as a distinguishing propensity of these people. Indeed, it
may well be said, without any undue stretch of imagination,
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that shoplifting, pickpocketing, and other elegant pastimes of the same
kindred are the legitimate offspring, especially among the lower classes,
of that passion for gaming, which, in Mexico, more than
anywhere else to use. Madame calder Owen's language is impregnated
with the Constitution. In Man, Woman and Child, he also
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describes the popularity of one particular game, a game of
chance called monty, which Dona Tules was famous for dealing.
This is not the con that's known as three card
monty that's basically a shell game where the mark has
to try to keep track of one particular card as
three of them are rapidly swapped around. This was a
different game that used a Spanish style card deck with
(17:36):
forty cards numbered ace through seven, with face cards of Jack, Night,
and King arranged in four suits. The dealer draws a
card from the top and the bottom of the deck
and places them each face up. The remaining cards in
the deck are called the monty. That's the Spanish word
for mountain, and players bet whether a card drawn from
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the monty will match the suit of one or both
of the face up cards. Here's how Greg described this quote.
There are other games that cards practiced among these people,
depending more upon skill, but that of el Monte, being
one exclusively of chance, seems to possess an all absorbing
attraction difficult to be conceived by the uninitiated spectator. Another man,
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William Clark kennerally also wrote about his experience as in
eighty six, and he described Donia Tules as dealing monty
quote with a firm hand and a winning smile. Here
is Greg's description of Donia Tules herself quote. The following
will not only serve to show the light in which
gambling is held by all classes of society, but to
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illustrate the purifying effects of wealth upon a character. Some
twelve or fifteen years ago, there lived, or rather roamed,
in Taos a certain female of very loose habits, known
as Latuleez. Finding it difficult to obtain the means of
living in that district, she finally extended her wanderings to
the capitol. She there became a constant attendant of one
(19:07):
of those pandemoniums where the favorite game of monty was
dealt pro bono public oh. Fortune at first did not
seem inclined to smile upon her efforts, and for some
years she spent her days in loneliness and misery. At last,
her luck turned, as gamblers would say, and on one
occasion she left the bank with a spoil of several
(19:28):
hundred dollars. This enabled her to open a bank of
her own, and, being favored by a continuous run of
good fortune, she gradually rose higher and higher in the
scale of affluence, until she found herself in possession of
a very handsome fortune. In eighteen forty three, she sent
to the United States some ten thousand dollars to be
invested in goods. She still continues her favorite amusement, being
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now considered the most expert monty dealer in all Santa Fe.
She is openly received in the first circle's of society.
I doubt in truth whether there is to be found
in the city a lady of more fashionable reputation than this.
Same Tulis now known as Senora Dona Gertrudis Barcelo. The
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shift of Donia Tulis is gambling operation from a secret
backroom monty game to a lavishly decorated sala that served
as a hotel in a ballroom and a gambling parlor.
That all happened alongside changes and unrest in New Mexico.
We will rewind just to touch and walk through that
after a quick sponsor break. As we mentioned earlier, Maria
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Gertrudis Barcelo opened her gambling salon in eighteen thirty nine,
within about a year of gambling being legalized in New Mexico,
and that shift followed on the heels of some unrest
and changes in New Mexico. At that point it was
still part of Northern Mexico. The Texas War of Independence
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had started in eighteen thirty five, and that had led
to Texas becoming independent from Mexico in eighteen thirty six.
That same year, a set of laws went into effect
that essentially revised the Mexican Constitution, centralizing the government and
establishing a new branch of the government called the Supreme
Conservation Power. New taxes went into effect as well, and
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as happens a lot of the time with new taxes,
these were incredibly unpopular. All of this fed into an
uprising in northern New Mexico, and that led to the
assassination of New Mexico Governor Albino Perez and multiple other
government officials. According to notes left by the interim governor,
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a group of women from the Barcelo family, possibly including
Dona Tulez, had found out about the threat to the
governor's life and disguised themselves in men's clothes to try
to persuade him to leave. When that failed, these same
women retrieved his body and had it buried. Perez's successor
was Governor Manuel Armijo, and he was the one who
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had spearheaded the legalization of gambling in New Mexico, and
in some accounts, don't you Tulis had a hand in
this decision. She definitely knew the governor. Various sources describe
her as his advisor and his friend and possibly his lover.
He did visit her enough times that somebody tried to
assassinate him on the way to her house two different times.
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She also definitely became one of Santa Fe's wealthiest and
most influential people. She was a successful businesswoman and she
used her income from the gambling salon gold mining trading
and other ventures to buy more property, renting a lot
of it out. As we said earlier, she adopted children
who were orphaned or abandoned, and she made donations to
(23:01):
various charities. She also took legal action against people who
failed to pay their gambling debts to her. That's something
that of course, was only possible once gambling was legalized,
because you can't really take somebody to court overhead debt
for an illegal activity. For example, in August eighteen thirty nine,
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she went to the alcol Day to demand that James
Kirker make good on four hundred pacos that she had
won from him. Kirker was born in Ireland, and shortly
after this he entered into a contract with the governor
of Chihuahua, Mexico, to essentially raise a private army and
fight against indigenous nations. In eighteen forty one, the Santa
(23:47):
Fe census list Donia Tulez with an occupation of gambler,
along with her husband Manuel Antonio Sisneros, who was listed
as a farmer, her daughter Rafaella, and three servants. But
shortly after this her husband just disappears from the record.
It seems as though she went to the city of
Chihuahua for a time in eighteen forty two, and according
(24:09):
to their family lore, he stayed behind in Santa Fe,
running the business and maintaining their household. In eighteen forty three,
Dona Tulis invested about ten thousand dollars in trade goods
from the US That was something that Josiah Gregg had referenced.
The following year, she bought a nine room home on
about a hundred and sixty acres of land, which was
(24:30):
adjacent to the land that she already owns. In eighteen
forty five, the United States annexed the Republic of Texas,
setting the stage for the Mexican American War, which began
in April of eighteen forty six. We have no documentation
of Donia Tulis's experiences or thought process in all of this,
(24:50):
but she does seem to have sided with the United
States against Mexico. She boarded multiple U. S military officers
and other American officials in her home. She is credited
with passing along an advanced warning of a Mexican and
indigenous uprising that was to take place on December nineteenth
of eighteen forty six. She also apparently loaned U S
(25:13):
forces about one thousand dollars to buy supplies for the troops.
It's unclear whether this was ever repaid, and in some
accounts she forgave it. Before the start of the Mexican
American War, Dona Tulis was described as one of the
most fashionable women in Santa Fe. Matt Field had passed
through the area with a merchant caravan in eighteen thirty nine,
(25:36):
and he had described her as New Mexico's most fashionable woman.
George Wilkins Kendall wrote an account of an expedition that
the Republic of Texas made into New Mexico in eighteen
forty one. That expedition was made in an effort to
claim new territory, and Kendall's description he actually misidentifies her
(25:57):
as French, possibly because of that associateation between France and
high fashion. Her love of fashion also seems to have
earned her the favor of cloth merchants in Santa Fe,
since it raised the demand for silk and other expensive fabrics.
But over the course of the Mexican American War, she
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seems to have lost a lot of that influence as
US troops became more and more present in the town,
bringing their own biases and standards for dress and behavior.
An influx of Anglo newcomers arrived from the Eastern US
as the war ended, and many of them found Donia
Tulis's taste, which had set trends in Santa Fe, to
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be dated or tacky. Susan Shelby mcgoffin was the wife
of a merchant on the Santa Fe trail, and she
wrote a description of Donia Tulis in eighteen forty six,
calling her quote a stately dame of a certain age,
the possessor of a portion of that shrewd sense and
fascinating manner necessary to allure the wayward, inexperienced youth to
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the hall of final ruin. Later, in that same diary,
she describes Donia Tulis, who would have been in her
mid forties, as an old woman with false hair and
false teeth. I mean, when I was a kid, I
would have thought old Donia Tulas still had a lot
of influence over local politics, though meaning it was a
(27:24):
good idea for American newcomers to get on her good side.
In one account, General Stephen Wants Kearney did this by
personally escorting her to a ball at a time when
her social and fashion influence were starting to wane. The
Mexican American War ended in eighteen forty eight with the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico seated most of what's now
(27:46):
New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, Texas, and western Colorado
to the United States for fifteen million dollars. This treaty
gave Mexican citizens one year to either move into territory
that Mexico still held or become US citizens. Dona Tulas
stayed in Santa Fe, so she became a US citizen
(28:08):
in eighteen forty nine. She continued to do business and
take people to court during these years. In eighteen forty eight,
Dona Tulas sued two different men for failing to repay
the money she had loaned them. Another court case involving
alone to a man named G. W. Coulter, proprietor of
the United States Hotel, stretched on for three years. By
(28:31):
the time that case was settled, Barcello's business seems to
have been struggling. As we've already discussed attitudes towards card
playing and gambling were radically different among Anglo authorities than
they had been in New Spain and in independent Mexico.
So after New Mexico became part of the United States,
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gambling was seen less as just an ordinary pastime that
was part of everyday life and more as a sin
that was verging on criminal. In February of eighteen forty eight,
a US military commander in New Mexico levied attacks on
gambling houses of two thousand dollars a year and also
banned miners and non commissioned military personnel from gambling. All
(29:16):
that would have had a huge impact on Barcello's business,
and it seems like about a year later her gambling
salon closed down. The last written references to Donia Tules
are not particularly flattering. George Brewerton published a piece called
Incidents of Travel in New Mexico in April of eighteen
fifty four. He had spent time there in the summer
(29:39):
of eighteen and to be clear, Brewerton thought gambling was
quote debased, and that opinion likely colored all of his
writing about Donia Tules. He described her as quote scarred
and seemed and rendered unwomanly by those painful lines which
unbridled passions and midnight watching never failed a stamp upon
(30:00):
the countenance of their votary. Harper's also published an illustration
of her as part of this piece, and in it
she is wearing a crucifix while smoking a cigarette and
she looks really haggard. Yeah, we're not putting that picture
on our social media because I hate it. That just
looks like you went out of your way to make
(30:23):
it look ugly. By the time Harper's published this article,
Donia Tulis had died. She had died on January seventeen,
eighteen fifty two, probably around fifty two based on when
we think she was born. She had written a will
two years earlier, so there's some speculation that maybe she
was seriously ill or knew that she was dying. This
(30:45):
will was written in English, so it's likely that someone
translated it for her. This will begins by saying that
Maria Gertrudis Barcelo was a resident of Santa Fe and
a Roman Catholic. It specifies that she had no sets
and that the property being bequeathed was quote accumulated by
my own labor and exertions. She left a house to
(31:07):
her sister Maria, another to her daughter Rietis, and a
third to Delphinia Flores, daughter of a former alcalde. She
provided her adopted daughters to be supported until they reached
the age of twenty five or got married. She also
had money and livestock, specifically mules, which she divided among
her siblings. Her husband is not mentioned in this will
(31:30):
at all. Yeah, we don't really know if he was
still living at this point, if they were estranged, what
exactly don't you? Tullis also had an elaborate funeral, one
that George Brewerton described as having quote all that pomp
and ceremony with which ill gotten wealth delights to guild
its obsequies. Various sources report that the total cost of
(31:53):
this funeral was six hundred dollars, a thousand dollars to
the bishop, and fifty dollars for each stop that her
funeral procession made. What would happen is the procession would
be moving, it would stop, the priest would pray or
perform a small ritual at each of the stops. People
who weren't local to the area were generally really critical
(32:15):
of this funeral, describing it as much too ostentatious and expensive.
Or implying that the Catholic Church was extorting money from
the bereaved. However, elaborate funerals really were not unusual for
the Hispanic population of northern New Mexico. There wasn't a
standard way for people to simply make offerings or donations
(32:35):
to the church, so most of the church's income came
from fees associated with baptisms, weddings, and funerals. So it
became really common for wealthier people to have elaborate, expensive funerals,
both because of social norms and because it was just
a way to give money to the church. Yeah, there
there probably was some sort of one upmanship among really
(32:58):
wealthy people about how having funerals that kind of upstaged others,
but also a big part of it was just making
sure the church got money. This funeral was officiated by
Jean Baptiste Lemmy, who was the first Bishop of Santa Fe,
New Mexico. Maria Gertrudeis Barcello was the last person known
to have been buried at La Peroquita Church, which has
(33:20):
since been rebuilt as the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis
of Assisi. Her exact burial place there is not known,
though it's possible that her remains were lost during various
building projects that happened in the years after her death.
Maria Gertrudez Barcello has made some appearances in fiction over
the years, and her life is fictionalized in the novel
(33:41):
The Wind Leaves No Shadow, which was first printed in
ninety one. In nineteen forty nine, past podcast subject Nino
Tera Warren played Dona Toulez at a historical preservation event
that raised money for a restoration project and mcgoffin home
State historic site. Because deed records from the time are incomplete,
(34:02):
there are contradictory descriptions about what buildings stand on the
former site of her home and gambling studio. These are
the kind of things you might hear if you're on
like a walking tour of Santa Fe, or if you're
at an establishment that sis has ties to her. It's
likely that the Santa Fe County Courthouse is roughly where
(34:23):
her residence was. A lot of sources claimed that she
owned the property that eventually became the Palace restaurant that
later became Senior Luckies at the Palace, and then that
became Palace Prime. But in a two thousand seven interview
with the Santa Fe, New Mexican Barcelo. Biographer Mary Jean
Straw Cook, whose book was a part of the research
(34:44):
for this, said this, shouldn't think that was that likely
that that was the same location. So I don't know.
She's a fun figure. She is a fun figure. I
found her really fascinating, and we can talk about some
reasons why more in the behind the scenes. I wish
we had pictures of all of her apparently very flamboyant clothes.
(35:08):
I do too. And one of the points that was made,
either in the book or in the other other research
that was part of this was we don't know that
we have a picture of her, but it's totally possible
that we do, because how would we know, like that
that was who that was. I don't know, it's it's
(35:29):
it's unknown. There's no known picture of her, is what
we can say. So, yeah, we'll talk about some some
stuff more in the behind the behind the scenes. Do
you have a listener male in the meantime? I do.
This is from Catherine. Catherine said, Hi, I just finished
listening to your episode about Lucy Gonzalez Parsons, and I
thought I would send you a quick note about this
(35:50):
very lovely mural of her in my former neighborhood of
Avondale in Chicago. Avondale was the neighborhood where Lucy and
Albert lived, and I believe Lucy continued to live there
after he died. I'd speaking tours notwithstanding. I've attached a
picture of this mural for you below. It's at the
corner of Belmont and Kenzie, near the overpass of the
Kennedy Expressway. I unfortunately don't know the name of the artists,
(36:12):
and I haven't been able to track it down this morning.
It's not a particularly pedestrian friendly intersection compared to some
of the other areas of Chicago, but it's a familiar
sight to me since I've passed it frequently while taking
the Belmont bus. Lucie Gonzalez Parsons also has a section
of Kenzie Avenue named after her near this area, which
is how I learned her name before I ever learned
(36:34):
about her activism. I imagine she would be glad to
know that Chicago still has a robust socialist community today.
The IWW still has offices and gets involved in community organizing.
I'm not originally from Chicago, and before I moved here,
i'd only heard of the IWW and history classes in
the context of the labor movement in the late nineteenth
(36:55):
early twentieth century. I was quite surprised to arrive and
find them still around. I feel like my high school
history teachers always implied they disbanded. Thanks for doing an
episode on her. Lucy was a complicated person, but the
activists scene in Chicago still remembers her favorably. I don't
live in Avondale anymore, but I do live in a
neighborhood not far away, so maybe it's time to go
(37:15):
by that mural again. Thanks Catherine, and I also poked
around and was like, who who painted this mural? I
meant to do a more in depth search before um
getting into here today, and I did not manage to do.
You're going to mural jail. I'm gonna go to mural jail.
(37:36):
So there is uh So there is a mural that
includes Lucy Parsons that is by Mike Alwitz. Um. But
I was trying to compare and see if I could
figure out if they are the same, and I did not,
And I I should have thought of that. I should
(37:58):
have made a note for myself to do that, rather
than just expecting myself to remember it before coming in
here to read the email. Uh. So maybe I will
have an update about that in some future episode of
the podcast. Maybe you'll write us a letter from mural jail.
(38:18):
We also have hurt some So I tried so hard
to frame the the industrial workers of the world as
having been established in the past and most active in
the past, but still existing today in the episode on
Lucy Parsons, because people got upset about that. The last
time the Wild Lapse came up on the show. I
(38:39):
still got emails though from people that were like, you
made it sound like they don't exist anymore. They still exist.
I know, I know they still exist. I tried to
make it sound like they still exist, and I'm sorry
I did not do a great enough job with that apparently. So, uh,
if you would like to send us a note about anything,
especially if you know the history of that mural uh,
we're history podcast that I Heart Radio dot com. We're
(39:00):
all over social media at MS in History, which is
where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterston Instagram, and you
can subscribe to our show on the I Heart radio app,
wherever else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you
missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from i heart Radio, visit the iHeart
(39:21):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today's episode
has one of the weirder back stories about how I
first heard of them, because it was in a puzzle
(00:25):
that was part of the m I T Mystery hunt.
I did not manage to solve this puzzle, nor did
the rest of my team. It remained unsolved, but it
did spark my curiosity about Donia Maria Gertrudis Barcello, who
was a professional gambler and card dealer in New Mexico
in the early nineteenth century. I worked on this puzzle
(00:48):
a few years ago, and I've circled back to Barcello,
who was known as Latulas or Donia Tulis, a few
times since then. It always seemed like there just was
not going to be enough information for a full episode.
But it turns out there was a book on her
that was published back in two thousand seven, and for
some reason, it did not come up in my searches
(01:10):
until it was reissued in paperback. In that said, though,
this book, which is Donia Tulis Santa fe Is Courtisan
and Gambler by Mary J. Strackhook is not a long
book at all because even though she did years of
research putting this book together, there's just not a lot
that's documented. And some of what Cook puts forth in
(01:33):
the book, like that Donia Tulis was definitely a courtisan,
is crowded a little bit more in rumor than it
is an established fact. But once I realized that, yes,
with this book and other sources and all of that together,
the information is mostly there, I decided to go for it.
So Maria Gertrudis Barcello was born around eighteen hundred, probably
(01:55):
in the Bovespa River valley in Sonora, Mexico. Her father,
on Ignacio Barcello, was a rancher and her mother was
Dolores Herrero. Gertrudez had a brother named Jose Trinidad and
a sister named Maria de la Luce. Spain had started
colonizing the area where they lived in the seventeenth century,
(02:15):
but we don't really know when members of Gertrudis's family
started arriving in the America's Beyond the fact that Barcello
is a Catalan surname, we just don't have a lot
of detail about the family history. For a long time,
one of the main sources of written information about Donia
Tulis was Josiah greg He was a merchant, a naturalist,
(02:38):
and a writer who grew up in Tennessee and Missouri.
We will talk a bit more about his account of
her later, but in terms of her early life, he
claimed that she grew up in Taos, New Mexico, in poverty,
but that does not appear to be true. As we
just said, she was likely born in Sonora, but beyond that,
(02:58):
Gertrudis got at least some education. She signed legal documents
with her full name and an embellished signature, at a
time when most women would have signed their name just
with an X. Sometime between eighteen fifteen and eighteen twenty,
the family moved from Sonora to the settlement of Valencia,
which was near Tomay, New Mexico. Church records in Tomay
(03:20):
list Gertrudis and her parents with the honorifics don and Dounia.
These titles were originally used for the royalty and nobility,
but by the nineteenth century they were also used for
gentry or other people who had acquired some kind of
political or financial means, and a note about the nickname
Dounia Tulis. A lot of accounts say that tu less
(03:42):
came from a Spanish word for read and was a
reference to her physical appearance, but interpretations of how she
resembled a read are all over the place, and Toulas
is also described as a common diminutive for the name Gertrudis.
There are some sources that say she acquired this nickname
(04:04):
as she became more well known later on in her life,
and that it was connected to her professions somehow, we
don't really know. It's also totally possible that this was
her nickname from childhood. We also don't really know why
the family moved from the Bevis Bay River Valley to Valencia,
but there are a lot of possible reasons. The traditional
homelands of multiple Apache nations are primarily north and east
(04:28):
of Sonora, but Apache forces had been raiding neighboring areas
for centuries. In terms of Sonora in particular, these raids
really peaked in the late seventeen hundreds, but they were
still ongoing in the early eighteen hundreds. Violent conflicts between
indigenous peoples and Spanish colonists, and between different indigenous nations
(04:50):
were pretty common. This was of course, not unique to
Sonora at all, so moving wouldn't necessarily mean that the
family would get away from these kind of conflicts, but
it may have been a factor in their decision. Also
the Mexican War of Independence it started in eighteen ten,
and although a lot of the major battles were south
of where the Barcelo family lived, it's possible that they
(05:12):
just wanted to be farther away from the violence, or
they may have been trying to anticipate what life was
going to be like in an independent Mexico. They might
have thought they could find business opportunities that they lived
closer to the border with the United States once the
war was over and trade opened up between the two countries.
(05:32):
The Year without a Summer took place in eighteen sixteen.
We have an episode on this global climate disruption, which
followed the eighteen fifteen eruption of Mount Tambora. Depending on
exactly when the family decided to move, it is possible
that the weather that year and its impact on their
ranch could have also been part of the decision, or
(05:54):
it might have just been that life in a relatively
remote part of Mexico just felt too uncertain, and that
whatever they had heard from merchants and traders about life
farther to the north just seemed more appealing. Sometime after
the family arrived in Valencia, Juan Ignacio Barcelo died. Gertrudis's mother, Dolores,
(06:14):
remarried on August six, eighty three to Don Pedro Pino.
This was just a couple of months after Gertrudis's own
marriage to twenty one year old Don Manuel Antonio s
Narros that was on June three. We know a little
bit more about his family's history in the America's than
we do about hers. He was descended from a man
(06:37):
named antonio's Is Narrows, who had been driven out of
al Paso during the Pueblo Revolt in sixteen eighty. We
covered this revolt on the show in it was a
successful uprising bi Pueblo in People's which drove the Spanish
out of part of what's now New Mexico for twelve years.
At twenty three, Gertrudis was a little older than was
(06:58):
typical for a woman getting married for the first time.
She was also pregnant. After getting married, she kept Barcelo
as her last name, along with the right to keep
her own property and control over her own financial decisions.
There are a lot of articles and kind of brief
descriptions of her that frame this as a particularly astute
(07:21):
move on her part and as evidence that she already
had a really savvy business sense when she entered into marriage.
It's possible she did have a really savvy business sense
when she entered into marriage, but really this was just
how it worked in the Spanish colonies and in Mexico
after it became independent from Spain, especially for women of means.
(07:42):
Spanish marriage contracts usually included provisions that protected a woman's
existing property and her future income, and allowed her to
end the marriage if it was abusive. We should note, though,
that while this afforded European women in Spanish colonies rights that,
for example, European women in British colonies were typically denied,
(08:03):
it did not mean that Spanish law protected married women
across the board. As Europeans colonized North America, indigenous women
in many nations lost rights that they had previously held,
and none of these rights applied to enslaved women. At all,
since they were seen as property and their marriages were
not recognized as legally existing. Your Trudis's pregnancy at the
(08:27):
time of her marriage also was not particularly scandalous or
unusual for this part of New Mexico in the eighteen twenties.
Although a lot of Hispanic people in New Mexico were
devoutly Catholic at this point, a lot of couples just
never went through the formal steps of getting married. This
might have been related to the costs involved, or the
fact that while women could keep their names and their
(08:50):
property a lot of times, their social lives became more restricted.
After becoming lives. People were usually living in big extended
family is, with people's own children and their siblings, children
and children who had been orphaned or abandoned all being
raised together. There just wasn't a ton of focus about
(09:10):
whether any of them had been born out of wedlock
or not. What was pretty unusual for Dona Tulas, though,
is that it seems like she kept a lot of
the social freedoms that a lot of women were more
likely to lose after she got married. She seems to
have kept on seeing whoever she wanted to see whenever
she wanted to see them and conducting her own business however,
(09:31):
she saw fit. Gertrudis's son, Jose Pedro, was baptized on
October ninete, but he died only about a month later.
She had another son, Miguel Antonio, who was baptized on
January nine, but tragically he died when he was about
four months old as well. Now we can assume this
(09:53):
was heartbreaking for the family, but we have no personal
recollections from any of them. Some time before the end
of Gertrudis and Manuel moved to a mining camp known
as Oro or Oro Springs that later became known as
Reality Dolores. The Mexican War of Independence had been over
for about four years. New Mexico was now a territory
(10:16):
of Independent Mexico. This seems to have been when she
really got her start gambling, and we will get to
that after a quick sponsor break. In early nineteenth century
New Mexico card games and the gambling that went along
(10:39):
with them were incredibly popular. The gambling part, though, was
also illegal. The government did not really do much to
try to stop people from gambling, though, They just find
people when they got caught doing it and everyone went
on with their lives. Maria Gertrudis Barcello was fined for
gambling for the first time that we know of, while
(11:01):
she was living in Oro, in the mountains south of
Santa Fe. That fine was for forty three paces and
it was levied in eighteen twenty six by one Virgilie Martinez,
alcalde of Santa Fe. The role of alcalde was like
being both the mayor and the magistrate, managing the administrative
functioning of the town as well as administering the law. However,
(11:24):
one Virgilie Martinez was also charged in connection to this
fine after a more senior administrator found that he had
kept about half of it for himself. It seems that
Donia Tules and her husband both enjoyed gambling. He was
fined for it while living in Oro as well. In
eighteen twenty six, Donia Tules adopted a daughter that was
(11:46):
Maria del Refugio, who had been either orphaned or abandoned
over the years. Donia Tules adopted other children as well,
including her niece Rafaela and possibly her niece's daughter Ritas.
Then there is about a ten year gap in the record.
It's possible that Donia Tulis and her husband went back
to Sonora or to Taos, New Mexico, where her brother lived.
(12:09):
If that's the case, it might explain why Josiah Gregg
described her as coming from Taos. But by about eighteen
thirty three, the family had moved to Santa Fe, including
Donia Tulis's mother and stepfather. If the Barcelo families moved
to New Mexico was motivated by the idea that they
might find some business opportunities after the Mexican War of
(12:31):
Independence was over. That was definitely true when they got
to Santa Fe. The war had ended in eighteen twenty one,
and that same year William Becknell had traveled from Franklin, Missouri,
to Santa Fe, New Mexico, along one of the roots
that became known as the Santa Fe Trail. Spain really
had not welcomed travelers and traders who had tried to
(12:53):
make their way southwest towards Santa Fe, but Mexico did,
and the Santa Fe tre all essentially became a commercial
highway connecting Mexico to the United States. As the southern
terminus of this trail, Santa Fe became an increasingly important city.
The Barcelo families business ventures included raising mules to sell
(13:15):
to traders, and eventually Donia Tulis invested in trade goods
as well, and she ran a gambling salon. At first,
this was illegal, so her operation was probably a little
bit like a speakeasy, secret games being held in her
home or in back rooms, with people needing to know
a secret knock or a password to get in. But
(13:35):
in ety eight the government shifted its policy from finding
people who were caught gambling to charging licensing fees for
running gambling tables legally. Within a year, Donia Tulez had
opened a gambling salon, one described as being lavishly decorated
with chandeliers and plush carpets, and with mattresses draped in
(13:55):
blankets against the walls to serve as couches during the
day and pulled out to be used as beds at night.
There's also some speculation that she ran a brothel or
otherwise engaged in sex work. When she and her husband
first got to Santa Fe, they shared a house with
Lucious Thruston of Kentucky. In eighteen thirty five, their neighbor
(14:17):
Anna Maria Ren Dawn accused her of having an adulterous
affair with him, but when Donia Tulis confronted Anna, she
changed her story, saying that she had only said they
were living in the same house. Donia Tulis also took
another woman named Josepha Norio to court for slander in
eighteen thirty six. The details on this slander have not
(14:40):
survived to today, but some historians have interpreted the combination
of the adultery charge, the slander, and various rumors that
Donia Tulas had a lot of lovers as meaning that
she was running a brothel or otherwise doing sex work.
But a lot of the rumors about this came from
Anglo visitors and travelers who I don't really just found
(15:01):
Donia Tulez to be scandalous. She was gambling, smoking, dealing cards,
and running a gambling salon that served alcohol to Santa
Fe locals. None of this was particularly disgraceful, and Don'tia
Tuleez was a prominent businesswoman, But in the minds of
most Anglos, of course, she must also be a sex
(15:21):
worker or running a brothel, because that went hand in
hand with those sinful things like drinking and gambling, and
while she may have been, it likely can't be substantiated.
At this point. We mentioned Josiah Gregg's account of Donia
Tulists earlier, and it's a really good example of these
attitudes and how people from the Eastern United States talked
(15:41):
about New Mexico and the early nineteenth century. He wrote
a book called Greg's Commerce of the Prairies or the
Journal of the Santa Fe Traveler eighteen thirty one to
eighteen thirty nine. As that name suggests, This details Greg's
experiences and observations traveling along the Santa Fe Trail, including
observations of Santa Fe itself. These observations are often really negative.
(16:07):
Case in point quote, the administration of the laws in
Northern Mexico constitutes one of the most painful features of
her institutions. He also describes all kinds of incidents as outrages.
Volume two of this book uses the word outrage twenty
times to describe everything from Americans being beaten and robbed
(16:29):
to people using the same musical instruments to accompany dances
as they would use to accompany hymns at church. Here
is how he describes the culture of gambling in Santa
Fe quote, the love of gambling also deserves to be
noticed as a distinguishing propensity of these people. Indeed, it
may well be said, without any undue stretch of imagination,
(16:52):
that shoplifting, pickpocketing, and other elegant pastimes of the same
kindred are the legitimate offspring, especially among the lower classes,
of that passion for gaming, which, in Mexico, more than
anywhere else to use. Madame calder Owen's language is impregnated
with the Constitution. In Man, Woman and Child, he also
(17:14):
describes the popularity of one particular game, a game of
chance called monty, which Dona Tules was famous for dealing.
This is not the con that's known as three card
monty that's basically a shell game where the mark has
to try to keep track of one particular card as
three of them are rapidly swapped around. This was a
different game that used a Spanish style card deck with
(17:36):
forty cards numbered ace through seven, with face cards of Jack, Night,
and King arranged in four suits. The dealer draws a
card from the top and the bottom of the deck
and places them each face up. The remaining cards in
the deck are called the monty. That's the Spanish word
for mountain, and players bet whether a card drawn from
(17:56):
the monty will match the suit of one or both
of the face up cards. Here's how Greg described this quote.
There are other games that cards practiced among these people,
depending more upon skill, but that of el Monte, being
one exclusively of chance, seems to possess an all absorbing
attraction difficult to be conceived by the uninitiated spectator. Another man,
(18:22):
William Clark kennerally also wrote about his experience as in
eighty six, and he described Donia Tules as dealing monty
quote with a firm hand and a winning smile. Here
is Greg's description of Donia Tules herself quote. The following
will not only serve to show the light in which
gambling is held by all classes of society, but to
(18:44):
illustrate the purifying effects of wealth upon a character. Some
twelve or fifteen years ago, there lived, or rather roamed,
in Taos a certain female of very loose habits, known
as Latuleez. Finding it difficult to obtain the means of
living in that district, she finally extended her wanderings to
the capitol. She there became a constant attendant of one
(19:07):
of those pandemoniums where the favorite game of monty was
dealt pro bono public oh. Fortune at first did not
seem inclined to smile upon her efforts, and for some
years she spent her days in loneliness and misery. At last,
her luck turned, as gamblers would say, and on one
occasion she left the bank with a spoil of several
(19:28):
hundred dollars. This enabled her to open a bank of
her own, and, being favored by a continuous run of
good fortune, she gradually rose higher and higher in the
scale of affluence, until she found herself in possession of
a very handsome fortune. In eighteen forty three, she sent
to the United States some ten thousand dollars to be
invested in goods. She still continues her favorite amusement, being
(19:53):
now considered the most expert monty dealer in all Santa Fe.
She is openly received in the first circle's of society.
I doubt in truth whether there is to be found
in the city a lady of more fashionable reputation than this.
Same Tulis now known as Senora Dona Gertrudis Barcelo. The
(20:13):
shift of Donia Tulis is gambling operation from a secret
backroom monty game to a lavishly decorated sala that served
as a hotel in a ballroom and a gambling parlor.
That all happened alongside changes and unrest in New Mexico.
We will rewind just to touch and walk through that
after a quick sponsor break. As we mentioned earlier, Maria
(20:45):
Gertrudis Barcelo opened her gambling salon in eighteen thirty nine,
within about a year of gambling being legalized in New Mexico,
and that shift followed on the heels of some unrest
and changes in New Mexico. At that point it was
still part of Northern Mexico. The Texas War of Independence
(21:06):
had started in eighteen thirty five, and that had led
to Texas becoming independent from Mexico in eighteen thirty six.
That same year, a set of laws went into effect
that essentially revised the Mexican Constitution, centralizing the government and
establishing a new branch of the government called the Supreme
Conservation Power. New taxes went into effect as well, and
(21:31):
as happens a lot of the time with new taxes,
these were incredibly unpopular. All of this fed into an
uprising in northern New Mexico, and that led to the
assassination of New Mexico Governor Albino Perez and multiple other
government officials. According to notes left by the interim governor,
(21:51):
a group of women from the Barcelo family, possibly including
Dona Tulez, had found out about the threat to the
governor's life and disguised themselves in men's clothes to try
to persuade him to leave. When that failed, these same
women retrieved his body and had it buried. Perez's successor
was Governor Manuel Armijo, and he was the one who
(22:14):
had spearheaded the legalization of gambling in New Mexico, and
in some accounts, don't you Tulis had a hand in
this decision. She definitely knew the governor. Various sources describe
her as his advisor and his friend and possibly his lover.
He did visit her enough times that somebody tried to
assassinate him on the way to her house two different times.
(22:38):
She also definitely became one of Santa Fe's wealthiest and
most influential people. She was a successful businesswoman and she
used her income from the gambling salon gold mining trading
and other ventures to buy more property, renting a lot
of it out. As we said earlier, she adopted children
who were orphaned or abandoned, and she made donations to
(23:01):
various charities. She also took legal action against people who
failed to pay their gambling debts to her. That's something
that of course, was only possible once gambling was legalized,
because you can't really take somebody to court overhead debt
for an illegal activity. For example, in August eighteen thirty nine,
(23:23):
she went to the alcol Day to demand that James
Kirker make good on four hundred pacos that she had
won from him. Kirker was born in Ireland, and shortly
after this he entered into a contract with the governor
of Chihuahua, Mexico, to essentially raise a private army and
fight against indigenous nations. In eighteen forty one, the Santa
(23:47):
Fe census list Donia Tulez with an occupation of gambler,
along with her husband Manuel Antonio Sisneros, who was listed
as a farmer, her daughter Rafaella, and three servants. But
shortly after this her husband just disappears from the record.
It seems as though she went to the city of
Chihuahua for a time in eighteen forty two, and according
(24:09):
to their family lore, he stayed behind in Santa Fe,
running the business and maintaining their household. In eighteen forty three,
Dona Tulis invested about ten thousand dollars in trade goods
from the US That was something that Josiah Gregg had referenced.
The following year, she bought a nine room home on
about a hundred and sixty acres of land, which was
(24:30):
adjacent to the land that she already owns. In eighteen
forty five, the United States annexed the Republic of Texas,
setting the stage for the Mexican American War, which began
in April of eighteen forty six. We have no documentation
of Donia Tulis's experiences or thought process in all of this,
(24:50):
but she does seem to have sided with the United
States against Mexico. She boarded multiple U. S military officers
and other American officials in her home. She is credited
with passing along an advanced warning of a Mexican and
indigenous uprising that was to take place on December nineteenth
of eighteen forty six. She also apparently loaned U S
(25:13):
forces about one thousand dollars to buy supplies for the troops.
It's unclear whether this was ever repaid, and in some
accounts she forgave it. Before the start of the Mexican
American War, Dona Tulis was described as one of the
most fashionable women in Santa Fe. Matt Field had passed
through the area with a merchant caravan in eighteen thirty nine,
(25:36):
and he had described her as New Mexico's most fashionable woman.
George Wilkins Kendall wrote an account of an expedition that
the Republic of Texas made into New Mexico in eighteen
forty one. That expedition was made in an effort to
claim new territory, and Kendall's description he actually misidentifies her
(25:57):
as French, possibly because of that associateation between France and
high fashion. Her love of fashion also seems to have
earned her the favor of cloth merchants in Santa Fe,
since it raised the demand for silk and other expensive fabrics.
But over the course of the Mexican American War, she
(26:17):
seems to have lost a lot of that influence as
US troops became more and more present in the town,
bringing their own biases and standards for dress and behavior.
An influx of Anglo newcomers arrived from the Eastern US
as the war ended, and many of them found Donia
Tulis's taste, which had set trends in Santa Fe, to
(26:37):
be dated or tacky. Susan Shelby mcgoffin was the wife
of a merchant on the Santa Fe trail, and she
wrote a description of Donia Tulis in eighteen forty six,
calling her quote a stately dame of a certain age,
the possessor of a portion of that shrewd sense and
fascinating manner necessary to allure the wayward, inexperienced youth to
(27:01):
the hall of final ruin. Later, in that same diary,
she describes Donia Tulis, who would have been in her
mid forties, as an old woman with false hair and
false teeth. I mean, when I was a kid, I
would have thought old Donia Tulas still had a lot
of influence over local politics, though meaning it was a
(27:24):
good idea for American newcomers to get on her good side.
In one account, General Stephen Wants Kearney did this by
personally escorting her to a ball at a time when
her social and fashion influence were starting to wane. The
Mexican American War ended in eighteen forty eight with the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico seated most of what's now
(27:46):
New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, Texas, and western Colorado
to the United States for fifteen million dollars. This treaty
gave Mexican citizens one year to either move into territory
that Mexico still held or become US citizens. Dona Tulas
stayed in Santa Fe, so she became a US citizen
(28:08):
in eighteen forty nine. She continued to do business and
take people to court during these years. In eighteen forty eight,
Dona Tulas sued two different men for failing to repay
the money she had loaned them. Another court case involving
alone to a man named G. W. Coulter, proprietor of
the United States Hotel, stretched on for three years. By
(28:31):
the time that case was settled, Barcello's business seems to
have been struggling. As we've already discussed attitudes towards card
playing and gambling were radically different among Anglo authorities than
they had been in New Spain and in independent Mexico.
So after New Mexico became part of the United States,
(28:52):
gambling was seen less as just an ordinary pastime that
was part of everyday life and more as a sin
that was verging on criminal. In February of eighteen forty eight,
a US military commander in New Mexico levied attacks on
gambling houses of two thousand dollars a year and also
banned miners and non commissioned military personnel from gambling. All
(29:16):
that would have had a huge impact on Barcello's business,
and it seems like about a year later her gambling
salon closed down. The last written references to Donia Tules
are not particularly flattering. George Brewerton published a piece called
Incidents of Travel in New Mexico in April of eighteen
fifty four. He had spent time there in the summer
(29:39):
of eighteen and to be clear, Brewerton thought gambling was
quote debased, and that opinion likely colored all of his
writing about Donia Tules. He described her as quote scarred
and seemed and rendered unwomanly by those painful lines which
unbridled passions and midnight watching never failed a stamp upon
(30:00):
the countenance of their votary. Harper's also published an illustration
of her as part of this piece, and in it
she is wearing a crucifix while smoking a cigarette and
she looks really haggard. Yeah, we're not putting that picture
on our social media because I hate it. That just
looks like you went out of your way to make
(30:23):
it look ugly. By the time Harper's published this article,
Donia Tulis had died. She had died on January seventeen,
eighteen fifty two, probably around fifty two based on when
we think she was born. She had written a will
two years earlier, so there's some speculation that maybe she
was seriously ill or knew that she was dying. This
(30:45):
will was written in English, so it's likely that someone
translated it for her. This will begins by saying that
Maria Gertrudis Barcelo was a resident of Santa Fe and
a Roman Catholic. It specifies that she had no sets
and that the property being bequeathed was quote accumulated by
my own labor and exertions. She left a house to
(31:07):
her sister Maria, another to her daughter Rietis, and a
third to Delphinia Flores, daughter of a former alcalde. She
provided her adopted daughters to be supported until they reached
the age of twenty five or got married. She also
had money and livestock, specifically mules, which she divided among
her siblings. Her husband is not mentioned in this will
(31:30):
at all. Yeah, we don't really know if he was
still living at this point, if they were estranged, what
exactly don't you? Tullis also had an elaborate funeral, one
that George Brewerton described as having quote all that pomp
and ceremony with which ill gotten wealth delights to guild
its obsequies. Various sources report that the total cost of
(31:53):
this funeral was six hundred dollars, a thousand dollars to
the bishop, and fifty dollars for each stop that her
funeral procession made. What would happen is the procession would
be moving, it would stop, the priest would pray or
perform a small ritual at each of the stops. People
who weren't local to the area were generally really critical
(32:15):
of this funeral, describing it as much too ostentatious and expensive.
Or implying that the Catholic Church was extorting money from
the bereaved. However, elaborate funerals really were not unusual for
the Hispanic population of northern New Mexico. There wasn't a
standard way for people to simply make offerings or donations
(32:35):
to the church, so most of the church's income came
from fees associated with baptisms, weddings, and funerals. So it
became really common for wealthier people to have elaborate, expensive funerals,
both because of social norms and because it was just
a way to give money to the church. Yeah, there
there probably was some sort of one upmanship among really
(32:58):
wealthy people about how having funerals that kind of upstaged others,
but also a big part of it was just making
sure the church got money. This funeral was officiated by
Jean Baptiste Lemmy, who was the first Bishop of Santa Fe,
New Mexico. Maria Gertrudeis Barcello was the last person known
to have been buried at La Peroquita Church, which has
(33:20):
since been rebuilt as the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis
of Assisi. Her exact burial place there is not known,
though it's possible that her remains were lost during various
building projects that happened in the years after her death.
Maria Gertrudez Barcello has made some appearances in fiction over
the years, and her life is fictionalized in the novel
(33:41):
The Wind Leaves No Shadow, which was first printed in
ninety one. In nineteen forty nine, past podcast subject Nino
Tera Warren played Dona Toulez at a historical preservation event
that raised money for a restoration project and mcgoffin home
State historic site. Because deed records from the time are incomplete,
(34:02):
there are contradictory descriptions about what buildings stand on the
former site of her home and gambling studio. These are
the kind of things you might hear if you're on
like a walking tour of Santa Fe, or if you're
at an establishment that sis has ties to her. It's
likely that the Santa Fe County Courthouse is roughly where
(34:23):
her residence was. A lot of sources claimed that she
owned the property that eventually became the Palace restaurant that
later became Senior Luckies at the Palace, and then that
became Palace Prime. But in a two thousand seven interview
with the Santa Fe, New Mexican Barcelo. Biographer Mary Jean
Straw Cook, whose book was a part of the research
(34:44):
for this, said this, shouldn't think that was that likely
that that was the same location. So I don't know.
She's a fun figure. She is a fun figure. I
found her really fascinating, and we can talk about some
reasons why more in the behind the scenes. I wish
we had pictures of all of her apparently very flamboyant clothes.
(35:08):
I do too. And one of the points that was made,
either in the book or in the other other research
that was part of this was we don't know that
we have a picture of her, but it's totally possible
that we do, because how would we know, like that
that was who that was. I don't know, it's it's
(35:29):
it's unknown. There's no known picture of her, is what
we can say. So, yeah, we'll talk about some some
stuff more in the behind the behind the scenes. Do
you have a listener male in the meantime? I do.
This is from Catherine. Catherine said, Hi, I just finished
listening to your episode about Lucy Gonzalez Parsons, and I
thought I would send you a quick note about this
(35:50):
very lovely mural of her in my former neighborhood of
Avondale in Chicago. Avondale was the neighborhood where Lucy and
Albert lived, and I believe Lucy continued to live there
after he died. I'd speaking tours notwithstanding. I've attached a
picture of this mural for you below. It's at the
corner of Belmont and Kenzie, near the overpass of the
Kennedy Expressway. I unfortunately don't know the name of the artists,
(36:12):
and I haven't been able to track it down this morning.
It's not a particularly pedestrian friendly intersection compared to some
of the other areas of Chicago, but it's a familiar
sight to me since I've passed it frequently while taking
the Belmont bus. Lucie Gonzalez Parsons also has a section
of Kenzie Avenue named after her near this area, which
is how I learned her name before I ever learned
(36:34):
about her activism. I imagine she would be glad to
know that Chicago still has a robust socialist community today.
The IWW still has offices and gets involved in community organizing.
I'm not originally from Chicago, and before I moved here,
i'd only heard of the IWW and history classes in
the context of the labor movement in the late nineteenth
(36:55):
early twentieth century. I was quite surprised to arrive and
find them still around. I feel like my high school
history teachers always implied they disbanded. Thanks for doing an
episode on her. Lucy was a complicated person, but the
activists scene in Chicago still remembers her favorably. I don't
live in Avondale anymore, but I do live in a
neighborhood not far away, so maybe it's time to go
(37:15):
by that mural again. Thanks Catherine, and I also poked
around and was like, who who painted this mural? I
meant to do a more in depth search before um
getting into here today, and I did not manage to do.
You're going to mural jail. I'm gonna go to mural jail.
(37:36):
So there is uh So there is a mural that
includes Lucy Parsons that is by Mike Alwitz. Um. But
I was trying to compare and see if I could
figure out if they are the same, and I did not,
And I I should have thought of that. I should
(37:58):
have made a note for myself to do that, rather
than just expecting myself to remember it before coming in
here to read the email. Uh. So maybe I will
have an update about that in some future episode of
the podcast. Maybe you'll write us a letter from mural jail.
(38:18):
We also have hurt some So I tried so hard
to frame the the industrial workers of the world as
having been established in the past and most active in
the past, but still existing today in the episode on
Lucy Parsons, because people got upset about that. The last
time the Wild Lapse came up on the show. I
(38:39):
still got emails though from people that were like, you
made it sound like they don't exist anymore. They still exist.
I know, I know they still exist. I tried to
make it sound like they still exist, and I'm sorry
I did not do a great enough job with that apparently. So, uh,
if you would like to send us a note about anything,
especially if you know the history of that mural uh,
we're history podcast that I Heart Radio dot com. We're
(39:00):
all over social media at MS in History, which is
where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterston Instagram, and you
can subscribe to our show on the I Heart radio app,
wherever else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you
missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from i heart Radio, visit the iHeart
(39:21):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
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