While the Great Books Program of St. John’s College has remained fundamentally the same since its inception in 1937, the College’s reputation as a bastion of bona fide readers and book lovers has–through programs like its Book and Author Luncheons in the 1970s and 1980s and its Library and Fine Arts Guild lectures in the 1990s and 2000s–also brought a stream of acclaimed contemporary authors to its Santa Fe campus through the decades. Among these authors was renowned New Mexico writer Tony Hillerman, seen here in 1992 on the front porch of Meem Library, delivering a lecture sponsored by St. John’s College and the Bread Loaf School of English.
While by this time in his life he was a nationally bestselling author made famous by the success of his mystery series featuring Navajo Nation police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee (the same series that is the basis for the current AMC television series “Dark Winds”), Hillerman’s early career had been as a newspaperman. It was in this capacity, as Managing Editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican, that Tony Hillerman would first cross paths with St. John’s. That paper’s owner and publisher, Robert McKinney, was the individual who first enticed St. John’s College President Richard Weigle to visit Santa Fe for consideration as a possible location for a second campus of St. John’s College, and Tony Hillerman would ultimately be present when the four faculty members of the Annapolis Search Committee (William Darkey, Barbara Leonard, Robert Bart, and Douglas Allanbrook) flew out to see for themselves the nearly 300-acre parcel of prime mountainside land renowned Santa Fe residents John and Faith Meem had offered as a gift to the College, should the Committee choose their city.
Some years later Hillerman would write an account of that momentous 1960 Search Committee visit in a short essay that would appear in a volume of some of his other New Mexico-based essays, The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other True Stories. That essay, entitled “The Committee and the Mule Deer”, is reprinted here with the generous permission of the University of New Mexico Press.
“The Committee and the Mule Deer“, by Tony Hillerman
It was one of those winter days which residents of the Rocky Mountains remember with fierce nostalgia when exiled to the flatlands. At this elevation, five hundred feet above the seven-thousand-foot altitude of the Santa Fe Plaza, the air was cold but the sun beat down from a dark blue sky. There was no wind, no dust, no humidity, the sort of day when skiers doff their jackets and come home at dusk with both frostbite and sunburn. Thirty miles northwestward across the Rio Grande Valley, Los Alamos was etched white against the ponderosa green of the Jemez Mountains. Sixty miles south the snow-rimmed hump of Sandia Mountain looked close enough to touch. The air had that odd, intense clarity peculiar to the mountain country on cold, cloudless, dry days.
The site selection committee from St. John’s College stood under this mountain sun, bundled against the drearier winter of Maryland’s humid tidewater climate, and looked around. They were on a high slope of a Sangre de Cristo foothill which locals call Moonmount. They hadn’t originally planned to be here. They had been en route to Claremont, California, to inspect a tract of land on which their ancient Annapolis liberal arts college would probably build its new western campus. There, St. John’s would become part of the famous “Claremont cluster”—sharing library, laboratory, and other facilities with Pomona, Scripps, and Claremont colleges. The advantages of the California site were numerous and obvious. The stop-off of these professors in New Mexico to view land offered there was mostly a matter of courtesy. So today the committee was among the pinons on the side of Moonmount, walking now on places where the sun had evaporated the snow.
Years have passed and I forget their names and even their number—five, I would guess, but perhaps as many as seven, generally young, made pale by the weak sun of the coastal climate and their scholarly profession, generally urban, generally Eastern, solidly WASP. They came from a world that was old Anglo-Saxon families, old books, Greek and Latin literacy, prep schools and bluepoint oysters and Ivy League; a world bounded on the north by Boston (or perhaps Vermont) and on the south by Virginia, in which the West consisted of San Francisco, reached on airliner flights over an American interior as vacant as the Australian Outback. None of them, unless my memory fails me, had visited the Southern Rockies before this day. It seemed to me that for this group the landscape around them and the culture of the Rio Arriba was stranger than the Lake District of Britain or the Aegean Islands. This was the country of the most vulgar American mythology, of cowboy and Indian, raw material only for children’s literature. Nothing here of particular interest to mainstream scholarship.
One of them, a youngish, slightly skinny man who might have been a professor of Romance languages, had stopped at a place where trees and the slant of ground protected a field of snow from the sun. Not many hours earlier a single deer had strolled across this expanse and the professor had noticed the tracks. In a moment, his fellow tutors were standing beside him examining the hoofprints.
“Are those deer tracks?” the professor asked. “They are, aren’t they?”
“A mule deer,” said one of the local guides, and noticing the interest, he squatted by the snow for a closer look. “An old buck,” he said. “See how big the track is, and how it’s splayed, and how the front of the back hooves are rounded off. They do that by dragging their feet when they’re rutting.”
The group stood around the snow patch while the Santa Fean explained something of the solitary grouchiness of elderly male mule deer, and identified other tracks in the snow—the drag marks of a porcupine and the footprints of assorted birds.
The committee left the next day for Claremont, and then flew back to Annapolis where the members recommended, without dissent, that the western campus of St. John’s be located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I understand no mention was made of deer tracks.
(From The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other True Stories by Tony Hillerman, copyright © 1973 Tony Hillerman, University of New Mexico Press. Reprinted with permission of the University of New Mexico Press. https://www.unmpress.com/9780826365453/the-great-taos-bank-robbery/)
Nor was that fateful day the end of Hillerman’s association with the College. After the Search Committee’s unanimous decision was announced, in the winter of 1960, Hillerman immediately followed up with the College offering his help publicizing the new campus and its Program, and in the decades that followed, even as his fame grew, appeared multiple times for public readings in the Santa Fe campus’s Book and Author Luncheon program, a fundraiser for the Library.
