Hemmingway: The Old Man and the Desert

I recently watched the movie, Hemmingway & Gellhorn, which had been on my to-do list since its debut in 2012. I was reminded of the movie after writing a blog post about my 2009 trip to Cuba where I was fortunate to get a private tour of Ernest Hemmingway’s home in Havana.

I enjoyed the movie and, no surprise, I particularly appreciated the scenes of Hemmingway and Martha Gellhorn at the Havana home they shared.

 

Ernest Hemmingway's home in Havana 2009

The movie also renewed my curiosity about a rumor I encountered while researching my family history. I never took the rumor seriously because it seemed so incredulous. As the story goes, Ernest Hemmingway once stayed for a period of time in the tiny western New Mexico village of Cubero. Of course, Cubero means something to me because my Grandpa Louie was born and raised in the village near Grants. Generations of my maternal Chavez ancestors were among the original settlers of Cubero.

I figured it was possible that Hemmingway could have stopped over in Cubero in the early 1950s. But I can’t bring myself to believe the claim that Hemmingway wrote his famous short novel, The Old Man and the Sea, from the desert Southwest. When I was in Cuba, it was a thrill to see a copy of the classic book on the shelves of Hemmingway’s bedroom in Havana. I can’t imagine he would have written The Old Man and the Sea any place other than Havana.

Cubero, NM 2011

Over the years, others have explored the rumor about Hemmingway and Cubero. A local blogger went to Cubero on a fact-finding mission in 2009. A resident of Clovis wrote about the rumor in a 1996 edition of the Hemingway Newsletter, a publication of the Hemingway Society. In the footnotes, Kathy Willingham says he couldn’t find any evidence that Hemmingway visited New Mexico, much less stayed in Cubero. “Either the biographers have missed something or New Mexico has some of the best liars,” she wrote.

While I don't claim to have done extensive research on a visit to Cubero, I can say with certainty that he did, indeed, visit New Mexico, thanks to a friend at the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives. After a quick search of newspapers, she discovered that Hemmingway visited Santa Fe from Sun Valley, Idaho in February 1948 – four years before he published The Old Man and the Sea, most likely in Havana. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953.

Life's Work Well Done

For reasons I can’t explain, I picture my maternal Great-Great-Grandfather Preciliano Chavez as being larger than life. A man of respect in the villages where he ran sheep and cattle, engaged in high-stakes gambling, made coffins for his neighbors and raised a grand family of Chavez boys and girls in the late 1800s.

Preciliano was one of a long line of Chavez men, dating back to 1600 in New Mexico. He was born Jan. 3, 1862 in La Jolla, near Socorro. He was the third of six children by Diego Antonio Chaves and Maria Juana Sisneros. His grandparents, Jose Chavez and Maria Paula Gallego, were neighbors in La Jolla.

Soon after his birth, Preciliano moved north with his family, near his father’s birthplace of Cebolleta. They eventually settled in the village of Cubero, and his father, Diego Antonio, was a Union soldier based at Fort Wingate during the Civil War. One soldier who fought alongside Diego Antonio said in a deposition 26 years after the war that he remembered visiting the Chavez family in Cubero. Preciliano would have been about three years old at the time.

Sometime before the 1880 Census, Preciliano, who was a young man of 18, migrated west with his family from Cubero to San Juan, Arizona. Many others from Cubero and surrounding villages also migrated to San Juan, which was later renamed St. John’s when several Mormons, led by the patriarch of the famous Udall family, settled in the same area.

In 1882, Preciliano found himself back in New Mexico. On June 10 of that year, he married Telesfora Duran at San Felipe de Neri church in Albuquerque. Telesfora was the daughter of Onofre Duran and Maria Placida Sanchez, all from Ranchos de Atrisco, west of Albuquerque.

Preciliano and his bride went straight to St. John’s, and immediately started a family in nearby Las Tusas. Their first daughter, Liberata, was born in May 1883. A year after that, on Oct. 6, 1884, my Great Grandfather Juan Diego Antonio Chavez was born. He was named after his own grandfather. Preciliano and Telesfora, who was known as Lesfora, had a total of 10 children (Liberata, Diego Antonio, Juana Bruno, Ysidro, Yrinea, Onofre, Ygnacio Leopaldo, Federico, Aniceto and Victorino) during their 20 years in St. John’s, before moving back to Cubero, where they had two more (Trinidad and Nicanora). Both of Preciliano’s parents, Diego Antonio and Juana Maria, died and were buried in St. John’s. Preciliano also lost a son during a tragic accident while in St. John’s. His son, Ysidro, entered a horse race and was thrown from the horse and trampled to death, according to an account told later by his younger brother, Onofre.

Because my Great-Grandfather Diego Antonio Chavez died at the relatively young age of 55, my own Grandfather, Louis Chavez, and his younger brother, Lalo Chavez, learned a lot of the family history from their Uncle Onofre, who lived 99 years before dying in Mesa, AZ. Before his death, he was interviewed by a family member, Pauline Chavez Bent, who later published Onofre’s memories of St. John’s and Cubero.

 

Looking west from the Cubero Cemetery

“My father Preciliano had sheep at first, then ran cattle,” Onofre said. “During a hard winter, he lost all his stock and sold his land to Juan Iriarte. When my father was in his heyday he liked to gamble. Once, he lost one thousand lambs in a card game. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to my father. He was the coffin maker in the village, but he didn’t charge people, he did it as a courtesy. My father was a kind man, muy buen hombre. Our family home was around the Cubero area. It was a large house made of stone and mud. It had about five rooms, one big room had a divider that was removed to expand the room. It was often removed to make room for dances. Dances were held to celebrate feast days.”

Onofre said when the family lived in St. John’s, the Catholic priest celebrated Holy Mass in the Chavez home. A Catholic Church was eventually built in St. John’s. Onofre also remembered that he and his siblings were taught by Monico Garcia who only used English in class.

In Cubero, the Chavez men worked for Juan Iriarte, a Basque from Spain who bought a lot of land in the area. Onofre worked for Iriarte for 20 years, earning $60 a month, in addition to food and a place to live. “I always had a talent for working sheep and for the sheep business,” Onofre said. “I guess it was because I was a young boy of six when I started working for my father.”

Onofre’s father, Preciliano, died in 1928 and was buried at the cemetery in Cubero. His headstone reads: “Life’s work well one, he rests in peace.”

Diego Antonio Chaves

 I’ve always admired my great-grandfather’s name – Juan Diego Antonio Chavez, and I wish I would have known him. His father was Preciliano Chavez, who named his first-born son (out of 11 children) after his own father, Diego Antonio Chaves.

The elder Diego Antonio was born in Cebolleta in 1823 and baptized in nearby Laguna. He moved to La Jolla and married Juana Sisneros in 1848 in nearby Socorro. Some of their children were born in La Jolla, including Preciliano, before they moved back north to Cubero, where he earned a living as a silversmith. According to family lore, my great-great-great grandfather is the same Diego Antonio Chavez who settled the area that later became Grants. I haven’t yet confirmed that tale, but I’m researching it.

In any case, I recently found out that Diego Antonio served in the Civil War. He was mustered into service on March 30, 1865, and mustered out on Sept. 28, 1866. He later moved with his family to San Juan, or St. John’s, Arizona, where he would spend the rest of his life.

During a trip to Washington, D.C., a few months ago, I made my first trip to the National Archives. While there, I found a reference to the fact that Juan Diego’s wife, Juanita, applied for a military pension shortly after her husband died on Christmas Day in 1890. Last week, I received a copy of the pension application and military investigation that resulted in Juanita receiving $8 a month for the final few years of her life, before she died in 1897.

I have spent so much time during the past two years trying to piece together my family tree. It’s thrilling when you make a connection. But I always wonder about these people I’m researching. I always want to know more about them.

The pension file gave me a taste of what Diego Antonio and Juanita were like. His widow describes how he entered the service at Fort Wingate, NM and was discharged in Albuquerque. They lived about 14 miles from St. John’s, and that’s where Diego Antonio, who was “quite old” and sick in bed for two months, eventually died. She recalled that they were married by Father Chavez in Socorro. She thought she was 12 years old when she married, but other records prove she was actually 19. She relied on a prominent local attorney named Alfred Ruiz to help her with the pension application, which cost her $1 for postage and $2 for her marriage certificate to prove that she was married to Diego Antonio. Sadly, Juanita was poor, too “old and feeble” to work, had no property and relied on her sons for support. She lived in a small adobe house.

A soldier who served with Diego Antonio in the New Mexico 1^st  Calvary Regiment, remembered his comrade well. In a deposition for the pension investigation, the soldier and long-time family friend described Diego Antonio, a dark-complexioned man who stood just 5-feet, 5-inches tall, as “quite a small man – low in stature – but one of the best and bravest soldiers I ever saw. He would drink all the whisky he could get but was one of the best hearted men I ever saw and a man of fine principle. He was an ‘all round’ good and whole man.”