'Take this car for the healer'

Actual cures limited to the fingers of one hand

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

An old photograph can trigger latent memory and spur on investigations that help us try decipher a series of related photos and events from more than a century ago. And maybe figure it out some, even if those photos and stories don't make much sense today. I found that out recently when I posted the following photo.

 

 

 

 

 

Photograph shows men and boys standing on or near streetcars bearing signs, "Take this car for the healer," and "Foot ball D.A.C. park, Saturday 3 p.m."

"Francis Schlatter was an Alsatian immigrant and former cobbler who believed he had a special gift from God.  He believed his very touch could heal people. Tom Noel reports in his must-have text on Denver history, “Denver Landmarks & Historic Districts,” that the Fox home, built in 1888, is now a Denver landmark. Schlatter centered his healing ministry in the humble front yard of the Fox home. So many people showed up to meet the healer that Mr. Fox had to build a receiving platform just behind his white picket fence. Every day from 9 AM until 3 PM, Schlatter, an experienced healer from New Mexico, would greet those seeking to receive his healing benediction. Noel estimates that Schlatter attracted some eighty thousand people over the two months in the north Denver yard on Quivas Street," writes Dennis Gallagher in a 2020 column.

Dennis Gallagher was a former Denver city auditor, city councilman, state senator and state representative. He shared thoughts and stories from North Denver’s past and future in his reoccurring column in the North Star.  He is also one of my Colorado heroes and he died less than two years after this column was published, 

"Local railroad lore mentions that trainloads of sick people came to Denver on special Union Pacific trains. They disembarked at Union Station, which began to look like a hospital ward.  They then boarded special North Denver trolley cars whose front banner announced, “The Car for the Healer.” Rumors of Schlatter’s healings spread through the community by word of mouth and in the printed media, the only media available in 1895. The long-haired eye-piercing Schlatter demanded no particular confession of faith before holding hands of those seeking his healing touch.  He accepted no money for the healing sessions which separated him from most of the other faith healers operating in the west at that time and, indeed, even today. A story of his bringing a young girl back from the dead two times only to lose her on the third time made its way through the neighborhood. Farm workers testified that he healed their disabled limbs."

Denver residents gather to see the "Healer" in 1895.

In the evenings Schlatter and Fox answered thousands of letters sent to him at the Quivas street house.  The post office workers knew where to take the thousands of letters addressed to Schlatter for prayers “for the Father.” Most of these prayerful petitions were simply addressed to  “The Messiah, Denver Colorado.” 

Schlatter’s two month stay with the Fox family ended with a message left on the bed in the Fox house.  The note was simple and as mysterious as the 5′ 9″ healer himself. “Mr. Fox, My mission has ended. The Father takes me away.  Good Bye.”

Fox told people the healer is gone and he did not know where he went.

"Stories flowered about where he went.  Some say his skeletal remains were found in the mountains of Mexico. Some say he walked across the western United States.   Some said he died of starvation. Readers interested in learning more about the healer after he quickly vanished from north Denver can read David Wetzel’s book published in 2016,  a thorough study of the healer in “The Vanishing Messiah: The Life and Resurrection of Francis Schlatter.” 

Francis Schlatter
 

Wetzel is a former staffer at History Colorado. Wetzel found that when reports of Schlatter’s death appeared in U. S. newspapers in 1897, bearded blue-eyed long haired Schlatter imitators announced to the world that he was not dead but ready to heal folks again.  

"Tom Noel concludes his entry on the Fox House history saying that “the Fox house is all that is left of healer Schlatter’s mysterious ministry.  John Varone, bought the home from Fox’s widow, Mary, in 1912 and built the extant grocery store on the corner of West 33rd and Pecos.” The Varone Family has for a long time contributed to the history of North Denver. Their family still lives here in Denver," writes Gallagher. 

"Hamlet tried to tell us that human knowledge is limited as we have to wrestle with experiences which confront empirical verification when he says to Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” This applies to those of use who today face the challenges of the coronavirus as much as it did to those alive in Shakespeare’s day," Gallagher notes.

 

Treatment in the rain in Denver.

"Today Hamlet and Shakespeare would shout to those of us looking for miracles in the hood, “Trust Dr. Anthony Fauci.” Listen to him trained by the Jesuits at Regis High School in New York City. His calm, steady, and rational scientific voice may miraculously see us through this crisis."

Denver in 1895 experienced nothing as drastic as the current coronavirus epidemic.  Denver citizens were still feeling the effects of the Silver Panic of 1893 and perhaps North Denver citizens argued over what color their fancy one horse carriages should be.

"I doubt that Edward Fox realized what would happen to upset the quiet peace of his north Denver block when he invited Francis Schlatter to live with his family in his modest one-story worker’s cottage at 725 Witter Street, now 3225 Quivas," says Gallagher.

Schlatter was born in the village of Ebersheim, Bas-Rhin, near Sélestat, in Alsace, France, on April 29, 1856. In 1884 he emigrated to the United States, where he worked at his trade in various cities, arriving in Denver, Colorado, in 1892. There, a few months later, he experienced a vision at his cobbler's bench in which he heard the voice of the Father commanding him to sell his business, give the money to the poor, and devote his life to healing the sick. He then undertook a two-year, 3,000-mile walking pilgrimage around the American West which took him across eastern Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and then to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he was arrested and jailed for vagrancy. In early 1894 he escaped and headed west, walking across Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona and into southern California, where he began his first efforts at healing with the indigenous people of the San Jacinto Valley. After two months, he again took up his pilgrimage and traveled east across the Mohave Desert, living on nothing but flour and water. 

In July 1895 he emerged as a Christlike healer in the Rio Grande villages south of Albuquerque. There, while treating hundreds of sick, suffering, and disabled people who flocked to Albuquerque's Old Town, he became famous. Crowds gathered about him daily, hoping to be cured of their diseases simply by clasping his hands. The following month he returned to Denver, but did not resume his healings until mid-September. During the next few weeks, his ministry drew tens of thousands of pilgrims to a small home in North Denver. Schlatter is said to have refused all rewards for his services. His manner of living was of the simplest, and he taught no new doctrine. He said only that he obeyed a power which he called Father, and from this power he received his healing virtue.

 On the night of November 13, 1895, he suddenly disappeared, leaving behind him a note in which he said that his mission was ended. Then, in 1897 news came out of Mexico that the healer's bones and possessions had been found on a mountainside in the Sierra Madre. At the same time, a New Mexico woman named Ada Morley published a book called The Life of the Harp in the Hand of the Harper which told of the healer's three-month retreat on her ranch in Datil, New Mexico, after his disappearance from Denver. The book, which carried the title the healer gave it, also contained a first-person description of his two-year pilgrimage, which he believed held the same significance for mankind as Christ's forty days in the wilderness. On departing the Morley ranch, Schlatter told Morley that God intended to establish New Jerusalem in the Datil Mountains, and the healer promised to return at that time. In the wake of the healer's death, several men claiming to be Francis Schlatter made headlines around the country in 1909, 1916, and 1922.

In 1906 Edgar Lee Hewett, who became a noted archaeologist and museum director, was conducting research near Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico, when his Mexican guide pointed out an unmarked grave. Ten years before, the guide said, he had come across the body of a dead man following a blizzard. From the guide's description, Hewett surmised that the dead man the guide had come across was Francis Schlatter, whom Hewett had met and whose healing sessions he observed in 1895. Hewett asked if any of the man's possessions had survived. The guide led him to the home of the jefe of Casas Grandes, and there Hewett saw Schlatter's Bible, saddle, and copper rod—which had become a mysterious hallmark of the healer from the time of his disappearance. Years later, in 1922, Hewett returned to Mexico and examined the copper rod again. By now the director of the School of American Research (now the School for Advanced Research) and the Museum of New Mexico, he showed interest in the rod and made a donation to the village of Casas Grandes to hire a teacher. Back in Santa Fe, a few weeks later, he received a heavy, burlap-wrapped package, and inside was Francis Schlatter's copper rod. He placed the rod in the collections of the two institutions he directed, which shared space in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, N.M. Today the rod lies in the collections of the New Mexico History Museum in the Palace of the Governors.

Almost immediately after reports came out of Mexico announcing the healer's death, skepticism arose. Ada Morley, who had visited at length with Schlatter during his three-month stay at her ranch in New Mexico in early 1896, had her doubts. "The men who found the skeleton declared to have been [Schlatter's]," she said, "say it was resting as though it had never been disturbed. I know the coyotes would never have left it so if it had ever lain there bearing flesh." The New York Times expressed doubts as well. "It does not appear that the human remains were actually identified as Schlatter's," the newspaper stated on June 19, 1897, "or that any identification was possible." However, the presence of the healer's possessions at the scene, especially his copper rod, convinced most people otherwise.

Over the next twenty-five years, several men arose claiming to be Francis Schlatter. One, a Presbyterian minister named Charles McLean, died in Hastings, Nebraska, in 1909, creating a controversy between skeptics and believers. Two others, August Schrader and Jacob Kunze, who formed a healing team that operated between 1908 and 1917, were arrested and jailed in 1916 for mail fraud. A final so-called imposter died in St. Louis, Missouri, in October 1922.

During the second half of the twentieth century, a renewed interest in Schlatter brought with it speculation about the claim of the healer who had died in St. Louis. Most recently, The Vanishing Messiah: The Life and Resurrections of Francis Schlatter (2016), argues that the healer conspired to stage his death in the mountains of Mexico and returned to the United States to continue healing in the eastern and southern parts of the country until his death in St. Louis in 1922. This author's claim rests in part on the discovery of a largely forgotten autobiography in the Library of Congress entitled Modern Miracles of Healing: A True Account of the Life, Works and Wanderings of Francis Schlatter, the Healer, attributed to "Francis Schlatter, The Alsacian," and published in 1903.

The New Mexico Historical Review gives the following account by Ferenc M. Szasz. in "Francis Schlatter: The Healer of the Southwest. "

It was the Fall of 1895 and over a thousand people were lined up in Denver to be touched by a German immigrant who bore a startling resemblance to the pictures of Jesus. They would walk up a wooden platform, grasp the hands of the man-he would then offer a short prayer-and they would walk away. Many testified to miraculous cures. Moreover, the man took no payment for any of this. 

"I have no use for money," he said. Whenever people thanked him, he
replied, "Don't thank me; thank the Heavenly Father. Put your faith in him, not in me. I have no power but what he gives me through my faith. He will give you the same." 

The man was Fran-cis Schlatter, "The New Mexico Messiah," "The Healer," "EI Gran Hombre," and his is one of the most remarkable stories of the Southwest during the 1890s.

Francis Schlatter was born on April 29, 1856 in the French Province of Alsace-Lorraine. His parents were German peasants and he quit school at fourteen to learn the trade of shoemaker. Born a Roman Catholic, he remained one throughout his life. When his parents died, he emigrated to America, where he arrived around 1884. He spent several years in New York City and in Jamesport, Long Island, working both as a shoemaker and as a fireman on the local steamboats. In the Fall of 1892 he arrived in Denver and set up shop, first on Stout Street and later on Downing Avenue.  

While working at his trade in Denver, he cured a friend by let- ter. With this he began to feel that "The Father" had chosen him to perform great deeds of healing. First, however, he would have to be tested. So, in July of 1893 he left Denver in the rain, with only $3 in his pocket, and began to wander across the western United States. He had no itinerary but simply followed the voice of The Father.
His wanderings took almost two years. From Denver he walked through Kansas, stopping at Clay Center, Topeka and Lawrence. At Kansas City, he turned south where he eventually entered Indian Territory. When he came to Hot Springs, Arkansas, he was arrested for vagrancy, given 50 lashes, and thrown in jail for five months. When he was released, he traveled through Texas where he was again arrested at Throckmorton and spent three more days in jail. From there he went to EI Paso, across the desert to Yuma and finally to San Diego. He began healing in the San Diego area during July, 1894 (where he was robbed by a fellow wanderer).
Then he journeyed to San Francisco, eventually crossed the Mojave, and rested a few months herding sheep with some Navajo Indians around Flagstaff, Arizona. Since he had little money, he either begged food or did without. Although friendly railroad men offered him rides on occasion, he walked most of the way, usually barefoot. His fellow itinerants poked fun at "that crazy shoemaker," as they called him, but they were also somewhat in awe of him. He built a following, and eventually gathered large crowds in Albuquerque, but soon left abruptly, headed for Denver.

"Denver was as amazed as Albuquerque had been, The streetcars were crowded with the faithful, the scoffers, and the merely curious. The lines began to form before dawn and during the day small boys moved among them selling iced drinks, popcorn, and sandwiches. Some entrepreneurs arrived early, in order to sell their places in line to latecomers. When an official of the Union Pacific railroad felt himself cured of deafness, he offered his employees free trips to Denver. Special trains were also run from
Albuquerque and Omaha. The story was even carried in easternpapers. "The work of this man of faith," remarked one reporter, "is one of the greatest sensations in Denver for years."
Denver's doctors and clergymen were irate, but their denunciations proved no match for the testimonials of miraculous cures. So many people tried to withdraw their children from the Colorado Springs State Institute for the Deaf and Blind that the officials sought (unsuccessfully) to have Schlatter visit their institution.
Despite persistent scoffing, many of the cures were verified by outsiders. Several people signed affidavits while other cures were attested to by skeptical reporters. "'Faith moveth mountains,' "remarked Joseph Emerson Smith, who, covered the story for the Denver Post. "Now, after 46 years, I am still unable to account otherwise for the healings I saw."
Some rascals tried to make money from this excitement by selling handkerchiefs (supposedly blessed by Schlatter) as far away as the East Coast. The Federal government indicted them for using the mails to defraud, and it had plans to call Schlatter in as a witness against them. Before any action could be taken, however, Schlatter disappeared. 

On the morning of November 14, 1895, Fox and his wife went in to wake the healer, only to find a note pinned to the pillow of his cot: "Mr. Fox-My mission is finished. Father takes me away. Goodbye. [signed] Francis Schlatter."says NEW MEXICO HISTORICAL REVIEW, 1979.

The Denver papers then began a hunt for Schlatter as if he were public enemy number one. Sightings were reported in every area of the state and in Kansas City and Omaha. The hundreds of people who had come to see him voiced their disappointment, and souvenir hunters tore down the fence surrounding Fox's house. 

"Meanwhile, Schlatter and Butte, his big white horse, were slowlyriding south into New Mexico. In mid-December he was spotted in the Santa Fe area and he spent time healing in Pena Blanca, San- to Domingo, and Bernalillo. Several prominent citizens urged him to return to Albuquerque, but he refused to commit himself. He would go where The Father wished, he said. When word of his whereabouts spread, numerous packages and letters were sent to him care of the Postmaster of Santa Fe: "Suffering humanity outside of New Mexico," remarked a Santa Fe editor, "is trying hard to definitely locate Schlatter, the healer. "

Early in January Schlatter quietly appeared at the Morley ranch in Datil (near Socorro). There he met a sympathetic listener in Mrs. Ada Morley (Jarrett) who gladly housed him for the winter months. "The Father has directed me to a safe retreat," he told her. "I must restore my spiritual powers in seclusion and prayer."
For three months Schlatter stayed in an upstairs room at then Morley household, venturing out only when the coast was clear. During that time he alternately rested and exercised by swinging a large copper rod over his head, as a drum major might swing a baton. He said that The Father had told him this was necessary or he would lose his power. He and Mrs. Morley had long conversations during the winter and, with his permission, she copied them
down in a book later published under the title The Life of the Harp in the Hand of the Harper (Denver, 1897). Only three copies of this volume are still extant.
"Historians owe a great debt of gratitude to Mrs. Morley, for this little book provides the only reliable source for Schlatter's ideas and social attitudes. Here he elaborated on his views of The Father, his impressions of the truth of reincarnation, his criticism of American society, and his vision of the coming New Jerusalem.

"When spring arrived, Schlatter informed his hostess that it wastime for him to leave. Word had leaked out as to his whereabouts  and people were beginning to seek his aid at the ranch. After bid- ding Mrs. Morley goodbye, he headed south. He was spotted near Silver City on April 8, but he appeared to be avoiding settled areas. 26 He crossed the line into Mexico a few days later," says reports in New Mexico.
 

For more than  twenty years afterward, imposters claiming to be Schlatter appeared intermittently across the nation. Chicago, New York City, Canton, Ohio, central Nebraska, Los Angeles, Long Beach, and St. Louis all produced healers who said they were he.

But there was a key difference between Schlatter and his imposters: They almost always took money. Schlatter himself lived only about a year after he left the Morley Ranch. His death occurred sometime in 1897 in Chihuahua, Old Mexico. Rumors of his death spread in the spring of 1897, but they were discounted by his followers. His passing was reported in 1901 by H. F. Gray, a Los Angeles doctor, and this was confirmed five years later by archaeologist Edgar L. Hewett. 

Hewett tells it this way:

 "In the spring of 1906 he was surveying the eastern slope of the Sierra Madres, near Casas Grandes, about 150 miles south of the American border. Here he heard the story of Schlatter's death from his Mexican guide. Several years earlier the guide had one day found a white horse standing by a man he assumed was sleeping. When he ran to get the village authorities, they
discovered that the man was dead. "Francis Schlatter" was written on the flyleaf of the Bible in the saddle bags and a large copper rod lay nearby. 

After Hewett donated a check to the village educational fund, the jefe politico of Casas Grandes gave him the rod. Hewett, in turn, donated it to the Museum of New Mexico, where it now lies. 28 Thus, while much of the western United States was seeking Schlatter, the healer had quietly passed away in a tiny Mexican village.

Francis Schlatter was not the first American to heal by faith, of course, and numerous such healers exist today: Kathryn Kuhlman of Minneapolis, Oral Roberts of Tulsa, the "psychic surgeons" of the Philippine Islands, and numerous lesser-known Pentecostals are all very much in evidence. 

 But Schlatter can best be understood as a product of the 1890s, a period which could justly be considered an age of transition in American life. American culture, according to NEW MEXICO HISTORICAL REVIEW 1979,  in the 1890s was undergoing major shifts in two areas especially:
(1) the relationship between rich and poor; and (2) discoveries in
the world of medicine.
 

Historians agree that the "Gay Nineties" hardly deserve their sobriquet. A far better nickname would be the "Grim Ninetles" for the depression which lasted from 1893 to 1897-without any governmental intervention, may well have been the nation's worst. 

The violent strikes at Homestead, Pennsylvania (1892) and Pullman, Illinois (1894) were just the most spectacular of thousands of smaller labor management conflicts. The election of 1896, which pitted Democrat and Populist William Jennings Bryan against Republican William McKinley, saw America split along lines of poor against rich. The nation was more divided in 1896 than in any other election, with the possible exception of 1936. In 1892 Episcopal priest John J. McCook, an expert on the matter, estimated that there were perhaps 50,000 unemployed men roaming the land. One of these gentlemen of the road, Connecticut Fatty, told McCook that there were only two truly happy people in the world; the millionaire and the bum. During the 1890s, it seemed, there were plenty of both.

Francis Schlatter was very much a part of this milieu. He denounced American society for its love of money and for its injustice to the working classes. 

"The moneyed few," he said, "are the bloodsucking parasites on the common people." 

Moreover, he interpreted the message of Jesus of Nazareth as utopian socialism.

"Never forget," he told Mrs. Morley, "I was a workingman. It's a devilish system! It's the cursed institution and those who uphold it will reap their reward. If they sow the wind they will reap the whirlwind. That is the law from on high. Have they clothed the naked, fed the hungry? Have they housed the homeless? Have they protected the widow and orphan?

"There has been no peace since Adam. Is not 6,000 years enough? How long must they suffer? But the day cometh when the promises for thousands of years shall be fulfilled. He will show the world unmistakably that He is the Lord their God and they are His people. Then we shall have peace, once and forever. "

"Yet Schlatter was not a political person. He despaired of political solutions. It would serve no purpose to give women the franchise; it would do no good to vote for the Populists. It was too late. The end of time was approaching. Schlatter predicted that in 1899 there would be a terrible war between the gold powers and the laboring classes," according to SZASZ in: FRANCIS SCHLATTER.

(He missed the McKinley-Bryan election by only three years). 

After the confrontation, he said, the Lord would establish a New Jerusalem in America. It would be located in Datil, New Mexico. Francis Schlatter was a product of the social unrest of the 1890s. Not without reason was he called "the democrat's Jesus." The 1890s were also a great age of transition for the world of American medicine. The age of scientific medicine was dawning, but it had not yet arrived. In Principles and Practices of Medicine (1892), the chief textbook of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, Dr. William Osler confessed that modern medicine could cure only four or five diseases. Thanks to the discoveries of Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Joseph Lister, medicine was able to prevent many' infections-antiseptic measures during surgery could halt infection; clean drinking water could stop the spread of cholera and typhoid; doctors could vaccinate against smallpox; quinine could alleviate malarial fevers. But actual cures were limited to the fingers of one hand. These were probably the "deficiency diseases," such as scurvy and beriberi, which could be corrected by proper diet. The miracle drugs of sulpha, penicillin, and the like were all products of the twentieth century."