Doña Tules

Santa Fe's Courtesan and Gambler

Mary J. Straw Cook

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780826343154
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Biographies de sciences sociales

Gertrudis Barceló was born at the turn of the nineteenth century in the Bavispe valley of east central Sonora, Mexico. Young Gertrudis, who would later achieve fame under the name "Tules, " discovered how to manipulate men, reading their body language and analyzing their gambling habits. This power, coupled with a strong-willed and enterprising nature, led Doña Tules to her legendary role as a shrewd and notorious gambling queen and astute businesswoman. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, her monte dealings and entertainment houses became legendary throughout the southern Rocky Mountain region. Doña Tules's daring behavior attracted the condemnation of many puritanical Anglo travelers along the Santa Fe Trail. Demonized by later historians, Doña Tules has predominately been portrayed as little more than a caricature of an Old West madam and cardsharp, eluding serious historical study until now. Mary J. Straw Cook sifts through the notoriety to illustrate the significant role Doña Tules played in New Mexico history as the American era was about to begin.

CHAPTER ONE

Valle del Río Bavi

e, Sonora

Fruit and young girls ripen early in the sultry Bavispe Valley of east-central Sonora. The narrow but fertile valley parallels the western flank of the Sierra Madre Occidental, separating the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua. Gertrudis Barceló, New Mexico’s celebrated gambler and courtesan of the 1830s and 1840s, was born around 1800 in this remote area. She achieved fame by the name of “Tules,” said to be the diminutive of Gertrudis, a name that means fiel a su hogar, “faithful to her home.”¹ She was also known by many other names—“Tula,” “Tulas,” “Tía Barcelona,” “Lona Barcelona,” “La Barcelona,” “Madam Barcelo,” “Señora Toulouse,” “Doña Lona,” “Doña Julia,” “Madam T,” and to many, “La Tules.”²

The origin of the name Tules, suggesting the curvaceousness of her figure, is from the word tules meaning “reeds.” Tules with a “la” placed before it designates perhaps the one and only, with inference of a slanderous overtone. The nickname may have originated before her arrival in New Mexico in 1815. Coincidentally, tules, or carrizo agugueado, grows in the marshes near the villages of Huásabas and Granados in the lower Río Bavispe of Sonora, where the Barcelós live today. It is, therefore, possible that the young and intelligent Gertrudis Barceló first acquired her titillating nickname from the bulrushes surrounding her birthplace.

Whatever the case, Gertrudis Barceló surely discovered early in life her extraordinary perception of and power over the male psyche. Manipulation of men became but one of her many achievements, and to the end of her life she was a genius at the art.³ Such a talent appears to be the result of astute, native intelligence. It played a significant role in her capacity to read the body language and gambling habits of her often fidgety and sweaty opponents.

FIGURE 1.

“Lady Tules,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, April 1854. Museum of New Mexico neg. no. 50815.

FIGURE 2.

Bavispe River near Huásabas, Sonora, Mexico, 1986. Photo by author.

Because of apparent chronological discrepancies in Sonoran church records for the late 1700s and early 1800s, Catholic church baptismal records for Gertrudis Barceló or that of her family have not been found.⁴ On the 1870 U.S. Census for Valencia County, New Mexico, María de la Luz, younger sister of Gertrudis, gave Sonora as her place of birth. To further help corroborate Sonora as the birthplace of Gertrudis Barceló, her older brother José Trinidad returned to the village of Huásabas following her death in early 1852. In a letter dated 1853 addressed to a Victor Baca in New Mexico, Trinidad Barceló left a significant clue with his return address as Huasavas [sic].⁵ Barcelós of today remain in the villages of Moctezuma (Oposura), Huásabas, and Granados.⁶ They trace their heritage to Antonio Barceló (1717–97), a Spanish marine who participated in the siege of Gibraltar in 1779.⁷

On the northern frontier of New Spain, Huásabas and neighboring Granados lacked the protection of presidio soldiers from Janos or Fronteras. The villages endured incessant raids by nomadic Indian tribes—the Apache, Jano, Jocome, and Suma from the north, and the Seri and occasionally the Pima Alto from the west. These warriors of the desierto plundered Sonoran mines, ranches, missions, crops, women, and children. Apache Indians from the upper Gila River basin of southern New Mexico, called Gileños, entered Sonora and escaped with impunity through the Púlpito and Carretas passes to the north. Two centuries of unbridled terror under unstable Spanish rule began in the seventeenth century. The capture of Gerónimo and his tribe in southern New Mexico in 1886 ultimately subdued the wily Apaches.⁸

Between 1790 and 1831 a fragile truce brought peace between the Spanish and the Apaches living in Sonora. The reorganization of defense began in 1765, initiated by the visitor general to New Spain, José de Gálvez, and in 1786 by the Instrucción of viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez. Retaliatory expeditions by soldiers against the Indians resulted in a temporary reprieve. Trade alliances with the nomadic tribes plus enticements of food, horses, and liquor encouraged their settlement near the presidios. When the Mexican government stopped the subsistence for lack of funds, Indian dependency ceased and warfare resumed for the remainder of the nineteenth century.⁹

Rugged mountains cut off the narrow north-to-south river valleys such as the Bavispe from all but the Pacific coast. These fertile valleys were the main suppliers of food for colonial Sonora. Today’s inhabitants of the lower Río Bavispe, once termed the breadbasket of Sonora, continue to live for the most part in that colonial past, traditionally cultivating two crops annually. Late summer monsoons or tropical storms occasionally cause valley flooding. During the winter months, lighter equipatas, or frontal storms, arrive from the Pacific Ocean to the west. Western Sonorans call these subhurricane storms arriving near the feast of St. Francis on October 4, El Cordonazo de San Francisco, the lash of St. Francis.¹⁰

Indian warfare coupled with the washboard terrain and the geoeconomic isolation of eastern Sonora inevitably shaped the character of its people. Women of La Serrana, the Highland, possessed a fundamental trait from a very early age—survival. Later events in the life of a mature Tules Barceló reveal an intelligent and courageous woman endeavoring to survive in a Spanish, Mexican, and American man’s world in any manner possible, including prostitution. To a young and precocious Tules Barceló in remote Sonora, choices in her early life were few—family, home, and anonymity as opposed to wealth and fame. Instinctively and against great odds, she pursued the path that ultimately imprinted her name in the pages of Southwest history.

The Scottish-born, American wife of Spain’s first envoy to an independent Mexico in 1839, Fanny Calderón de la Barca, observed how Mexican women occupied their time: “[T]hey do not read, they do not write, they do not go into society. For the most part they do not play, they do not draw . . . nor do they ride on horseback. What they do not do is clear, but what do they do?”¹¹ What Gertrudis must have concluded was that the pobres gambled to amuse themselves. It was a national obsession beginning in childhood.

Interrelated prominent families exercised regional control throughout the state of Sonora, resulting in a distinguished colonial society. Founders of these families, immigrants from northern and eastern Spain, came to Sonora at the end of the colonial period. These immigrants called themselves “notables,” dominating the small villages in which they lived. Many made fortunes on the Mexican frontier and owned large estates, but apparently not the Barcelós, or they would have continued living in Sonora.¹²

The date and reason why the Juan Ignacio Barceló family first settled in the Bavispe Valley remains unknown. The Catalán father of Gertrudis, Juan Ignacio, perhaps arrived in Sonora with the Compañía Franca de Voluntarios de Cataluña in 1767. Organized from ranks of the Segundo Regimiento de Infantería Ligera de Cataluña stationed in Barcelona, Spain, the one hundred men and four officers originally destined for Havana, Cuba, were instead sent to New Spain. The Volunteers joined the Sonoran Expedition commanded by Domingo Elizondo. Their mission included not only warfare against the Indians and the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 but also the colonization of Sonora. Yet the name of Juan Ignacio Barceló fails to appear on the list of men in the Elizondo Expedition.¹³

Another conjecture to be considered is that perhaps members of the Barceló family migrated earlier from the east, over the Sierra Madre from Chihuahua. The Barceló name survives today in the remote mining areas of Moris and Chínipas, west of Chihuahua City. During the early decades of the seventeenth century, Chihuahuan miners crossed over the Sierras into eastern Sonora seeking silver and gold deposits. Many remained to farm and raise families. Hindered by heavy seasonal rains and the flooding of mine shafts, miners soon found mining anything but a year-round activity. They then focused their daily efforts on farming and stockraising. On his arrival in New Mexico, the older brother of Tules Barceló, Trinidad, possessed prior knowledge of these professions plus the advantage of an education.¹⁴

In 1645 Franciscan father Marcos del Río founded the village of Huásabas. He named the new mission La Misión de San Francisco Javier de Guásabas.¹⁵ To the Opatá Indians already living in the Bavispe Valley, the name of Guásabas in their native tongue meant “where there are many frogs.”¹⁶ On his arrival Fray Marcos found not only indigenous Indians, but also members of the Mexican-Italian Moreno family. Other names in the early history of Huásabas include Juan de Mella y Hernández, born in Galicia, Spain; Don Luis Gonzaga Leyba, a Yaqui Indian; Dons Guillermo Fimbres and Francisco Xavier Fimbres, Basques from Spain; and the Durazo family of Italian origin. Once again, the Barceló name escapes mention before the 1800s in the Bavispe Valley. The Moreno family history briefly records the marriage of Venancio Durazo Moreno to a Teresa Barceló Durazo, but with no reference to her parents.¹⁷

During the 1760s the Barceló name appeared in Arizpe, a presidio to the northwest of Huásabas. In 1776 Arizpe was the capital of New Mexico, on the far northern rim of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Don Juan Bautista de Anza (1735–88) of Arizpe, Sonora, was New Mexico’s governor. A María Concepción Barceló was the mother of María del Pilar León who married Josef Joaquín Moraga, alferez, or second lieutenant, of Anza’s expedition to the coast of California in 1776. It was on this expedition that Anza founded San Francisco Presidio, Misión Dolores, Misión Santa Clara, and the pueblo of San José de Guadalupe. María del Pilar León and Josef Joaquín Moraga are buried at Misión Dolores in San Francisco.¹⁸

While the year of arrival of the Barcelós in the Bavispe Valley presently eludes discovery, mission settlements of early Sonora represented one of greatest successes for the Jesuit order in the New World. The Jesuits, until their expulsion in 1767, remained the religious guardians of Sonorans. The village of Huásabas became the mission of one of the better-known Jesuits, Father Juan Nentvig, author of the Rudo Ensayo, an essay describing Sonora and Arizona in 1764. Regarding the name of Sonora, Nentvig wrote:

Although I know nothing of the etymology or origin of the name Sonora, I do not believe I am deceiving myself in being inclined to think it may have been suggested by her great wealth, the news of which swept sonorously across New Spain and into Europe. Perhaps the name might have been given accidentally as has ...