Sisters of Charity

Sister Blandina Segale never meant her book for print. At the End of the Santa Fe Trail is the diary she kept as letters to her sister, published in 1932 at a governor's urging. It tells of nursing a wounded member of Billy the Kid's gang in Trinidad and of the outlaw later sparing her stagecoach when he recognized her. She helped found St. Joseph Hospital in Albuquerque, returned to Cincinnati in 1897 and died there in 1941. In 2014 the Archdiocese of Santa Fe opened her cause for sainthood, the first it had ever opened.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Historic Marker Sisters of Charity The first Sisters of Charity arrived in New Mexico Territory in 1865 from Cincinnati at the request of Bishop Lamy with the mission of serving all people regardless of race, religion or ability to pay. Hundreds of sisters followed. They established some of the most significant institutions in the state including St. Vincent Hospital & Orphanage and St. Elizabeth Shelter for the Homeless in Santa Fe. Official Scenic Historic Marker Sisters Pauline Leo and Vincent O'Keefe, Civil War nurses, with Sisters Theodosia Farn and Catherine Mallon arrived in Santa Fe in 1865. Sister Mary de Sales Deheney, an Irish immigrant with an eighth-grade education, became the first woman doctor licensed in the Territory. Sister Blandina Segale, an Italian immigrant, authored At the End of the Santa Fe Trail. Hermana Dolores Chavez de Gutierrez, a New Mexico Territory native, became a benefactor of St. Vincent Hospital and Orphanage.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Palace of the Governors — 16 mi
  The long adobe on the north side of the Santa Fe plaza, called the oldest public building in continuous use in the country, though its own founding date is in dispute.
• Bandelier National Monument — 19 mi
  Rooms carved into soft volcanic tuff in Frijoles Canyon, named for a Swiss scholar who was led there in 1880 by a man from Cochiti Pueblo.
• Fuller Lodge — 26 mi
  The upright-log dining hall of a boys' ranch school, which fed and housed the Manhattan Project after the Army bought the school in 1942.
• Valles Caldera National Preserve — 29 mi
  A crater thirteen miles across, floored with grass, left by an eruption 1.25 million years ago and owned privately for 140 years under a law that called it vacant land.

More markers nearby

• Three Wise Women — steps away
• Maria Gertrudis Barceló, Doña Tules — steps away
• Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) — steps away
• Bicentennial Celebration / La Bajada — steps away