Note 3 — Chapter I · SANTA FE—THE ROYAL CITY OF SAINT FRANCIS’S HOLY FAITH

General Lew Wallace, while governor of New Mexico, wrote the last three books of “Ben Hur” in the old Palace. “When in the city,” he informed a correspondent, as quoted in Twitchell’s “Leading Facts of New Mexico History,” “my habit was to shut myself night after night in the bedroom back of the executive office proper, and write there till after twelve o’clock.... The retirement, impenetrable to incoming sound, was as profound as a cavern’s.”