Smith agreed; he was taken aback, however, when Robert approached him in private shortly before their departure with a strange proposition: Would Smith agree to let him travel under the name “Smith” as his younger brother? Smith rejected the suggestion out of hand, and couldn’t help but think that some part of Robert was uncomfortable with being identifiably Jewish. Robert’s classmate Francis Fergusson later speculated, similarly, that his friend may have felt self-conscious about “his Jewishness and his wealth, and his eastern connections, and [that] his going to New Mexico was partly to
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