Erna Fergusson — Dancing Gods (1931), my Southwest (1940), New Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples (1951) & the Indian Detours Founding

By Josh Eldred · New Mexico Literacy Project · May 13, 2026 · ~9,000 words

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

In 1921, in Albuquerque, a thirty-three-year-old Red Cross veteran and Albuquerque Herald reporter named Erna Mary Fergusson started a small business with her friend Ethel Hickey. They called it Koshare Tours. They borrowed a Cadillac, recruited a few bilingual women as guides, and began taking Eastern visitors by car to Pueblo dances and Hispano village fiestas. Five years later the Fred Harvey Company bought the operation, relaunched it as the Indian Detours, and Erna Fergusson became chief trainer of the first generation of Couriers — the famous young women whose photographs in concho belts and squash blossom necklaces became the dominant image of Southwest cultural tourism between the wars. Across the next thirty-five years she wrote for Alfred A. Knopf a dozen books on the Southwest and Latin America, founded the popular tri-cultural framework of New Mexico's history in Pageant of Three Peoples (Knopf 1951), and remained — until her death in Albuquerque on July 30, 1964 — the most consequential interpreter of New Mexico to itself and to the country. This is the collector's reference.

A Huning Granddaughter, a Fergusson Daughter, Eldest of Four

Erna Mary Fergusson (January 10, 1888 — July 30, 1964, closed pool) was born in Albuquerque, the eldest of four children of Harvey Butler Fergusson and Clara Mary Huning Fergusson. The Fergusson family combined two of the most prominent territorial-period Albuquerque lineages.

Her father, Harvey Butler Fergusson (September 9, 1848 — June 10, 1915), was an Albuquerque attorney and the principal New Mexico political figure of the late territorial period. He served as Delegate to Congress from the New Mexico Territory to the 55th Congress (March 1897 — March 1899), authored the Fergusson Act of June 21, 1898 — the federal legislation that granted New Mexico four million acres of public land for the support of common schools and the territorial university (the foundation of UNM's modern endowment) — and after statehood returned to Congress as US Representative from 1912-1915.

Her mother, Clara Mary Huning Fergusson (1865-1950), was the daughter of Franz Huning (1827-1905), the German-immigrant Albuquerque merchant who arrived along the Santa Fe Trail in the 1850s, built one of the principal mercantile fortunes of New Mexico territorial commerce, and constructed the 1883 Huning Castle on what was then a seven-hundred-acre estate at 15th Street and Central Avenue NW. Franz Huning was one of the founding figures of Anglo Albuquerque; Clara was his daughter and Erna was his granddaughter.

The four Fergusson siblings — Erna (1888), Harvey (1890), Francis (1904), and Lina ("Li") Browne — grew up at La Glorieta, the family home at 1801 Central Avenue NW that Franz Huning had deeded to Clara on her 1887 marriage to Harvey Butler Fergusson. La Glorieta survived the twentieth century — it still stands and now houses the Manzano Day School — making it one of the most architecturally significant surviving Albuquerque buildings of the territorial-into-early-statehood transition. The Huning Castle did not survive: declared structurally unsafe in 1954, the building was demolished in 1955 to make way for what is now a parking lot, one of the largest Albuquerque architectural losses of the postwar period. The Albuquerque Museum holds carved capitals salvaged from the building.

Erna attended the University of New Mexico (degree 1912) and Columbia University Teachers College (MA in education). She returned to Albuquerque after Columbia and worked as a Red Cross relief worker during the influenza pandemic and World War I, then as a reporter for the Albuquerque Herald (1918-1922) and as a contributor to the New Mexico Highway Journal. The Herald years gave her the practical Southwest contacts — Pueblo governors, Hispano village leaders, ranchers, traders, archaeologists — that would later become the Koshare Tours network and the Knopf book material.

She never married. She lived at La Glorieta as her adult home base, traveled extensively for the Knopf books across the 1930s through 1950s, was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of New Mexico in 1943, and remained an active Albuquerque civic figure until her July 30, 1964 death. Her body was cremated and her ashes scattered over the West Mesa above Albuquerque, the high desert plateau that she had crossed countless times in the Koshare Tours Cadillacs and the Indian Detours Pierce-Arrows.

Koshare Tours (1921) and the Fred Harvey Indian Detours (1926-1939)

In 1921 Erna Fergusson and her business partner Ethel Hickey founded Koshare Tours in Albuquerque — the first commercial automobile-tour operation taking paying visitors from Albuquerque and Santa Fe by car to Pueblo ceremonial dances, Hispano village fiestas, ruins sites (Bandelier, Pecos, Chaco Canyon, Aztec Ruins), and Native arts villages. The “Koshare” name was taken from the Tewa sacred clown society — a name that would not be used today, and that signaled both genuine cultural interest and the cultural-borrowing assumptions of the early-twentieth-century Anglo cultural-tourism economy.

Koshare Tours pioneered the model that would define Southwest cultural tourism for half a century: chauffeured automobiles (initially Cadillacs and Pierce-Arrows, later open-top tour cars built for the dust-and-altitude conditions), bilingual female guides trained in Pueblo and Hispano cultural history, advance arrangements with Pueblo governors for ceremonial visits, and overnight accommodations at the Fred Harvey Company's chain of hotels along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. The model worked — Eastern visitors paid substantial sums for guided car tours that delivered them to authentic cultural experiences that they could not have arranged on their own.

The 1926 Fred Harvey purchase. In 1926, Hunter Clarkson — the Fred Harvey Company executive who had been developing a parallel cultural-tourism program based at the company's flagship La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe and El Tovar Hotel at the Grand Canyon — purchased Erna Fergusson's Koshare Tours operation. The combined operation was relaunched as the Fred Harvey Indian Detours. Erna Fergusson became director of the Indian Detour Service and assumed responsibility for training the original generation of Couriers.

The Couriers. The first formal Courier training session began April 15, 1926; the first commercial Indian Detour ran on May 15, 1926. The Couriers were young women, typically college-educated, often from Eastern colleges but recruited specifically for Southwest interest and language skills (Spanish and basic Pueblo language fluency); dressed in the distinctive Indian Detours uniform with concho belts, velveteen blouses, squash blossom necklaces, and Stetson hats; trained over weeks in Pueblo and Hispano cultural history, archaeology, ethnobotany, and the protocol of visiting Pueblo ceremonial sites. Erna Fergusson was, in every functional sense, the original Fred Harvey Company courier — the model against which every Courier hired after her was measured. The Couriers led tours for approximately fourteen years until the program was scaled back in the late 1930s as the Depression contracted Fred Harvey's national operations and the approach of World War II ended cross-country leisure travel. The full arc of this vintage New Mexico travel and tourism era — from Koshare Tours through the Indian Detours' peak years — is one of the richest collecting veins in Southwest Americana.

The Couriers became the most photographed faces of Southwest cultural tourism between the wars. Their image — the young Anglo woman in Native-adjacent dress at the rim of the Grand Canyon, at the Pueblo of Taos, at Acoma — was reproduced in tens of thousands of postcards, Fred Harvey advertising, magazine features, and personal-family snapshots. Modern scholarship on the Indian Detours (Diane Thomas, Marta Weigle, D. H. Thomas) treats the Couriers as a complex phenomenon — a substantive cultural-translation function paired with the unmistakable Anglo cultural-borrowing aesthetic of the period.

Erna Fergusson left the day-to-day operational role at the Indian Detours after the Courier training years, but her relationship with the Fred Harvey organization continued — she wrote travel features for Fred Harvey publications and remained an informal consultant to the Detours through the 1930s.

Dancing Gods (Knopf 1931) — Indian Ceremonials of New Mexico and Arizona

Dancing Gods: Indian Ceremonials of New Mexico and Arizona (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1931 first edition) was Erna Fergusson's first major book and the foundational popularization of Pueblo, Diné (Navajo), and Apache ceremonial dance for a general American readership. The book draws directly on Fergusson's Koshare Tours and Fred Harvey Indian Detours experience escorting visitors to Pueblo dances across the 1921-1930 period — a decade of practical Southwest fieldwork that no academic anthropologist of the period could match for sheer attendance volume.

The book is a detailed seasonal calendar of public Pueblo ceremonies with extended chapters on the Hopi Snake Dance, Zuni Shalako, San Geronimo Day at Taos Pueblo, the Christmas matachines dances, Navajo Yei Bei Chai healing ceremonials, and Apache Mountain Spirit (Crown) dances. The treatment is sympathetic-outsider — Fergusson writes from sustained attendance and personal acquaintance with Pueblo and Diné consultants, but firmly within the comparative-religions framework of 1920s anthropology.

Modern reading. Dancing Gods is read in modern Pueblo and Diné scholarship with the standard cultural-protocol caution that applies to all 1920s-1930s Anglo cultural-tourism documentation of Native ceremonial life. The book is a period source, valuable for the calendar-and-protocol detail Fergusson recorded from sustained on-site observation, and complicated by the cultural-tourism economy it both documented and helped extend. Modern Pueblo scholarship — particularly the work coming out of the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center and Pueblo tribal historic preservation offices — provides the corrective framework for reading the period sources.

Points of issue for the 1931 Knopf first edition:

1. Alfred A. Knopf imprint on title page with Borzoi colophon.
2. 1931 copyright page with first-edition designation ("First Edition" or "Published [date], 1931" notation).
3. Original Knopf cloth binding with Native-design stamping characteristic of Knopf's Southwest publications of the period.
4. Decorative illustrations through the text: the 1931 edition includes Pueblo and Diné decorative motifs. Dealer and library catalog attributions of the decorative work have sometimes named Gustave Baumann and sometimes Frank Applegate; collectors should verify the precise illustration credit on the title page of the specific copy in hand before relying on a particular attribution.
5. Original Knopf dust jacket — scarce; surviving jacketed copies trade meaningfully higher than unjacketed firsts.

Reprintings: Dancing Gods was reprinted by Knopf in multiple editions across the 1930s and 1940s and was later reissued in University of New Mexico Press paperback editions. The 1931 Knopf first with original cloth and original dust jacket is the principal Tier 1 collector target.

my Southwest (Knopf 1940) and the Knopf Latin American Series

my Southwest (Alfred A. Knopf, 1940 first edition) is Erna Fergusson's substantial mid-career cultural-and-historical survey of the American Southwest — approximately five hundred pages covering New Mexico, Arizona, southern Colorado, southern Utah, and far West Texas. The book is a synthesis of her preceding two decades of Southwest travel and Indian Detours work and is the most-read of her Southwest titles. It is the mid-twentieth-century standard popular survey of the region, read by tens of thousands of Eastern visitors before their first Southwest trips and assigned in New Mexico-history and Southwest-studies courses across the postwar decades.

The book takes a place-by-place narrative approach — chapters on Santa Fe, on Albuquerque, on Taos, on the Pueblo country, on the Navajo Nation, on the Hopi mesas, on Arizona's Spanish-and-Anglo cattle country, on the West Texas border — and weaves together cultural history, geography, ethnography (in the period framework), and travel observation. The Knopf design is the standard mid-century cloth-and-dust-jacket trade format; the 1940 first edition with original dust jacket is the principal Tier 1 target.

The Knopf Latin American series. Across the 1930s through 1950s Erna Fergusson published a substantial Latin American travel-and-cultural series with Alfred A. Knopf — the series that established her as a serious cultural-travel writer beyond the Southwest and as one of Knopf's most consistent mid-list authors of the period. Fiesta in Mexico (Knopf 1934 first edition) was the first of the Latin American books, drawing on multiple Mexico research trips across the 1920s and early 1930s and on her sustained relationship with the Mexican cultural-tourism organizations promoting interior travel after the consolidation of the Mexican Revolution. Guatemala (Knopf 1937 first), Venezuela (Knopf 1939 first), My Hawaii (Knopf 1942 first — the Hawaii book uses the "Our" construction parallel to my Southwest), Chile (Knopf 1943 first), and Cuba (Knopf 1946 first) followed across the war and immediate postwar years. Mexico Revisited (Knopf 1955 first) is the late-career return to Mexico after a twenty-year gap.

The Knopf Latin American books are less collected than the Southwest titles but appear regularly in Erna Fergusson estate accumulations and in mid-century Knopf collector libraries. Fine firsts with original Knopf dust jackets trade in the low to mid three-figure range; signed copies and exceptional-condition copies meaningfully higher.

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Erna Fergusson's Albuquerque (Merle Armitage Editions 1947)

Erna Fergusson's Albuquerque (Merle Armitage Editions, Los Angeles, 1947 first edition, eighty-seven pages, drawings by Li Browne) is the most-collected Erna Fergusson title for Albuquerque-specific collectors and one of the most desirable mid-century Albuquerque local-history collector's editions overall.

Merle Armitage was a Los Angeles-based book designer, opera impresario, and small-press publisher with a distinctive modernist typographic sensibility — Armitage Editions produced a limited series of beautifully designed small-format volumes on Southwest and Western American subjects across the 1940s and 1950s. The 1947 Albuquerque book is a characteristic Armitage production: small format, rubricated title page, red frontispiece, black-and-white plates, one color plate, Li Browne's pen-and-ink drawings throughout, and Armitage's signature modernist sans-serif display typography paired with classical text faces.

Li Browne — the artist who provided the drawings — was Erna's younger sister Lina Fergusson Browne, the visual-artist sibling of the four Fergussons. The collaboration between the eldest and youngest Fergusson siblings on the 1947 Albuquerque book gives the volume an additional family-history dimension.

The text covers Albuquerque's Spanish colonial founding (1706 by Provincial Governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdés, who named the village for the tenth Duke of Alburquerque, Don Francisco Fernández de la Cueva, Viceroy of New Spain), the Mexican period, the territorial period including the 1862 Confederate occupation of the city by Henry Sibley's invasion forces (defeated at Glorieta Pass), the railroad arrival in 1880 (the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway bypassed Old Town and created the modern downtown a mile to the east), the early-twentieth-century transformation of Albuquerque into a tourist-and-tuberculosis-sanatorium city, and the mid-century postwar transformation into an air-base city (Kirtland Field, later Kirtland AFB, founded 1939; Sandia Base 1945). The book also includes original interview material with Elfego Baca — the legendary nineteenth-century Hispano lawyer and Socorro County sheriff who famously survived the 1884 thirty-three-hour Frisco gunfight against eighty Texas cowboys at the village of Frisco (modern-day Reserve, NM). The Elfego Baca interview material is the most-cited primary source in Erna Fergusson's Albuquerque and a major item in Hispano New Mexico folk-history scholarship.

Collector market. The 1947 Merle Armitage first is scarce — print run was modest, the book has never been reprinted in its Armitage form, and signed copies (relatively common because Erna remained an active local figure until her 1964 death) trade in the upper three figures to low four figures. Unsigned fine copies in original Armitage wrappers in the mid to upper three figures. This is the most desirable Albuquerque collector's-edition local-history title of the entire mid-century period.

New Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples (Knopf 1951)

New Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples (Alfred A. Knopf, 1951 first edition) is Erna Fergusson's most consequential book in terms of cultural-historiographical impact and the standard popular survey of New Mexico history from publication through approximately the 1990s. The book popularized the "tri-cultural" framework: New Mexico as the product of three peoples — Pueblo Indians (and to a lesser extent in Fergusson's 1951 treatment, the Diné, Apache, and Utes); Hispano New Mexicans of Spanish colonial and Mexican descent (the descendants of the 1598 Oñate colonization, the 1610 founding of Santa Fe, the 1693 reconquest after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, and three centuries of Spanish and Mexican administration); and Anglo Americans from the 1846 territorial period forward.

The tri-cultural framework had been articulated earlier by anthropologists and folklorists — the Santa Fe Anglo intellectual circle had been working with versions of it across the 1920s and 1930s — but Fergusson's 1951 Knopf book made it the dominant popular self-understanding of New Mexico history for the next half-century. The framework structures the exhibition design at the Palace of the Governors, the New Mexico History Museum, the Albuquerque Museum, the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, and dozens of smaller New Mexico historical and cultural institutions. It is the framework most heritage-tourism organizations and museums still use to describe the state.

Modern critique. The tri-cultural framework has been substantially complicated and partially superseded in twenty-first-century New Mexico scholarship. The "three peoples" framing obscures the genocidal collisions of the Spanish-Pueblo and Anglo-Pueblo histories, the distinct experience of the Diné and Apache peoples (often folded into "Pueblo" in popular versions of the framework), the substantial Mexican-American post-1848 immigration that is not the same as Hispano colonial descent, the African American history of New Mexico, and the substantial Asian American and East Asian-immigrant communities in the railroad and mining periods. Modern New Mexico cultural-history scholarship uses more pluralistic and more historically specific frameworks. Fergusson's 1951 book is still in print (in UNM Press reprint editions) but is read alongside the modern correctives.

Fine signed firsts of Pageant of Three Peoples in original Knopf dust jacket are Tier 1 NM literary-history collector targets; unsigned firsts in fine condition with dust jacket are Tier 2; UNM Press paperback reprints are Tier 3.

Murder and Mystery in New Mexico — The Crime Anthology (Merle Armitage Editions 1948)

One of the least-known Fergusson titles among general collectors is Murder and Mystery in New Mexico (Merle Armitage Editions, Los Angeles, 1948) — a compilation of notable New Mexico crime cases and true-crime narratives assembled and introduced by Erna Fergusson in the year immediately following her 1947 Armitage Albuquerque book. The volume brings Fergusson's journalist's eye — trained at the Albuquerque Herald and sharpened across two decades of Southwest travel writing — to bear on the darker corners of New Mexico history: territorial-era outlaws, range wars, unsolved frontier murders, and the persistent violence that ran beneath the picturesque tri-cultural surface she was simultaneously describing in her more celebrated books.

First-edition points. The Merle Armitage imprint is the definitive identifier — same publisher as Erna Fergusson's Albuquerque (1947) and the same small-press Los Angeles modernist-design context. Armitage's signature production values apply: small format, characteristically typeset pages, and the limited-run production standard of the Armitage Editions series. The 1948 date is the first-edition year; there are no known reprints in the Armitage form, which makes the first edition the only edition for collectors. Condition presents challenges because the volumes were produced in modest print runs without the institutional-library durability of major trade publishers — copies in fine condition with original wrappers are meaningfully scarcer than copies in lesser condition.

Collector market position. Murder and Mystery in New Mexico is a solid Tier 2 target — a scarce Armitage small-press publication that surfaces in the market far less frequently than the major Knopf titles. I encounter this title maybe once every two years in estate pickups, typically in Albuquerque Anglo professional or academic family libraries where the Armitage Albuquerque book also appears. The two Armitage Fergusson titles naturally collect together — when I find one, I look hard for the other, and about a third of the time both are present in the same estate. The crime-anthology format and the true-crime subject matter attract a secondary collecting audience beyond pure Fergusson collectors: New Mexico criminal-history collectors, Southwest Americana assemblers, and Merle Armitage production-bibliography collectors all find the 1948 title compelling. Fine copies in original wrappers trade in the mid three-figure range when they appear; signed copies, which are uncommon, approach the low four figures. The Elfego Baca material in Erna Fergusson's Albuquerque (1947) provides natural cross-context — Baca, the legendary Socorro County sheriff-and-gunfighter who appears in the 1947 Albuquerque interview material, inhabited the exact territorial-era New Mexico violence that the 1948 crime anthology revisits.

The Fergusson Siblings: Harvey, Francis, Li — A New Mexico Literary Dynasty

Erna was the eldest of four siblings, each of whom had a distinguished but very different literary or artistic career. The combined Fergusson family output across the four siblings constitutes one of the most consequential single-family contributions to twentieth-century New Mexico literature and to American letters more broadly. Their father Harvey Butler Fergusson was the dominant New Mexico political figure of the territorial period; their maternal grandfather Franz Huning was the defining merchant-builder of nineteenth-century Albuquerque. The Fergussons are the closest thing New Mexico has to a literary dynasty in the traditional sense: a prominent political family whose children all turned to letters and whose books, taken together, constitute a generational portrait of New Mexico across the territorial-into-modern transition.

Harvey Fergusson (January 28, 1890 — August 27, 1971) was the novelist of the family. His "Followers of the Sun" trilogy — Blood of the Conquerors (Knopf 1921), Wolf Song (Knopf 1927), and In Those Days (Knopf 1929) — is the foundational fictional treatment of nineteenth-century New Mexico Hispano-and-Anglo collision. Other major Harvey Fergusson novels include Capitol Hill (Knopf 1923, on his Washington D.C. journalism years), Rio Grande (Knopf 1933), Grant of Kingdom (Morrow 1950), and the autobiographical Home in the West. Harvey began his career as a journalist in Washington D.C., Savannah, Richmond, and Chicago before turning to novels full-time in 1923, and relocated to Berkeley, California in the early 1940s where he spent the rest of his life. Documented in collector depth at /harvey-fergusson-blood-of-the-conquerors-collecting.

The Fergusson Family Library as a collecting category. Serious Southwest Americana collectors sometimes approach the Fergusson siblings as a paired collecting project — assembling first editions from both Erna and Harvey, and ideally from Francis as well. It is a coherent intellectual exercise: Erna's Dancing Gods and Pageant of Three Peoples from Knopf sit alongside Harvey's Blood of the Conquerors and Wolf Song from Knopf, published in the same Borzoi format by the same publisher across overlapping decades. Erna had the longer Knopf relationship — her first Knopf title came in 1931, and her last in 1955, a twenty-four year span. Harvey's Knopf relationship ran from Blood of the Conquerors in 1921 through the early 1930s before he moved to other publishers. But the Knopf overlap is real, and a Fergusson Family Library assembled in matching Borzoi firsts makes a visually and intellectually coherent collection. I have assembled partial Fergusson family sets a handful of times over the years — they reliably come in as estate-pickup units, because families who owned one sibling's books often owned the others'. When I find a box with both Erna and Harvey firsts, I know I am almost certainly in the library of someone who cared deeply about New Mexico literary history.

Francis Fergusson (1904 — December 19, 1986) was the literary critic of the family. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the 1920s, a Guggenheim Fellow, the first director of the Princeton Seminars in Literary Criticism (1949-1952; the program was later renamed the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism), and a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His The Idea of a Theater (Princeton University Press 1949) — a study of the dramatic structure across Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, Wagner, and modern drama — is a foundational mid-twentieth-century work of American dramatic and literary criticism and remains in print in the Princeton Classics series. Francis was the most academically distinguished of the Fergusson siblings outside of New Mexico.

Lina "Li" Fergusson Browne was the visual-artist sibling. Her pen-and-ink drawings illustrated Erna Fergusson's Albuquerque (Merle Armitage Editions 1947) — the collaboration between the eldest and youngest Fergusson siblings on the most beautifully designed Albuquerque local-history volume of the mid-century.

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Archives and Scholarship

The principal Erna Fergusson archive is the Erna Fergusson Papers MSS 45 at the University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research (CSWR) at Zimmerman Library. The finding aid is publicly available at the UNM CSWR digital archives. The collection includes Fergusson's manuscript drafts, correspondence with Alfred A. Knopf and the Knopf editorial staff across her thirty-five-year publishing relationship, correspondence with Pueblo governors and Native consultants on Dancing Gods and Pageant of Three Peoples, Indian Detours operational records, and her substantial correspondence with mid-century New Mexico intellectual figures.

CSWR also holds the Erna Fergusson Photograph Collection (PICT 000-045) — substantial period photographs from her Indian Detours and travel years; the Huning-Fergusson Family Photograph Collection — period family photographs of the Huning Castle, La Glorieta, and Albuquerque before redevelopment; and the Harvey Butler Fergusson Correspondence — her father's papers from his Congressional years. Researchers working on Erna Fergusson can do the bulk of primary-source work without leaving Zimmerman Library.

Additional Fergusson-related material is held at the Albuquerque Museum (the architectural fragments from the demolished Huning Castle, including a carved capital), the New Mexico History Museum at the Palace of the Governors (Indian Detours-period photographs and ephemera), and in the Knopf editorial archives at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin (Alfred A. Knopf's papers and the production records for the Fergusson Knopf titles).

Modern biographies and scholarly work. The standard modern overview is Robert Franklin Gish, Beautiful Swift Fox: Erna Fergusson and the Modern Southwest (Texas A&M University Press 1996) — Gish is the major modern scholar of the Fergusson siblings (he has also written extensively on Harvey Fergusson). Marta Weigle's edited collections on Santa Fe and Indian Detours women include substantial Fergusson material. The standard treatment of the Indian Detours is Diane Thomas, The Southwestern Indian Detours (1978).

Three-Tier Collector Market

Tier 1 — mid three figures to low four figures with signed/inscribed material. Signed Erna Fergusson's Albuquerque (Merle Armitage Editions 1947) with Li Browne drawings and original wrappers in fine condition is the apex Albuquerque-collector Fergusson trophy. Signed Dancing Gods (Knopf 1931) first edition in original cloth with original Knopf dust jacket; signed my Southwest (Knopf 1940) first in original dust jacket; signed New Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples (Knopf 1951) first in original dust jacket; signed Mexico Revisited (Knopf 1955) first; signed Fiesta in Mexico (Knopf 1934) first. Closed signature pool 1964 makes every confirmed signed Erna Fergusson a finite artifact; she was an active local figure across her sixty-year adult life and signed copies appear more often than for some other closed pools, but the supply is still finite.

Tier 2 — low to mid three figures. Unsigned Tier 1 firsts in fine condition with original Knopf dust jackets. The Knopf Latin American series: Fiesta in Mexico (Knopf 1934), Guatemala (Knopf 1937), Venezuela (Knopf 1939), My Hawaii (Knopf 1942), Chile (Knopf 1943), Cuba (Knopf 1946). UNM Press reprints of Pageant of Three Peoples and my Southwest with scholarly introductions. Robert Franklin Gish, Beautiful Swift Fox (Texas A&M 1996). Diane Thomas, The Southwestern Indian Detours (1978).

Tier 3 — under one hundred dollars. Knopf trade reprints across the mid-twentieth century of the major Southwest titles; UNM Press paperback editions of Pageant of Three Peoples and my Southwest; library-rebound copies; mass-market paperback reprints; Indian Detours-related popular histories and coffee-table books; academic monographs and journal-issue retrospectives on Fergusson and the Indian Detours.

NMLP Intake Position

Erna Fergusson books appear in NMLP donation pickups with unusual frequency given Erna's prominent Albuquerque civic and social role across her sixty-year adult life (1912-1964). She is also one of the very few twentieth-century New Mexico authors whose books are essentially universal in older Albuquerque Anglo bookcases — Pageant of Three Peoples in particular was a multi-generational gift book across the 1950s through 1980s.

Donor surface: Albuquerque Anglo professional retirees with Old Town, Country Club, Huning Castle neighborhood, North Valley, and Ridgecrest family-library accumulation; UNM faculty estates and emeritus donations (Erna's 1943 UNM Honorary D.Litt. anchored her in the UNM community across the postwar decades); Santa Fe Anglo retirees with Fred Harvey Indian Detours collector accumulation; the substantial Fred Harvey company memorabilia collector community (Fergusson is a foundational figure in Fred Harvey scholarship); the descendants of Indian Detours Couriers (the 1926-1939 Courier corps generated multi-generational family collections that surface in estate pickups across the Albuquerque-Santa Fe corridor); Albuquerque historical society members; and the substantial Hispano New Mexico family-history reader demographic (Pageant of Three Peoples and Erna Fergusson's Albuquerque are standard items in Hispano family libraries).

Tier 1 routes to specialist Southwest Americana dealers and auction houses (Heritage Auctions Books and Manuscripts, William Reese Company New Haven, PBA Galleries San Francisco, Bauman Rare Books, and local Albuquerque dealers including Treasure House Books in Old Town and Bookworks on Rio Grande Blvd). Tier 2 unsigned firsts through SellBooksABQ at 5445 Edith NE, Unit A in Albuquerque. Tier 3 trade-paperback Pageant of Three Peoples and my Southwest editions to APS Title I schools (these are standard New Mexico history reading-list titles in middle-school and high-school NM social studies curricula), UNM classroom-set acquisitions, NM Historical Society institutional donations, Hispano New Mexico cultural-heritage organization donations, and the regional research-library partnership network. Free statewide pickup — schedule your pickup or text/call 702-496-4214.

External References

• Wikipedia: Erna Fergusson
• Wikipedia: Harvey Butler Fergusson (father, Congressman)
• Wikipedia: Franz Huning (grandfather, builder of Huning Castle)
• Wikipedia: Harvey Fergusson (brother, novelist)
• Wikipedia: Francis Fergusson (brother, literary critic)
• Wikipedia: La Glorieta (family home, now Manzano Day School)
• UNM Center for Southwest Research — Erna Fergusson Papers MSS 45
• Albuquerque Library: Who Was Erna Fergusson?

Related on This Site

• Closed Signature Pools — Erna Fergusson (closed July 30, 1964), Harvey Fergusson (closed 1971), Francis Fergusson (closed 1986)
• Harvey Fergusson & Blood of the Conquerors — brother, novelist of the Followers of the Sun trilogy
• NM Spanish Colonial Historians — Pageant of Three Peoples tri-cultural framework foundation
• Willa Cather & Death Comes for the Archbishop — parallel Santa Fe Anglo cultural-tourism moment
• Mary Austin & The Land of Little Rain — parallel Santa Fe-period Anglo woman writer
• Collecting NM Pueblo Pottery Books — Indian Arts Fund / Indian Detours era cultural-tourism context
• Vintage NM Travel & Tourism Books — Fergusson's Indian Detours work and tourism writing in broader context of NM travel literature

Erna Fergusson: Primary Bibliography

The following is a working collector's bibliography of Fergusson's principal titles in first-edition form. Print runs, dust jacket survival rates, and signed-copy frequency vary substantially across the list; the tier designations above are the practical guide to relative scarcity and value.

• Dancing Gods: Indian Ceremonials of New Mexico and Arizona — Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1931. First edition. Knopf cloth with Native-design stamping; original Knopf dust jacket scarce. Tier 1.
• Fiesta in Mexico — Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1934. First edition. First of the Knopf Latin American series. Tier 2 unsigned, Tier 1 signed.
• Mexican Cookbook — University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1934; revised edition 1945. The UNM Press cookbook is among the more accessible Fergusson titles and appears frequently in estate pickups; the 1934 first is the collector target.
• Guatemala — Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1937. First edition. Tier 2.
• Venezuela — Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1939. First edition. Tier 2.
• my Southwest — Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1940. First edition. The major mid-career Southwest survey; Tier 1 signed, Tier 2 unsigned fine with jacket.
• My Hawaii — Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1942. First edition. The Hawaiian volume in the "Our" series; Tier 2.
• Chile — Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1943. First edition. Tier 2.
• Cuba — Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1946. First edition. Tier 2.
• Erna Fergusson's Albuquerque — Merle Armitage Editions, Los Angeles, 1947. 87 pages, drawings by Li Browne. The apex Albuquerque collector's title. Tier 1 signed and unsigned fine in original Armitage wrappers.
• Murder and Mystery in New Mexico — Merle Armitage Editions, Los Angeles, 1948. Scarce Armitage small-press publication. Tier 2.
• New Mexico: A Pageant of Three Peoples — Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1951. First edition. The most culturally consequential Fergusson title; Tier 1 signed, Tier 2 unsigned fine with jacket; Tier 3 UNM Press reprints.
• Mexico Revisited — Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1955. First edition. Late-career return to Mexico. Tier 1 signed, Tier 2 unsigned fine.

The Erna Fergusson Papers (MSS 45) at UNM's Center for Southwest Research hold correspondence and manuscript material bearing on the production histories of each of these titles; researchers tracing specific print runs or publication variants should begin there. The Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin holds the Knopf editorial archive, which contains the production records for the Knopf titles.

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