Passionate Pilgrim

by Antoinette May

A Mexican love song called her "La Peregrina"--The Pilgrim - for Alma Reed's adventures as a journalist and explorer drew her around the globe, to the fabled and mysterious sites of lost civilizations. But her heart remained in the Yucatan, where she would be buried alongside her celebrated murdered lover, the Abraham Lincoln of Mexico. This is the first biography ever to recount Reed's remarkable story - as dramatic and romantic as the chronicles of Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham. Born in the gold-rush boomtown of San Francisco in 1889, Reed shocked her family by determining to become a writer. In an era when most women's vocation was marriage, she got a job at the San Francisco Call. It was a "woman's beat" - writing feature stories on the poor under the byline Mrs. Goodfellow - but Reed used it to jog the public conscience, forcing the state to spare a Mexican boy and to reform its laws on capital punishment. That campaign won her a tour of Mexico, where she would meet a lifelong fr