by Karen Osborn
I promise you I will come down there to visit before summer. Maybe in April or May for a week or two. I can take the train. I have enough saved up for the ticket.
Your Son,
George
January 19, 1888
Dear Maggie,
I was glad to hear of Alex’s progress at the university. He is a bright young man and will do well in law or business, in whatever he endeavors. Our holiday was gay, filled with excitement and busy with preparations. George arrived December twenty-third with two other young men, all of them cowhands at the ranch George is working on. You can be assured there was plenty of merriment, food, and good company. George’s young friends were as sweet-natured as George himself, and both had excellent manners. I cannot picture the three of them driving cattle, with all the whooping and shouting and hard riding that seems a necessary part of that work. I venture that I would not recognize them if I saw them out on the open range.
Margaret was thrilled to have actual “cowboys” staying at the house and sharing our table. She asked every sort of question and spent hours sitting before the fire, listening to stories of cattle drives and ranging, with a deep glow in her eyes. “I’d go back with you, if they’d take a girl,” she told them one evening, and, of course, they all laughed.
“Really, I would,” she insisted.
Maggie, I believe she would. I am almost afraid she will cut off her hair and try to pass as one of them. Amy thinks her sister will change and become a lady during the next year or two. She relates several stories of young girls at her school who turned from boyish ways as they matured. In Margaret’s case, such a change would have to be an utter transformation, and while I pray for it, I am not at all certain it will come about.
Your Sister,
Abigail
June 6, 1888
Dear Maggie,
I have seen Sally Burton. She stopped here for nearly two weeks on her way east. She was traveling by railroad, and Clayton and I rode to the station to meet her. She confided in me that she has had great troubles because of her husband’s drinking. There are all kinds of saloons in California where they settled. Her daughter is married to a minister, and they have moved up to Oregon to live. Sally will stay in Virginia for a month or more, as her boys are big enough now to take care of the place. It was good to visit with her, but I hardly did recognize her after all these years. She has gotten heavier, and all her hair is gray.
She had word of Bea Manning, who moved to northern California after her husband died ten years ago. She has her own store, where she sells fashionable dresses, and has joined the suffrage ladies. I do think she is right and that we should get the vote.
You must visit with Sally while she is in Stillwater. I wonder what she will think of the transformations that have taken place.
Your Sister,
Abigail
September 20, 1888
Dear Maggie,
I was pleased to get your letter relating the visit you had with Sally Burton. But I must disagree with you over the causes you found for her hardships. I doubt her husband’s behavior would have altered had they stayed east of the Mississippi, and surely that is the origin of her troubles, not, as you put it, “a life spent in the wilderness of California.” Let me assure you, the California Sally has settled in is far from being a wilderness. There are large towns with streets and stores, schools and churches, and yes, saloons. But men who would do evil will find temptation wherever they may go.
Let me also assure you that my appearance is not “that of an old woman, completely worn by wind and sun and hardship.” My hair is still nearly all yellow, and while I do not look like a young girl, my complexion has not been “furrowed by the elements.” I will have my picture made immediately and sent, so that you can see for yourself that the west has not so altered me.
There was a spelling bee at the school yesterday, and it was well attended. Amelia Brown, the minister’s daughter, won the prize, which was a bound edition of Tennyson’s poems. There will be a neighborhood gathering this weekend, which promises to be lively. I have convinced Margaret to go and wear the new dress I have made her. You see, we are quite civilized here in the west.
Your Sister,
Abigail
April 17, 1889
Dear Maggie,
I was most distressed to hear from Amy that she was delivered early and the child was lost. She says the doctor reports it is a weakness in her constitution, but she was always a strong girl and as a child could work beside me the whole of the day, planting or caring for the little ones. I never knew her to tire.
I telegrammed that I would come east at once to assist her recovery, but today I received a note that she has nearly regained her strength and will return to the school to teach until the end of the year. She writes that I should not leave, especially now just when the planting will begin, and that she and Everett still plan to visit us in June, just two months away. Once again, I entrust her to your care. Perhaps I can convince her to stay with us the entire summer. I believe she needs the desert air.
Your Sister,
Abigail
January 2, 1890
Dear Maggie,
We spent Christmas Eve at the Sloaners’ house, which is nearly twelve miles from here. They are homesteading like us and attend the Methodist church. There were ten adults and several children, and we ate wild turkey, pheasant, squash, pumpkin, breads of all kinds, and corn pudding. I brought a dish I had made of the last of our potatoes, and the Porters brought oysters, a rare treat. The house was decorated with lace and pine branches, and there were small figures cut out of paper pressed to all the windows. A tree hung with candles filled the hallway.
Small gifts—handkerchiefs, sachets—were exchanged by all of the ladies. I made Margaret a dress of gray wool, trimmed in bright green, similar to one I saw in the National Cloak and Suit Company, with a tight waist, buttoning up the side, which Amy writes is quite the popular sort to wear. Margaret had wanted a new saddle, but if she was too terribly disappointed, she did not show it.
For me this Christmas there were paints Clayton had ordered and a new sketch book. I had sewn Clayton a shirt of white linen, and he laughed when he saw it, as he has little occasion here to wear it.
Maggie, your life sounds so filled with excitement. To have Robert’s wedding one month and the following month the birth of your first grandchild. I wish Irene and the baby the best of health.
Your Sister,
Abigail
May 21, 1890
Dear Maggie,
There is a heaviness that will not leave me since I read of Aunt Celia’s death. After Mother died, Aunt Celia wrote to me often, filling her letters with town gossip and news of Amy. Just last month she sent me a recipe for a butter cake that is most delicious and advised me to send Margaret away to school. She became, these last years, the mother I lost when I decided to stay in the west. And now she too is gone, lost to me even if I did return east.
This summer the heat has come early. Already, it rises off the desert in waves, by noon turning the land into a sea of red sand. The prickly pears blossom like mad, as if the abundance of light has forced their bright orange and pink outbursts. Our garden is thick with blue verbena. Clayton has bought a parrot from a Mexican, our latest “pet,” which he keeps in a cage made of willow twigs hung in the garden. He claims he will train it to speak English, but so far it only cocks its head to one side and spits out bits of Spanish.
Margaret is fifteen, and I had hoped that by now she would at least show some signs of becoming a young lady, but I am afraid she does not. This spring she has disappeared sometimes for much of the day, taking a horse and riding up into the mountains. Once she was gone for an entire day, and I feared she had run away as George did, but she returned in the evening tired and hungry, her skin burnt from riding out in the open.
She said she got lost up in the canyon, but Clayton fears there is a boy she is meeting. He rails at what he calls her decept
ions and threatens to hire a Mexican for the purpose of watching her. Their fights are awful to endure, the yelling and screaming, with Clayton calling her a whore and Margaret accusing him of every sort of cruelty. I should not go against my husband, but I believe, I know in my heart, she is only bewitched by the desert and cannot stop herself from riding all day up into it.
Your Sister,
Abigail
January 24, 1891
Dear Maggie,
This morning I write to you sitting beside our new cook stove, a Majestic range Clayton bought in December. I have baked seven loaves of bread, which has warmed the damp, drafty house. George was here for Christmas. Last summer he helped bring a herd of longhorn cows up from Mexico and said some of their horns were nearly five feet long and could easily rip a horse open!
“It’s time you were settled,” I told him.
“Come back home to live,” Clayton said, and told him there was land here he could have.
But George is set on working ranches. I guess he would not know what to do with himself here after the excitement of working with the herds. I can only hope he will meet some girl and she will make him settle down. But that is unlikely while he is living among cowhands and the herds.
The night before he left, he came to us and said that Margaret had begged him to take her with him up north to the open range. Maggie, you write that Susan is also strong-headed, but Margaret is sometimes beyond all sense. I had thought she would outgrow the notion that she could live like a boy, but she still has a child’s desire to do all that her older brother does.
Soon she will be grown and has received little schooling. A few years ago I wanted to send her away to school, as we did Amy, but she said she would never live in a town, where the houses are close together and where there are always people in the streets. Yet here in the valley she is too solitary, no young women to laugh with, no proper young men to socialize with.
Last spring and summer she often met Señora Teresa Martinez’s son, Ramon, when she rode out to repair the acequia. It is a chore she has helped with for years, and quite often they have done it together, as most repairs require more than two hands. She does not understand why, now that she is a young lady, she can no longer accompany a young man, especially one of Spanish descent, unchaperoned. Some mornings they were gone together for hours. Clayton said he would not allow it and often rode out after them. He never saw that they did anything together other than repair the acequia; indeed, they were usually dragging out branches or reinforcing a bank when he came upon them. She has no thought about pretenses or reputation, and she is alone so much of the time, more so than Amy or George ever were. All of her companions are Spanish. She speaks the language without a fault.
My failure has been her education. She cannot sew even a simple hem, and her arithmetic is so poor that I don’t believe she could figure the prices listed in a catalog or in a store. When I tried to get her to read to me from the Bible one evening, there were not many words she knew.
“How will you manage your own house?” I asked, but there is no shaming her. She thinks she can live like George does, out in the open on a horse. And she does ride well; there are not many men who ride better than she does. My hope is she will marry some rancher and be content to let him do her riding for her. It is difficult to be a mother of such strong-willed children.
Your Sister,
Abigail
June 15, 1891
Dear Maggie,
Amy and Everett’s visit last month was a treat for us. They came in May, she said, because that is when the desert is most beautiful, and we spent many afternoons, and several mornings and evenings, riding through the wildflowers, Spanish broom, which are covered with yellow flowers, the red and orange Indian paintbrush, white-blossoming snakeweed, chamiso, and the cacti, which blaze with large ornamental flowers this time of year.
Everett seemed to enjoy these trips and suggested rides nearly every day up into the mountains or along the mesa. From there, surrounded by red and yellow clay, the small, gnarled piñon trees and prickly pear, you look out across the fields of the valley, which are pale green with the early plantings of alfalfa and corn. Perhaps it is the contrast between the valley and the mountainous desert that makes this place feel enchanted.
“It’s a wondrous place you’ve brought me to,” I heard Everett say to Amy one afternoon, as we looked out across the valley, and I imagined for a brief moment how changed my life would be, how wonderfully transformed, if Amy and he moved to this place. But they have made clear, both of them, that they have duties and attachments in Virginia, which they never could leave. I suppose the most we can hope for are their visits, which I assure you I value.
Their two-week visit sped by, and I must confess I fell into such despair the night before they left that I begged Amy to convince Everett to let her stay on another week. She said she herself had commitments back east, but promised that she would try to come back for another visit before her teaching job at the academy begins in the fall. How I long to have her here, but I am thankful, as is Clayton, that they are such an industrious couple. That is the way to success in all things.
Life here proceeds as it has each spring and early summer. We had a good planting, and the river is still high. Margaret seemed pleased to see her sister and went riding with them every chance she got, showing off her abilities in the saddle. Amy tried to impart some wisdom. I heard her lecturing on decorum and the skills one must cultivate to get through this life. She offered to take Margaret back with her for the year, but Margaret would not go, saying she could never live where the sky is hemmed in by trees and buildings.
If only Amy could have stayed on, I am sure she could have altered her sister’s perilous course. Clayton says I sympathize too much with Margaret, but she has no sister here, no good friend in whom to confide, and I cannot bear to hear Clayton rail against her.
In some ways it is as if Amy’s visits open a wound in me. For many weeks I will long for her company. I wish that I felt as much for Margaret, but I cannot. When the afternoon light hurts my eyes and cuts a sharp silhouette of the bare mesa, I think of Margaret, for this is her desert—the blinding light, the loneliness of the sky. There is a story of an apparition which is sometimes seen by lone cowboys, a beautiful young woman with long, thick, dark hair on a silver-gray horse, who does not acknowledge the cowboys’ calls. It is Margaret they see riding out alone, or some spirit that is hers.
Amy does not know the fears I have for her sister, only that there are some concerns. These are words from one mother to another, words from a sister.
Keep them in your heart,
Abigail
November 17, 1891
Dear Maggie,
They have asked me to help teach at the Methodist school. Miss Alden invited Clayton and me to dinner after services last Sunday and asked if I would consider coming two mornings each week to help the children with their lessons. The school has expanded during the last two years and is in need of more instructors.
Pamela Porter, who advised me to refuse the position, does not believe the school can ever succeed at educating the Indian children. Since most of the people in the valley are Catholics, they will not send their children. The children who live on the few farms and ranches settled by easterners often run wild, and so you can imagine the task set before these educators. Most of the boys have their own horses and ride wherever they please. All of them want to get on with a cattle company and live a rough life. There are not many girls at the school, but I fear they are all like Margaret, forever riding across the desert or along the roads that run through the valley. One has to worry about them. Just last week some men got in a fight on one of those roads and a man was killed.
Maggie, what shall I do? I suppose I will go against Pamela Porter’s advice and take the position. I am sure I could learn much from working beside Miss Alden, and it would allow me to watch Margaret more closely. Perhaps I can find some suitable companions for her. I have
heard of two young ladies recently moved with their parents to our section of the territory.
Clayton claims I am lonely without any little ones to care for. I still wake before anyone else to watch the sun turn the desert red. After Margaret and Clayton are gone and the cow is milked and the chickens fed, if there is no snow, I might take my sketch pad and walk through the cold morning up towards the mesa, ankle deep in sand, my skirts twisting about in the wind. The sun slides across the sky, and I am above the world with it, lost to the clouds that gather along the horizon and sky, sky, sky.
Your Sister,
Abigail
February 12, 1892
Dear Maggie,
This season has been nearly lost in the flurry of my activities. I spend two days a week teaching reading, writing, spelling, and sewing at the mission school. Overall, the change of pace has done me good, and I look forward to my morning rides across the snow-powdered ground.
An added advantage to my position is that I have the opportunity to accompany Margaret to the school and sometimes observe her at her studies. I have given her extra tutoring and watched her reading improve. When I have her attention, she learns quickly and recites with confidence any passage she has memorized. I am hopeful my advice will have some effect on her.
I still do not understand how a child of mine could have become so unlike me, so foreign and unknown. Recently, I discovered her “collections”: feathers and stones of all sorts, the delicate bones of a lizard, a dried cactus husk. Clayton is certain that when she disappears for hours at a time she is with Ramon. He has questioned and bullied her, calling her all kinds of names, but she will not say where she goes or if she has been with someone. Neither will she deny his accusations. I cannot believe she has any lover; she seldom speaks to anyone, even at the school, and is so much alone.
