The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other True Stories

By Tony Hillerman, Don Strel and Anne Hillerman

This classic collection of nonfiction essays about life in New Mexico by the great Tony Hillerman remains a must read for anyone looking to understand the state’s unique charm. The engaging pieces in The Great Taos Bank Robbery unveil the life and magic one experiences in the Land of Enchantment.

This edition includes a new introduction and foreword by Anne Hillerman and new photographs with each story.

“It’s as serious a ‘glance’ over our state as it is often hilarious, from the opening relación about law enforcement in Taos, through succeeding commentaries on Indian encounters with Paleface, a Nigerian guest’s assessment of Santa Fe, a search for Folsom Man and so forth . . . it furnishes myriad moments of pleasurable insight.”—New Mexico Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780826351937

Tony Hillerman

TONY HILLERMAN served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and received the Edgar and Grand Master Awards. His other honors include the Center for the American Indian’s Ambassador Award, the Spur Award for Best Western Novel, and the Navajo Tribal Council Special Friend of the Dineh Award. A native of Oklahoma, Tony Hillerman lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, until his death in 2008.

Book preview

The Great Taos Bank Robbery

And Other True Stories

TONY HILLERMAN

Photographs by Don Strel

Foreword by Anne Hillerman

University of New Mexico Press | Albuquerque

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8263-5193-7

© 1973 by Anthony G. Hillerman

© renewed 2012 by Anthony G. Hillerman Trust Q

Photographs © 2012 by Don Strel

All rights reserved. First edition 1973

First Perennial/HarperCollins edition 2001

Second University of New Mexico Press edition 2012

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Hillerman, Tony.

The great Taos bank robbery and other true stories / Tony Hillerman;

photographs by Don Strel; foreword by Anne Hillerman. —

2nd University of New Mexico Press ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8263-5192-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8263-5193-7 (electronic)

1. New Mexico—History—Anecdotes. 2. New Mexico—Biography—Anecdotes. I. Title.

F796.6.H54 2012

978.9—dc23

2011044955

For Marie

Acknowledgments

Several of the chapters in this book have been previously published, in forms ranging from very similar to drastically modified, by magazines and periodicals. The Great Taos Bank Robbery, The Very Heart of Our Country, Las Trampas, Othello in Union County, and The Conversion of Cletus Xywanda all appeared, in one form or another, in New Mexico magazine. The magazine’s editor, Walter Briggs, and members of his staff were also involved in germinating the idea that led to this volume. Other material included here previously appeared in modified form in True, the Western Review, or the New Mexico Quarterly.

Great Taos Bank Robbery

A FOREWORD

Anne Hillerman

An editor once told me he thought Tony Hillerman’s The Great Taos Bank Robbery provided the perfect introduction to New Mexico. Not the tourists’ New Mexico, but the quirky, non-gussied-up version. The real deal. The New Mexico my dad fell in love with. Born in dust-bowl Oklahoma, Dad wandered west on Route 66 to New Mexico after his service in the infantry in World War II. He went back to Oklahoma, became a journalist, and ultimately a New Mexican. He appreciated the state’s long history, fishing streams, cultural mix, lively politics, and dynamic sunsets. He organized his home office to watch clouds billow up over the Sandia Mountains. He stayed loyal to his adopted homeland even in death, resting in the Santa Fe National Cemetery in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

The Great Taos Bank Robbery, a collection of nine nonfiction stories interspersed with shorter pieces, provides a partial tour of the state from the Three Rivers country near Carrizozo to the high mountain villages of Ojo Sarco and Truchas and the ranching country near Folsom on the northeastern plains. Quemado, Pecos, Gallup, Roswell, Toadlena, and even Albuquerque get some notice. Readers will discover kernels of Dad’s deep affection for the Navajo and Zuni people and the achingly beautiful landscape they call sacred. Some of the stories provide a glimpse of nostalgic New Mexico of the 1950s; some are timeless tales that could have happened yesterday. In addition to his affection for New Mexico’s seasoned storytellers, Dad listened to geography and geology and relished the symphony of creative ideas they inspired.

When he first moved our family to Santa Fe, Dad was a journalist. In addition to his job as a reporter and editor for United Press International, and later for Santa Fe’s lively daily paper The New Mexican, he wrote magazine articles. His freelancing helped keep our growing family in groceries. In the 1960s, the University of New Mexico offered Dad a job. We moved to Albuquerque and Dad became a journalism professor and ultimately head of that department. He kept writing.

First published in 1973, The Great Taos Bank Robbery was Dad’s third book, and a product of his happy years at UNM. Harper & Row had already published two Hillerman novels. The Blessing Way (1970) launched what was to become the long and popular series featuring Navajo detectives. The second, a stand-alone mystery thriller The Fly on the Wall (1971), told the story of a newspaper reporter and government corruption. The year The Great Taos Bank Robbery hit the bookstores, Harper & Row released the next Navajo mystery, Dance Hall of the Dead. That book won the Edgar Award in 1974 as the year’s best mystery novel.

Dad continued to teach at UNM and to serve as advisor to the college newspaper The Lobo. But he began to think he had a future as a writer of mysteries. Even after he retired to become a full-time novelist, he loved invitations from colleagues to talk to their writing classes and interact with students.

The true stories in this reissue of The Great Taos Bank Robbery reflect Dad’s training as a journalist—his eye for just enough of the perfect details, his ear for dialog, his skill at building sentence by sentence until a story seems to tell itself. Besides what they show readers about the New Mexico Tony Hillerman loved, the collection offers insight into the author’s tenacity for tracking down a curious fact or an odd detail to make a tale lively and intriguing.

Readers of this new edition may quickly notice that some things about Hillerman’s New Mexico have changed, among them population figures and highway designations. Along with the increasing number of residents in Santa Fe has come an adjustment in the flavor of the community. When Dad first went to work there, Santa Fe had fewer rules and more folks who marched boldly to their own, slightly off-tempo, drumbeat.

Just as religious converts tend to be more passionate about their faith, Dad claimed New Mexico as home with missionary fervor even though his voice never lost its Oklahoma accent. The state’s varied and expansive vistas stirred his imagination. Its people spoke to his heart and tickled his sense of humor. The book’s range of topics—a bank robbery that almost happened, a black cowboy’s monumental discovery of Folsom Man’s presence on the northern New Mexico plains, mystical stories of the Navajo homeland, New Mexico’s heritage of interaction between Anglo, Indian, and Spanish settlers—offers insight not only into New Mexico but also into the current of curiosity that fired Dad’s imagination. He set these stories in the historic villages of Taos, Tierra Amarilla, and Las Trampas; among the vanilla-scented pines of Glorieta; the twisting streets of Santa Fe; the dry, majestic landscape of Ship Rock; and the congenial bars of old Folsom. Readers watch eagles glide against an early winter solar halo. They spend time with archaeologists out on digs, biologists searching for deadly fleas, and a badly dressed but polite female impersonator/would-be felon. They meet Navajos stringing fence, angry land-grant activists, and crafty politicians.

As I reread these stories, I heard whispers of themes and places that would reappear in Dad’s novels: the wonderfully suspenseful murder at Shalako from Dance Hall of the Dead; the mysterious volcanic landscape between Gallup and Shiprock in Coyote Waits; the fearsome discovery of modern day bubonic plague in The First Eagle. His luscious descriptions of clouds piling on the peaks over northern New Mexico’s prime fishing territory return in The Fly on the Wall.

I am thrilled that the University of New Mexico Press has reissued this little gem of a book and added Don Strel’s beautiful new photographs. I remember my father’s excitement at the first edition of The Great Taos Bank Robbery. UNM’s decision strengthened his resolve to continue to focus on his writing, a dedication which led to millions of happy fans worldwide. In fact, when a bosque fire threatened his home in Los Ranchos and he and my mother thought they might have to evacuate, two first editions of The Great Taos Bank Robbery were among the few books he packed to save.

I’m sure if Dad were alive, he would be delighted that this collection will be available again.

Chapter I: The Great Taos Bank Robbery

The newsroom of The New Mexican first got word of the incident about ten minutes after nine the morning of November 12, 1957. Mrs. Ruth Fish, who had served for many years as manager of the Taos Chamber of Commerce and almost as many as Taos correspondent for the Santa Fe newspaper, called collect and asked for the city editor.

She told the city editor that the Taos bank would be robbed that morning. She said that she would walk over to the bank and watch this operation. She promised to call in an eyewitness account before the first edition deadline at 11:00 a.m.

The city editor asked how Mrs. Fish knew the bank was to be robbed. Mrs. Fish, in a hurry to get off the telephone and become an eyewitness, explained very briefly that one of her lady friends had stopped in her office and told her so. The lady was now waiting so that they could walk down together and watch.

But, the city editor insisted, how did the lady friend know the bank was to be robbed that morning?

Because, Mrs. Fish explained with patience, the two bank robbers were standing in line at this very moment waiting their turn at the teller’s cage.

But, persisted the city editor, how was it possible to predict that these two persons intended to rob the bank?

This presumption seemed safe, Mrs. Fish said, because one of the two men was disguised as a woman and because he was holding a pistol under his purse. Whereupon she said good-bye and hung up.

While astonished by the foregoing, the city editor recalled later that he had no doubt at all that the bank would indeed be robbed in the fashion described. If the reader feels less sure at this point, it is because the city editor had two advantages. First, he knew Mrs. Fish. An elderly woman of dignity, charm, and grandmotherly appearance, she possessed a flawless reputation for accuracy. Second, he knew Taos. While bank robbers probably wouldn’t stand politely in line with the paying customers in Omaha or Atlanta, there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t in this peculiar little town.

As a matter of fact they were doing exactly this, and their courtliness was about to cause them trouble. The chain of events that followed did not reach its semifinal anticlimax until sixty hours later and was not officially ended until the following February, when the federal grand jury met sixty-five miles south in Santa Fe. By then the affair was being called The Great Taos Bank Robbery.

Lest the reader be misled by this title, he should be warned that Taos also lists in its litany of notable events The Great Flood of 1935. If the reader can accept the fact that Taos managed a Great Flood without a river and with the very modest amount of water available in its arid climate, he is prepared to hear more about what happened on November 12, 1957.

After the city editor collected his wits, he placed a long-distance call to the bank. The secretary who answered didn’t know anything about any bank robbery, but she referred the call to a higher ranking official. The city editor asked this gentleman if his bank had been robbed. Certainly not, said the banker. How in the world did such rumors get started?

A few minutes later Mrs. Fish called back, slightly breathless. She reported that she and her friend had walked through the alley behind the Safeway store and arrived at the bank just as two men with drawn pistols dashed from the front door. One of the men was dressed as a woman, as previously reported. He ran awkwardly in his high heels. The two jumped into a green pickup truck parked in the alley and drove away. From what she had learned from spectators fortunate enough to arrive earlier, the two men had not taken any money from the bank. She would investigate further and call back. Mrs. Fish, a woman of impeccable courtesy, hung up without a word of reproach to the city editor for causing her to be late for the event.

The city editor now placed another call to the banker. He asked the banker if he was sure his bank hadn’t been robbed, or something. The bank official now was less confident. He was sure nobody had taken any money but he was also sure that something funny had been going on. He had been hearing something about a man dressed as a woman, and two men running wildly out of the bank lobby, and other confusing stories.

Figure 1: The original vault from the Taos bank that was almost robbed, now in use at US Bank

Meanwhile, the police reporter had called the Taos police department and said he was checking on a rumor that there had been a bank robbery. The policeman who answered said no, there hadn’t been one and he guessed the police would be the first to hear about it if there was one, wouldn’t they? The reporter said yes, he guessed that was true. Actually, the police would be approximately the last to hear about it, being informed only after the pastor of the local United Brethren Church entered the picture.

By then Mrs. Fish had made her third call and provided the city editor with a detailed account of what had happened in the bank lobby. The two men had arrived just as the bank opened its doors at 9:00 a.m. They found a crowd of Taos businessmen waiting to check out funds to fuel their cash registers for the day. The suspects joined the rush to the tellers’ cages but were outdistanced, perhaps because of the high heels, and were stuck well back in the line. Customers quickly noticed that the line-stander clad as a woman had a full day’s growth of dark stubble bristling through his pancake makeup and that the nylons encased an unseemly growth of leg hair. They also noticed that this person’s costume was remarkably chic for Taos, which is one of the few places where a man can still feel adequately dressed downtown in bib overalls. All this was enough to cause a modest amount of buzzing in the lobby, but probably not much. Taos is a tolerant village, well accustomed to whimsy. It has been said that if the late James Thurber

Reviews for The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other True Stories

[miaculpa-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I expected good things from “The Great Taos Bank robbery” but the book never reached those heights. The first story, about the bank robbery referenced in the title, promised much more than delivered and while there are some interesting essays on archaeology and very remote community, I couldn’t get excited about the book at all.

[msf59 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have read and enjoyed several of Hillerman's Navajo tribal police novels and was expecting this to be a story collection. It turned out to be essays, told in a novelistic style. Featured front and center, is New Mexico. The state's past, including prehistoric times, along with the battles of Native Americans and the Mexican people and more modern times, with poverty and corruption, that have plagued Hillerman's adopted state. Hillerman was a newspaper man for many years and these stories have that journalistic feel. The writing isn't as polished as his later Leaphorn and Chee novels but there are plenty of passages to sink your teeth into:“It is November of a year of almost unbroken drought. The air smells of autumn, pine resin, dust, and empty places. The only living things in sight are a sparrow hawk and a disconsolate Hereford. The hawk is scouting the rim of the red mesa for incautious rodents. The cow resting its search for something to eat, is staring moodily in the direction of Gallup.”

[juliebean_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Written when he was still a graduate student, before his writing career really took off. Quite dry compared to his later work - he really doesn't know how to tell a story, which is a shame considering he had interesting material.

[ague_3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

One or two good short stories, but the rest were disappointing. Some good insights into Sante Fe, New Mexico's culture. "...in New York society transcends and the man is submerged within it. But Santa Fe celebrates the individual."

[smbmom · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I picked this book up in Taos thinking that it might give me some insight into the people who inhabit New Mexico. I'm no expert, but it seems to ring true.The folks I met are mostly free spirits with their own way of doing things. This book presents the quirkiest of the bunch.It's a humorous, irreverent look at the unique people who populate this part of New Mexico.

[buffalogr · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Super great stories about New Mexico...insights into the state. A couple of notable ones are about the 1967 Tierra Amarilla riots and the Navajo who couldn't get the wire strung. Classic New Mexico tales--read 'em!