The Great Taos Bank Robbery: And Other True Stories

By Tony Hillerman, Anne Hillerman and James McGrath Morris

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 vivid pieces in The Great Taos Bank Robbery paint an indelible portrait of life—with all its magnificent quirks and foibles—in the Land of Enchantment.

Celebrating fifty years since its original 1973 release, this anniversary edition offers a new introduction by noted Hillerman biographer James McGrath Morris and a foreword by Anne Hillerman, introducing a new generation of readers to the magic of Tony Hillerman and New Mexico.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780826365460

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

Great Taos Bank Robbery

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An Introduction

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 and became a journalist before returning to New Mexico. 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 to 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 novel, the 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 the UNM and 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 dialogue, his skill at building sentence by sentence until a story seems to tell itself. Besides what it shows 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 despite his voice never losing 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; the vanilla-scented pine forests 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 fences, 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 the Shalako ceremony in 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; the luscious descriptions of clouds piling on the peaks over northern New Mexico’s prime fishing territory in The Fly on the Wall.

I am thrilled that the University of New Mexico Press has reissued this little gem of a book. I remember my father’s excitement for the first edition of The Great Taos Bank Robbery. UNM Press’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 is available again.

Chapter 1

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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.

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 had been raised here he would never have celebrated the antics of his family in print, since what seems outlandish in Columbus, Ohio, seems fairly normal in Taos. It is also said that if Sinclair Lewis had been a Taoseño, Babbitt would have had a common-law wife and worn sandals. In Taos a certain amount of eccentricity is required for conformity.

Interest among the spectators quickened, however, when some of them saw—or thought they saw—a pistol in the hand of the pseudowoman. The fleet-footed ones, who had beaten the rush to the tellers’ windows and therefore left early, spread the news of this unusual sight around Taos Plaza. Thus did Mrs. Fish receive the word, and thus were many curious townfolks drawn to the bank to watch the spectacle.

Several days later, one of the two suspects was to complain to federal agents that some among this growing crowd of spectators began giggling. Whether or not Taos residents were guilty of such churlishness, the two young men soon began suffering from stage fright. Embarrassed by the scrutiny of the crowd, they fled from the bank just as Mrs. Fish and her friend were arriving.

It was definitely established finally that both men were armed with loaded pistols. Although they were not to use these weapons until later, and then only when cruelly provoked, these revolvers are important because they lend an air of reality to The Great Taos Bank Robbery. It was much the same with The Great Flood of 1935. While it wasn’t a flood in the usual definition, people actually did get wet and Taoseños defend this historic event from scoffers by pointing out that Governor Clyde Tingley declared an emergency and scores of families were evacuated to the National Guard Armory.

These facts seem persuasive unless one knows that this Great Flood was actually an epidemic of leaking roofs—the combined effect of a freakishly slow and persistent rain and the traditional Taos habit of roofing flat-topped adobe