This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Naitameo.

She came from Nicaragua.

She came from Spanish parents,

Spanish nobility,

came from the family who had governed Nicaragua

since as far back as the 1600s.

But how she came to live in Nevada in the late 1870s, no one really knows.

But there, then, we find Ferminia Saris. She is just about 40. She is the mother of 4. She is quite

short. You can see that in an old portrait. but the broad shoulders you can also see.

She probably didn't have those when she first arrived.

She looked at a place, by all accounts, when she showed up in Virginia City, Nevada around 1879.

It had been a bustling boom town, but by the time she got there, the boom had been dampened,

first by a massive fire.

Then because the silver mines that had fueled its rise

had lost their shimmer.

Didn't seem to be much of value left in the hills.

But there was Ferminius Saris, looking like no one else they'd seen around there.

And Virginia City was used to strangers.

It was one of those Western Outposts that had drawn so many of the many immigrants who

had come to America seeking better lives, German and Dutch and

Scottish and Swedish and Chinese, there to try and pull those better lives directly out

...