Plaza merchants shook their stores from slumber as city workers swept the square, their conversation a melodic Spanish carried by the spring breeze. Huddled in the morning chill, we were walkers from St. Louis, New Jersey, Maine, Florida, New York and Michigan, led by a woman from California who was about to bring aboard a few folks like Napoleon, Willa Cather and a Native American saint.
“The Italians did not have tomato sauce,” declared Pat Kuhlhoff. “The Swiss did not make chocolate. And there was never a potato famine in Ireland until Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas.”
With that, Kuhlhoff began one of the downtown Santa Fe historic walking tours she has conducted on behalf of the Palace of the Governors for 17 years. She and other volunteers rotate responsibility for the tours every Monday-through-Saturday from mid-April through mid-October.
It’s an informal start: Gather at what we museum folks know as “The Blue Gate” – a wooden gate on the east side of Lincoln Avenue that divides the Palace of the Governors from the New Mexico History Museum.
Tours cost $10, last up to two hours (depending on how many questions you ask), don’t require reservations, rarely achieve a pace more strenuous than an amble, and provide a stop for drinking fountains and restrooms. (The museum guides, by the way, do not accept tips.)
Kuhlhoff begins her tour by drawing connections between visitors’ home states and the American Southwest. “All of King George’s Red Coats got their red from Mexico,” she tells an East Coaster. In a way, she’s subverting the standard U.S. educational view of American history, as something that started back East and eventually pioneered its way to a desolate West.
In fact, Kuhlhoff tells her dozen walkers, Santa Fe’s history began some 14,000 years ago with Native peoples who farmed, tamed turkeys and dogs, fought with one another, and then fought with European settlers, before reaching accommodations that led to today’s Southwestern melting pot and its still-distinct ethnic ingredients.
Standing in the Plaza, Kuhlhoff points to the obelisk commemorating those who died in the so-called Indian wars. She tells of how the word “savage” was chiseled out of its inscription – an oft-told story – but drops in something new: Napoleon saw obelisks used as memorials in Egypt and brought the idea back to France, where it took root and spread.
(We can also thank Napoleon for Southwestern punched-tin decorative arts, Kuhlhoff says. The general decided tin cans were the best way to move goods across long distances. Once goods made it all the way to Santa Fe, throwing away the cans they came in was deemed wasteful, so they were recycled into objects that now typify Santa Fe style.)
Kuhlhoff makes me see, for the first time, the gargoyle heads atop the Catron Block building at Washington and Palace.
She leads us into the Rainbow Man Courtyard on East Palace and points to the office where scientists for the Manhattan Project once learned of their top-secret orders.
On the corner of Cathedral and Palace, she compares and contrasts Territorial, Pueblo, Mission and Romanesque architectural styles.
Near the river, she stops at a bed of native plants and deftly IDs yarrow, poppies, aspens – before noting that, just upstream, nuclear secrets were exchanged, a crime that led to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
On the steps of St. Francis Cathedral, she introduces visitors to the statue of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the first female Native American to attain beatification, and tells a bit of the history of Bishop Lamy, noting drily that Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop is “not historically accurate, but popular.”
The walk includes information on the railroad era (with a timely restroom break at La Fonda) and on the use of acequias to move the desert’s most precious natural resource: water.
“You’re with these people such a short time and you don’t get to know them, so I try to make it really broad,” Kuhlhoff said afterward. “If you go into too much detail, people don’t have a basic framework.”
Getting that basic framework to them is easier said than done: “With the docent training we get,” Kuhlhoff said, “I could have these people out there for four days.”
The 
“The Cowden Café will be like a little café bistro,” said Daniel Razatos. “You come in for a little snack, nothing’s very huge or expensive, and it’s a nice, comfortable atmosphere to hang out and read your newspaper – very European.”
That campaign just won honors from the 
Last week, the New Mexico History Museum’s many volunteers were honored with a prestigious award by the 
John Ramsay accepted a last-minute invitation from Patricia to attend the event and said it was just another never-know-what-to-expect day in the life of a volunteer. For the last 14 years, Ramsay has volunteered at the History Library, most of that time “in the bowels” of archived documents. While helping with cataloguing and such, he’s honed an interest in Southwest history deep enough to lead him to contribute a chapter to a book that will be published by 
Also in the magazine is an article noting 25 kid-friendly museums, and it names the Native American Artisans Portal Program (left) at the Palace of the Governors.
The beauty of that culture was threaded throughout Chávez’s life. Born Manuel Ezequiel Chávez in Wagon Mound, N.M., Fray Angélico was ordained as a Franciscan, served several parishes in New Mexico and was instrumental in renovating the church in Peña Blanca – a true hands-on effort. The murals he painted of the Stations of the Cross used images of himself, his family and parishioners. He also renovated churches in Domingo Station, Golden and Cerrillos.
After his death in 1996, the History Library was named in his honor, and a bronze statue of him graces its entrance. A self-portrait is on display in the Palace of the Governors’ Portrait Gallery, and it carries an interesting tale. Painted in 1939 as an “idle sketch” on a board by Fray Angélico in 1939, it was later trimmed down to repair a drawer in the convent at Peña Blanca. In 1970, someone cleaning out the drawers happened upon it. Fray Angélico donated it to the museum, writing: “I thought you might display it more as a curiosity than a work of art.”
The New Mexico History Museum holds the set and has several of its pieces on display in its core exhibition, Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now. Each piece was handcrafted to reflect different aspects of the state’s cultural heritage – Coronado’s Expedition 1540-42; San Miguel Chapel – Oldest Church in the US; and the First Locomotive through Raton Pass – 1879. Pretty much everyone’s favorite piece is a humidor in the shape of Taos Pueblo. (That’s it at left and, if you know which viga to press on, you can pop open the various floors of the “pueblo.”)
If every picture tells a story, then 
In the process of working on the exhibition, I came up with the title for the show after months of looking at images and thinking about the structure the show would take. We settled on three themes or “lenses” from which to look at each photo – place, identity, and history. This exhibition was not a chronologically arranged visual history of Santa Fe. Rather, these three themes intersect and overlap, showing the spherical rather than linear nature of history.
The lecture series expanded the educational component of the exhibition by providing audience members not only with the opportunity to see documentary photographs in the historic Palace of the Governors but also to attend 12 free events and participate in a panel discussion and question-and-answer sessions related to the architecture, urban development, water rights, cultural diversity, tourism, and photographic history of Santa Fe. The technical and scientific aspects of early photographic processes up through the digital age were also addressed. Photographers involved in the project presented their individual philosophies about making place-based work and why it is important to understanding history both as a personal creative exploration and as a tool for future research through archival collections of visual materials.
The Photo Archives preserves and provides access to photographic materials of enduring historic value. The collection contains an estimated 800,000 items including original and copy prints, cased photographs, glass-plate negatives, film negatives, stereo views, postcards, panoramas, color transparencies, lantern slides, albums, framed materials, as well as a large library of books, journals, and other printed materials related to photography. The Photo Archives maintains the largest collection (excluding pot sherds) in the State of New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs museum system.
