Messiah: The Life and Times of Francis Schlatter

While living in Denver in the early 1890s, Francis Schlatter, a poor immigrant cobbler from Alsace-Lorraine, heard a voice inside his head that told him to put down his tools and go outside and walk east. For several years Schlatter, a deeply pious man, had been aware that he possessed the potential to cure people of their afflictions if he could only muster enough faith; the time to test that faith had arrived. So began a grueling two-year journey on foot that took him as far east as Hot Springs, Arkansas, then back across the Southwest to San Diego, north to San Francisco, then east to Arizona and New Mexico. In the summer and fall of 1895, first in Albuquerque then in Denver, he began to treat hundreds of people a day. Word of his miraculous power ran like wildfire all over the Southwest. Appalled by the carnival atmosphere he encountered in Denver, Schlatter slipped away into the wilds of New Mexico, finally into Old Mexico, where he died under mysterious circumstances in the spring of 1897. Charlatan or saint? Healer or fraud? The question remains. Even his detractors acknowledged the genuine compassion that people felt in his presence. Most telling was the fact that he never took a dime for the therapies he performed. A hundred years ago Francis Schlatter was one of the best-known figures in the Southwest; since then he has literally fallen off the map. In this gripping and powerful narrative, based on contemporary newspaper accounts and a memoir that Schlatter dictated to a friend before he died in Mexico, Conger Beasley, Jr. reconstructs the life and times of this remarkable man.