# Santa Fe, New Mexico For roughly two decades at the close of the nineteenth century, the Helbig family made their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico — an unlikely destination for a baker from Dresden, but the place where Robert Helbig raised his children and where his daughter Gertrude grew to adulthood before leaving for a life in the Minnesota north woods. ## A German Family in the New Mexico Territory Robert "Traugott Wilhelm" Helbig, born in Dresden in 1852, immigrated to the United States in 1881. He found his way to New Mexico Territory, where he took work as an industrial teacher at the Indian school in Albuquerque, his wife serving as the school's cook. By the 1880s the family had settled at Santa Fe, and there Robert built the life that would tie the family to this place: an orchard, a greenhouse, a dairy, and gardens full of flowers. Santa Fe in these years was still very much a frontier territorial capital, a town of adobe and dirt streets where a German immigrant baker turned dairyman and orchardist could carve out a living. The Helbigs lived on eastern Manhattan street, and later on Manhattan avenue, in a household that raised its children in the Catholic faith. ## Everyday Life and Local Troubles Robert's presence in Santa Fe left a colorful trail. In July 1889 he brought charges against a man he caught helping himself to the fruit of his cherry trees, a confrontation that left Robert with a badly skinned face. In July 1891 he captured a large snake in his upper Santa Fe orchard and put it on display at Ireland's drug store. His greenhouse burned to the ground in the middle of the night in March 1900, and that August a vicious bull broke his left arm in two places. These small dramas sketch the texture of the family's daily life — tied to the land, to livestock, and to the orchards that fed them. ## Births and a Grievous Loss The Helbig children came into the world in these years. Barbara Helbig was born in 1888, Marie Mary Hedwig Helbig on 21 September 1890, and Frances Kathryn Helbig on 10 January 1896. The family's deepest sorrow in Santa Fe came on 17 August 1898. Ten-year-old Barbara, described as bright and amiable, was suddenly seized with violent cramps and convulsions in the evening and died in great agony near midnight. An autopsy attributed her death to strychnine, which she had somehow gotten from a bottle of the poison kept in the house. She was buried in Rosario cemetery after a funeral at the cathedral. For Robert and his wife, and for young Gertrude and her sisters, this was the harshest of the Santa Fe years. ## Marriages at the Cathedral By 1900 both Gertrude Marie Helbig and her father Robert were living in Santa Fe, their household diminished by the deaths of Robert's first wife Pauline and, it appears, his two daughters born in Germany. On 23 May 1901, at six o'clock in the morning at the cathedral, Robert married a second time — to a widow from Philadelphia. The Vicar General, Anthony Fourchégu, performed the ceremony, and among the witnesses was "Miss Gertie W. Helbig," Robert's daughter Gertrude. That evening the couple held a reception at the Helbig residence on Manhattan avenue, followed by a dance that doubled as a celebration of Robert's birthday. Less than a year later, on 3 April 1902, Gertrude herself was married at the cathedral. Her groom was John Petri, a young logger from Buena Vista, Minnesota, whom she married as what family tradition long remembered as a "mail order bride." She was nineteen; he was twenty-seven. The banns were published twice, and the ceremony was again officiated by Vicar General Fourchégu. Her father, recorded as Fred Helbeig in the parish register, stood as a witness. ## Leaving Santa Fe Gertrude's marriage marked the family's departure from New Mexico. She left Santa Fe for John Petri's homestead near Long Lake in Liberty Township, Minnesota — an enormous change of climate and landscape for a young woman raised in the high desert. There she would raise their children, including Edwin Maurice "Matt," Robert, Alfred, Marie Catherine, and John Peter Petrie, all of them born far from the adobe town where their mother grew up. Robert Helbig followed his daughter north after her marriage, eventually settling in Minnesota himself. The orchards, the dairy, and the cathedral weddings of Santa Fe belonged to a chapter of the family's story that closed in 1902, when the last of them turned toward the Minnesota woods.