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The story of Edith Warner, the woman who lived in the small house at Otowi from 1928 to 1951, is one of the most captivating in Northern New Mexico's history.
Warner cherished her simple life, studying the natural world of the
Ro Grande amid the mesa and canyon country while sharing time with her neighbors at San Ildefonso Pueblo and with visiting scientists who worked on the secret Manhattan Project up in Los Alamos.
Her story has been presented before, notably in Peggy Pond Church's 1959 history, The House at Otowi Bridge, and in a 1966 fictionalized account by Frank Waters called The Woman at Otowi Crossing that was the basis for American composer Stephen Paulus' 1995 opera of the
same name.
"I read the Waters book years ago, and I thought Edith's name was Helen," said Patrick Burns, editor of a new book that focuses on Warner's own writings. "Then I read Church's book, and I thought her name was Peggy. Years later, in the 1990s, I decided to find Edith's own writings and piece together the real story. That began this quest."
Burns, an Albuquerque native who teaches music to grade school kids in White Rock, was fascinated by the letters Warner sent to her family in Pennsylvania each Christmas. They told the story of a much different woman than the world thought it knew from Waters' book.
"I had read that and so I thought Edith had a lover and that she was a divorcee who abandoned an alcoholic millionaire husband and a 2-year-old child to come here," he said.
In his research for In the Shadow of Los Alamos: Selected Writings of Edith Warner (University of New Mexico Press, 2001), Burns discovered that Warner was, instead, a modest person with a mystical bent - he refers to her in the text as a "complex and clairvoyant woman." She also was a writer, and beginning in 1993, he began to seek out the materials she had penned.
His book includes letters, published and unpublished essays, journal entries salvaged by various friends from the original (which was burned after Warner's death at her request), and a wonderful selection of photographs. The editor provides a useful introduction outlining Warner's life and setting it...