Interview with Mrs. Clara Fergusson 	Sep 14 1936 

Janet Smith, Field Worker 

Interview with Mrs. Clara Fergusson 

About [?] words 

INTERVIEW WITH MRS. CLARA FERGUSSON 

When I asked Mrs. Fergusson to tell me of her pioneer life in New Mexico, she 
answered, "I'm not a pioneer in the exact sense of the word. I'm a native born 
New Mexican. I have spent most of my life here, and all four of my children 
were born her in New Mexico." 

Mrs. Fergusson's father, Franz Huning, came to New Mexico over the old Santa 
Fe Trail, by ox team in 1849. 

Her husband, Harvey B. Fergusson, was the first New Mexican Congressman. 

Two of her children have loved and understood New Mexico so well that they 
have been able to describe and interpret the country and its people in several 
widely read volumes. Harvey Fergusson has written a number of novels, among 
them Blood of the Conquerors, Wolf Song, and Footloose McGarnigal, in  which 
he has dealt with various types of New Mexicans and periods of New  Mexican 
life,---the Spanish American in his relation to a superimposed Anglo  
civilization, the mountain men in contact with the old Spanish culture,  
glimpses of Indian life, and somewhat caustic descriptions of the  
comparatively recent art colonies. Always the background, the feel of the 
country, is splendidly and convincingly done. Rio Grande, with the Rio Grande 
basin for its central scene, is, in the words of the author, an attempt to 
"portray a region" and to "comprehend the present in terms of the forces that 
made it." C18 - N. Mex.

{Begin page no. 2}

His most recent book Modern Man, a profound and mature work, is concerned with 
modern behaviour in the entire western world. In contrasting primitive with 
modern man, Mr. Fergusson makes use of his knowledge of the southwestern 
Indian, explaining his serenity and lack of the conflict so apparent in modern 
man, but his complete reliance upon the taboos of tribal custom. Erna 
Fergusson's first book was Dancing Gods, describing and explaining the dances 
and ceremonies of the Pueblo, Navjo, Zuni, and Hopi Indians. Fiesta in Mexico 
is a varied picture of Old Mexico seen through her fiestas. Hargey and Erna 
Fergusson are among the very few writers who have been able to give the 
feeling of New Mexico, including its beauty and strangeness, without falling 
into  lush and picturesque language. Perhaps their realness of approach is due 
in some part to the fact that they were born and grew up here. 

I asked Mrs. Fergusson how she accounted for this quality in their writing, 
and she smiled and said that she was sure at any rate that all of their 
writing was well substantiated and authenticated, that neither of them spared 
any effort to add a significant detail or track down a source. 

Mrs. Fergusson is a charming white haired woman. She has a keen way of looking 
at one, and smiles unexpectedly with her eyes. We sat talking on the porch of 
her modern adobe house at  Orchard Road. Orchard Road [?] one street that has 
been allowed to lag a bit in Albuquerque's effort for an efficient, eastern 
air. A huge old bottonwood [cottonwood] stands not far from the middle of the 
unpaved road. At the side of Mrs. Fergusson's home are three old cottonwoods. 
"I think it was the trees that drew me to the place", she said. 
 
{Begin page no. 3}

Mrs. Fergusson told me that her father came to America from Germany in 1848. 
The port of New York was closed at the time, so he landed at New Orleans and 
went up the Mississippi to St Louis. In 1849 he went west and lived for some 
time in Santa Fe. He learned Spanish and interpreted for the soldiers, who had 
come with the American occupation of New Mexico. "I believe he always liked 
languages better than business," Mrs. Fergusson said. In 1863 he located at 
Albuquerque where he set up a general merchandise store. Ten years later 
he brought to Albuquerque his bride, Ernestina Franke. She too had come from 
Germany to St Louis by way of New Orleans. 

Mrs. Fergusson talked a little about her childhood which was spent in an adobe 
house in Old Town. The house, now known as the Calkins' House stands on the 
north side of West Central Avenue at 1801. It is separated from the street by 
a high adobe wall, and approached through a wooden gate and a pathway arched 
by trees. Seen from the front the house is long and low and beautifully 
proportioned. An open portal extends entirely across it. Upon entering one 
discovers that the house is built completely around a large square patio. In 
the centre of the patio is a cottonwood, so large and old that it is now 
supported by massive chains. The rooms are long and narrow and the walls are 
over two feet thick. The windows are small and the fireplaces huge. "Of-course 
there was no grass in the patio or in front of the house in those days", Mrs. 
Fergusson explained, but one can imagine that it must have been a delightful 
place for a child to grow up in.

Mrs. Fergusson Mexican girls passing by dressed in bright calico and of "slat" 
sunbonnets, the some kind the covered wagon women wore. 

{Begin page no. 4}

Their mothers were always wrapped in black shawls. She remembers hearing her 
father tell of seeing the Penitentes whipping themselves with cactus whips, in 
the Old Town plaza, though she herself never saw them until years later, and 
then with more difficulty, in an out of the way Mexican village. 

In the middle of [ta?] plaza stood an octagonal adobe house. In it dwelt the 
barber, a big fat man named Brown. Barber Brown was also the town's one 
dentist. Whenever anyone suffered from toothache, the barber called and pulled 
the tooth. On top of the octagonal house was a flag pole, and in the yard a 
cannon. It was the barber's duty to raise the flag and shoot off the cannon 
every Fourth of July. 

The funeral processions of children are among the strangest of Mrs. 
Fergusson's remembrances of this period. The box containing the small body was 
always placed in the middle of a wagon. It was covered with a piece of gay 
pink cambric. Around it sat the relatives, and in their midst a fiddler played 
bright and carefree tunes. The child's death was considered an occasion for 
rejoicing as the soul of a child who had not yet been touched by sin would 
surely go straight to heaven, thus escaping the trouble and sorrow of a longer 
earthly life. 

She remembers too processions of Mexicans carrying the virgin through the 
fields and around the plaza, praying for rain. Later they would sit up all 
night in their houses praying and singing for the rain to come. 

The problem of securing a variety of food was a real one in those days. The 
Huning family did its own slaughtering. Her father built an ice house, and ice 
was hauled from the river. Water too was brought from the river every morning 
on a wagon loaded with big barrels. It was then 

{Begin page no. 5}

poured into other barrels and allowed to settle. There were no oranges or 
lemons, and lemonade was made from a canned preparation. "Terrible stuff", 
Mrs. Fergusson said, "but we thought it was good." Her mother learned from the 
Mexican women how to dry and preserve the native fruits. Everybody made wine. 
Mr. Huning built the first steam flour mill, and the natives would come with 
their wheat and corn in exchange for flour. "Very little money was used," Mrs. 
Fergusson told me. "It was mostly a matter of trading. The people brought what 
they had raised to the store and received things that they could not produce 
themselves in return. A general merchandise store in those days had 
everything. Twice a year my father went to St Louis over the Santa Fe Trail, 
with ten or twelve wagons drawn by mule teams and returned with all kinds of 
merchandise. There is in one of the rooms of Castle Huning now a Steinway 
piano my father brought out by mule team."  

I asked Mrs. Fergusson about her early schooling. She replied that "the 
Brothers" had schools for the boys, but it was evidently not thought worth 
while to teach a girl in those days. When she was nine her father sent her to 
Santa Fe, an overnight trip by stage, to spend a year at Loretto Convent. Her 
greatest treat there was to be allowed to go into the garden of Archbishop 
Lamy. She remembers him as a tall, handsome man with a kind smile---she does 
not think that Willa Cather portrayed the real archbishop at all. Later Mrs. 
Fergusson's father brought her a governess from St Louis, and still later she 
was sent there to school.

Mrs. Fergusson remembers the time the Rio Grande flooded over its banks, she 
believes it was in '74 or '75. The water came down as far as the point 

{Begin page no. 6}

that later became Twelfth Street. The people in Old Town, which was then all 
there was of Albuquerque, withdrew to the sand hills, where they lived in 
tents until the water subsided. 

"It was the railroad," Mrs. Fergusson said, "which finally changed Albuquerque 
and the pattern of life here." She remembers when the first train came in 
1881. Everybody turned out for a big celebration, speeches and a dance in the 
evening. 

"Soon after that I went to Germany for two years," Mrs. Fergusson told me. 
"When I left there was only the railway station about a mile from the houses 
in Old Town and a dusty lonely road stretching between. A man named Cromwell 
built a track between the two towns and a mule pulled the car. Later the line 
was electrified. When I returned from Germany the single street reaching 
toward old Town was built up as far as Sixth Street. Another street ran along 
by the tracks. New Town was shaped like a big cross."  

"The new town was different from the old. Instead of quiet, low adobe houses 
shaded by cottonwoods, it was built of wood. There were stores, some of them 
with two story fronts, and nearly every other building was a saloon or a 
gambling house. The sidewalks were rickety board walks. There was a sense of 
excitement and feverishness and noise.  

"Before the coming of the railroad," Mrs. Fergusson said, "there was nothing 
very effective in the way of law or law enforcement. There was a great deal of 
stealing, especially horse thieving, and sometimes shooting. People had to 
take the law into their own hands, and thieves were strung up on the tree 
nearest to the place where they were caught more often than not. 

{Begin page no. 7}

After the coming of the railroad there was even more lawlessness for awhile, 
but within a few years things quieted down here, and the outlaws moved on to 
wilder places." 

With the railroad come sober solid business men, interested first of all in 
making money. They intended to have safe respectable homes for their wives and 
children, and an environment that would appeal to home builders, and before 
many years Albuquerque had become a comparatively peaceful place. 

Sometime before the first train came, men had started work on the great, white 
house, surrounded with tress add coolness, known as Castle Huning. In a 
country where the houses were sprawling and earth colored and casually built, 
a white house with a tower and plumb lines, that took three years to build 
must have been a cause for conversation. The walls of the house were made of 
"terrons", cut from the sod, and larger than "adobe" bricks. Cement for the 
foundation was imported from England. Lumber was brought in from Illinois. The 
house was patterned from houses which Franz Huning remembered in Hanover 
Germany, and it was named Castle Huning. In 1883 it was finished. Apart from 
the slow Spanish life of the Old Town, it stood equally remote from the wooden 
shanties and hectic life which was rapidly gathering about the railroad 
station to the east. In its solemn interior one of the rooms is today 
preserved in the style in which it was originally furnished--heavy draperies, 
a patterned carpet on the floor, gilt framed enclosing serious faced family 
portraits, be-tasselled furniture. 

The year after the coming of the railroad Harvey B. Fergusson, a 

{Begin page no. 8}

young attorney from Wheeling, W. Va., came to New Mexico as attorney for the 
North Homestake Mining Company. He decided to remain permanently in the 
territory, locating at Albuquerque. 

In 1887 Harvey Fergusson and Clara Huning were married. For awhile Mr. and 
Mrs. Fergusson lived in the Castle, and their first child, Lina, was born 
there. Later they moved to the beautiful old adobe house in old Town where 
Mrs. Fergusson had spent her childhood. There three other children Harvey, 
Francis, and Erna were born. 

"Most people don't know I have more than two children," Mrs. Fergusson said, 
"because Lina and Francis left Albuquerque when they were rather young and 
don't come back very frequently. Lina is married and lives in California, and 
Francis is head of the dramatic department at Bennington College. I am going 
there to visit him and his family this month." 

I asked Mrs. Fergusson if she would tell me a little about the two children who 
are so well known for their portrayals of the New Mexican scene. 

"Harvey", she said, "was always a dreamy, imaginative child, too much so to 
suit his teachers. They used to say he was forever gazing out of the window 
instead of paying attention to his lessons. He was never very interested in 
competitive sports, football or even tennis, but he loved to go away by 
himself, hunting or just wandering with his dog and his horse---still does in 
fact. His father wanted him to study law, but Harvey wasn't interested. He 
studied at the University of New Mexico, where he majored in English. During 
the summers he worked in the Forestry Service. He used that material in parts 
of Footloose McGarnigal years later. 

{Begin page no. 9}

I think Harvey always had the idea that he wanted to write. Later he continued 
studying at Washington and Lee, his father's university. I guess his father 
decided finally that there was no use trying to push him into the law 
business, and Harvey took a job in a newspaper office in Washington when his 
father was in Congress there. Later he was connected withthe Haskins 
Syndicate. He gave up steady positions to try fiction, and he has been writing 
books ever since. 

"Erna graduated from the University of New Mexico and got her MA at Columbia. 
She used to write a little for the newspapers in Albuquerque, going about 
talking to people about old times and writing up their stories. Harvey always 
encouraged her to write, but she was not very sure she could do it until she 
had her first book published." 

I asked Mrs. Fergusson whether Harvey and Erna Fergusson were at present 
working on books. "Harvey," she said, "agreed to write two books on the 
Guggenheim fellowship, one non-fiction, which was Modern Man, and the other, 
fiction. He is engaged on the novel now. Erna is writing a book on Guatemala. 
There", she finished with a smile, "don't you think that's enough about the 
Fergusson family?" 

Credit: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, WPA Federal Writers' Project 
Collection.

Bernalillo

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