During our research we were constantly being surprised by people who came up with information that either confirmed our guesses, or totally disproved our assumptions and set us out on a new trail of clues.

Take for instance the unusual picture of a Navajo man who painted beautiful pictures while he was in the hospital.

One clue that confirmed what we had been hearing,was an e-mail from a woman who said that her father had been a doctor at the Indian Hospital at Santa Fe and had treated Quincy Tahoma.  When I contacted the retired doctor by phone, he told me about Tahoma’s problems with alcohol and the kind of treatment that patients got at that time. The time was the mid 1950′s.

He liked Tahoma, but knew that he had a tendency to spend any money he had on alcohol. Nevertheless, when Tahoma said that he would like to have a radio (we had been told that he liked music) the doctor gave him one, thinking that was not cash, and since Tahoma really wanted it, he would not sell it. Wrong.  As soon as he left the hospital, he sold the radio and used the cash to go “partying” as he and his friends called their drinking binges. The doctor was disappointed. Not only in Tahoma, but also in himself for being mislead.

This doctor told me what the hospital was like and how well-liked Tahoma was by the staff and the other patients.  Tahoma could never be long without his paints, and as soon as he was able to, he would start painting–even in the hospital.  Although most of the alcoholic patients that showed up were suffering from secondary problems–injuries from fights and falls–Quincy Tahoma never had the broken bones and bruises. He was a gentle soul, the doctor said, and apparently avoided fights.

And information about the hospital stays came in two other unexpected ways, as well. When I was visiting the school librarian at the Santa Fe Indian School, a man who worked as a custodian there overheard our conversation and said “I knew Quincy Tahoma.”  It was almost spooky that in this school, nearly 70 years after Tahoma was a student there, I would hear someone say that.

It turned out that the man was hospitalized as a child, and remembered the adult Quincy Tahoma painting pictures in the hospital. Quincy made quite an impression on everybody he met.

The final piece of information that confirmed the hospital stay and using the hospital as an art studio, came when Mark Rosacker turned over one of the Tahoma paintings he had bought, There he saw that beside the signature on the back it said “Santa Fe Indian Hospital.”

Do you look at the back of paintings you own to see if you can find clues to the artist’s life?

I told you how I met Quincy Tahoma’s artist friend, Ramos Sanchez through Rex Arrowsmith, an Indian arts dealer and expert. This is about my attempt to find Ramos.  When I knew that I was going to be in Santa Fe, I called Ramos and asked if I could come and see him. Sure, he said, any time.  We settled on a date and time and his wife Gerdie gave me directions to his house, which is outside the San Ildenfonso Pueblo, but within the Pueblo’s reservation lines.

I love the country north of Santa Fe. The land here is punctuated by unexpected mesas and vistas of green-clad mountains in the background. In between wide sweeps of flat dusty land provide scarce vegetation for wandering cows and horses.

It is easy to see why the pueblo people have settled there for hundreds, if not a thousand years.  When the Spanish conquistadors came through the Puebloans were here, and they are still here. Most of their legends say they came down from the area of Mesa Verde in Colorado and split into the many villages that exist today, most along the Rio Grand River that runs south from the mountains in northern New Mexico, past Santa Fe and Albuquerque on its way to Texas.

The directions that Gerdie gave me went something like this. Take the highway north from Santa Fe and follow the branch toward Alamos. Go across the river and when you see the black mesa, look for a trailer house and then we are the next road.  It sounded pretty clear until I got there. But then, I wasn’t very clear on a lot of things. I thought Gerdie’s name was Gertie (like my husband’s aunt Gertrude) until I had visited with Gerdie a couple of times, and saw her name in print.

I missed the turn-off to Alamos which is pretty simple to see when you are familiar with it–and pulled into an orchard where a guy loading crates of fruit explained to me how to get to San Ildefonse.

I saw an entrance to San Ildefonse, but I had not yet crossed a river. Soon I saw another sign for San Ildefonse, and I got worried because I assumed I need to go into the village.  I pulled off the road, and called Gertie on my cell phone. No, she explained, I did NOT need to go into San Ildefonse.  I went on a ways and the road dipped and curved over a bridge across the Rio Grande River. (Duh, I said to myself–”the river” is the Rio Grande.)

Ahead was a large black mesa on the right hand side of the road. Of course there were mesas of varying degrees of darkness all over the place, but this one seemed more dramatic than the rest, and likely to be the landmark.  Good. The bad news, however, lay ahead–a ribbon of road bordered by barbed wire fence, and here and there a cluster of houses or trailers off to the right beneath trees.

Thoroughly confused, I called Gerdie once again. By now I’m sure she had me pegged as an idiot and was wondering why she and Ramos were wasting their time on me.  “Do you see a man painting by the road?” She asked. YES! There he was, easel set up for painting the Black Mesa.  That was a landmark that got me in to their house. Heaven knows how I would have found it if he had packed up his paints before I got there.

This expedition was just another example of communications between the native dwellers of the Southwest who know every natural landmark and notice every change made by man–and the urbanized (even from small towns) non-Indians who rely on roads, named geological features, numbers on houses and signs to get around.