Mules

Mules are recurring working animals in Lizzy Enders’s story, linking the long journey on the Santa Fe Trail to the convent in Santa Fe. They carry supplies, are packed as the caravan resumes its journey after Mama’s burial, and appear again in the Bishop’s stable, where the mysterious carpenter feeds them. Their brief appearances are practical rather than individualized: the narrative does not give them names or private histories. Yet the Mules occupy a world shaped by human need, danger, care, and religious uncertainty, and one remembered tale makes their bodies part of the hazards imagined along the Trail.

The caravan and its cargo

When Mr. Enders agrees to bring Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy’s grandniece, Elinora, to the girls’ school in Santa Fe, the family travels with a caravan that includes four Mules. They carry cargo, books and paper, and supplies for the school, among them cutlery, dinnerware, woolens, calico, and canned goods. The Mules are thus part of a journey with several purposes: they bear the material provisions needed by the school while the family also makes its way toward a planned trading trip on the Gila Trail and a later journey to Colorado.

The trip takes fifty days up to Mama’s death, and still more travel remains. Bishop Lamy had asked that Elinora experience travel on the Santa Fe Trail rather than take the train as far as the railroad reached in southeastern Colorado. Against that background, the Mules belong to the slow, physically burdened movement of the caravan. The account gives a precise number and a cargo list, but does not describe individual animals or specify which supplies each carries. Their importance is conveyed through the work assigned to them, not through separate characterization.

A story carried into the burial scene

After Mama dies, Lizzy helps set stones over her grave. A fragment of a dream brings back a tale Elinora had told her: William Becknell had cut off his Mules’ ears so that he could drink their blood while crossing a fifty-mile dry plain. Lizzy remembers the story while kneeling in the cold and placing stones on Mama. The account presents this as a recollection within a dreamlike moment, not as an event Lizzy witnesses herself. Its place in the scene nevertheless joins the Mules to the journey’s imagined extremity: the remembered story turns the animals into evidence of how desperate a traveler might become in a landscape of scarcity.

The contrast with the burial itself is stark. Around Mama’s grave, the travelers perform specific acts of care and departure: stones are placed, underbrush is spread over them, the Mules are packed, and the wagons are checked before the caravan moves on. Lizzy watches her father secure the water buckets and feed box and prepare the animals for the road. The Mules’ work is part of the practical sequence that makes leaving possible, even as Lizzy experiences the departure as the painful act of leaving her mother behind. The animals are not given her grief, but their packing marks its consequence in action: the family must resume its journey.

At the convent

The Mules appear again in Santa Fe, where the beggar carpenter is found feeding the Bishop’s white Mules. This brief encounter places him among the ordinary work of the household rather than presenting him first as a supernatural figure. The animals are the Bishop’s, and feeding them is a concrete act of attention that Lizzy observes before she later asks the Bishop to consider giving the hungry carpenter work. The scene contributes to the story’s gradual association of the carpenter with practical kindness, without establishing that the Mules themselves recognize or respond to anything miraculous.

Their presence also connects the distant Trail scenes with the convent’s daily life. On the road, the Mules bear the caravan’s school provisions and are packed as the travelers leave the grave. In Santa Fe, they are part of the Bishop’s stable and receive care from a stranger who has come seeking help. The change in setting changes what the animals reveal: first, the material demands of travel; later, the carpenter’s place within a community of work and need.

Narrative significance

The story does not make the Mules independent protagonists, and it offers no account of their thoughts, temperaments, or eventual fates. Instead, it repeatedly shows people arranging their lives around the animals’ labor: loading them with supplies, packing them for departure, and feeding them in the stable. This limited but consistent presence makes the Mules more than passing scenery. They help give the journey its material scale, and their care becomes one of the visible tasks through which hardship is managed.

The tale about Becknell’s Mules adds a darker register to that practical role. In Lizzy’s remembered fragment, the animals’ bodies are caught up in a story of survival; at Mama’s grave, they are part of the preparations that carry the living onward. Later, the carpenter’s act of feeding the Bishop’s white Mules belongs to a quieter pattern of care. Across these moments, the animals connect danger, departure, and kindness without resolving the story’s larger uncertainty about miracles. Their narrative function is grounded in what people do to and for them—and in what their presence makes possible on the road.