The family and I visited the Loretto Chapel in downtown Santa Fe to see the “Miraculous Stairs”, a 20-foot tall wooden spiral staircase built around 1880 without nails and without a center beam, which many claim makes it an impossibly free-standing object. The church has claimed that after their nuns prayed for help a mysterious man showed up with a donkey and a toolbox, St. Joseph himself (the patron saint of carpenters) and proceeded to build the stairs in one night. When done, he asked for no pay and then left, never to be heard from again.

I love mysteries, legends and myths, and I also love the truth. Like many other miraculous things, this story has been embellished and exaggerated to make it more fantastic and appealing, especially to those who already have faith in divine intervention. The tragedy of these kinds of legends is that they erase the human contributions and ascribe them to the divine, depriving history of the knowledge of the individual artistic genius, skill and imagination of the very real people (not gods) who’s work is the source of admiration.

The real carpenter was most likely a man named François-Jean Rochas, a reclusive rancher and woodworker who migrated to Santa Fe from France in the 1870’s and was murdered in 1894.