by Susan Butler
There was a railroad line, the first in Kansas, but it only went upriver as far as St. Joseph, Missouri; and a telegraph office, also the first in Kansas. But instead of the beautiful Philadelphia stalls where food was carefully displayed on snow-white napkins, Amelia shopped at Atchison’s general store, owned by the Challisses, shelves stocked with a hodgepodge—everything from gunpowder to coal oil, white sugar, soda crackers, St. Louis nails, oolong tea, grain, dried buffalo meat, and more often than not fresh antelope, turkey, quail, and prairie chickens. Next door on Commercial Street was the coffee-roasting plant.
The streets were dismal, a far cry from the paved streets and brick sidewalks of Philadelphia. They were dirt—dusty until it rained, muddy afterward, so muddy that after a really heavy rain, pigs would sometimes rout in the middle. Nor were there sidewalks where walkers could take refuge. “In winter time the mud was very deep. I am sure if all the rubber overshoes that were lost in those tramps up the hill could be recovered, it would be easy to break the rubber trust,” wrote a friend of Amelia Otis’s of their Sunday trudges to church services on North Fifth. Still, Amelia had it easier than any other young bride arriving in Atchison to live. Alfred had chosen as his land the widest and choicest part of the bluff overlooking the Missouri, and there, finished and waiting for Amelia, stood the large white clapboard two-story house Alfred had commissioned. Although not as big as Mary Ann’s house, it was a gracious design in the manner of the popular architect Andrew Jackson Downing, with such details as Gothic fretwork, a triple-paned Gothic window centered over the front door, and a wide veranda that stretched across the front of the house. From the windows could be seen all of the river. Her elder sister Mary Ann Challiss and Bill were right next door to welcome and help her. There, side by side, Amelia and Mary Ann would live out their lives.
Amelia had the misfortune to arrive during the darkest period in Atchison history. Many of the town’s able-bodied men had left to join the army. The streets were periodically thronged with soldiers on their way to the front, some of whom pillaged as they passed through. A few months after she arrived, Atchison passed a law prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons, but the measure did not stop the looting: many businesses closed; law-abiding citizens locked their doors and stayed inside.
As the war spread, Atchison was fair game for both sides. Just the year before she arrived, the last thirty southern families had fled, hastily rising from their midday meals too flee aboard the Challiss ferry the Ida to Missouri and safety, as a rider galloped through the town warning that Free State ruffians and thieves were riding in to hang every pro-slavery man. Those empty houses bore mute witness to the violence of the times. Now the fear was that the Bushwackers—Missouri pro-slave bands—would storm the town and torch it as they had other Free State border settlements.
The southerners had been the backbone of the Episcopal community, and when they left, the parish was reduced to just a few hardy souls, so that each new parishioner was embraced with open arms. Amelia Otis’s arrival was noted with joy in church records but, undoubtedly because of her retiring nature, she took little active part in church activities. The early records are very complete; they list those who arrived on Sundays to sweep, build the fire, dust the chairs, and get everything in readiness for the service, as well as the members of the sewing society, those who organized the Sunday school, and those who sang in the choir; Amelia Otis’s name is nowhere to be found. There was a lull in the fighting Amelia’s first Christmas season that made it more bearable; families felt secure enough to open their houses and make and receive calls.
Amelia became pregnant soon after her marriage, and Maria and Gebhard, accompanied by their youngest child Theodore, braved the vicissitudes of war and traveled out to Atchison to be with her when she gave birth to her first child in the spring of 1863. Theodore, liking what he saw of the town, decided to stay and open a hardware store on Commercial Street, advertising in Freedom’s Champion that in his store there would be a “Glorious victory over high prices in hardware.” A short while later Gebhard had a stroke and died; from then on, except for a brief trip back to Philadelphia to dispose of their house, Maria made her home with the Otises.
She was given the northeast bedroom, with its window looking out over the river. Maria was a godsend to the retiring and fearful Amelia, particularly just then, for Alfred was a Union soldier, serving in the Eighth Kansas Infantry Volunteers commanded by John Martin. She fit right into the rhythm of the house and the town. A constant comfort to Amelia as well as to Mary Ann, she became a valued and financially generous member of Trinity Episcopal Church, which was such an important part of the Otises’ social life. When the war was over, her place was happily assured. Alfred was consumed by work; furthermore, it was his custom to return to his office after dinner, often remaining there until the early hours of the morning. Maria remained useful, companionable, and helpful for Amelia. Even Alfred appreciated how much she helped.
Alfred was mustered out in 1865 and returned to Atchison April 14, the day Lincoln was shot. By that time Amelia Otis, with Maria at her side, had given birth to another child, William, born February 2.
After the war ended and the dangers were past, the town turned again toward commerce and peaceful pursuits. The great stage companies returned. The wagon trains began gathering, provisioning while they waited, marking time before they started across the prairies to Pikes Peak, Salt Lake, to California, Colorado, and Montana. Now Amelia and her mother could see Atchison plain as it had been before the war, and take in the lack of amenities, and the great swings in the climate that alternately turned the town to mud or—worse—to dust. Because the prairies had not yet been planted with crops, because the trees planted around the houses were still too small to protect them and there was “nothing to be seen but the grass and sky,” the wind swept through—constant, strong, and unending—and brought the dust. One of the first of Atchison’s preachers, a “scrupulously neat” man, returned east because he couldn’t stand it. The winds “were the trial of his life.... The dust would powder his clothes, and the wind carry beaver and wig away so far that it was tiresome to recover them without the assistance of friends.” A young woman described life in the early years: “When we first came to Kansas, the climate was nothing like it is today. The winds then were not hot as they are now, but they blew incessantly and so powerfully that one could scarcely walk against them. It was worse in the daytime than at night. It seldom rained in the daytime, and the night showers were nearly always local and sometimes covered very small areas. After five or six years, all this began to change. Planting trees and tilling the soil made a difference.”
Amelia bore eight children in her gracious house, six of whom would reach adulthood. Amy Amelia Earhart’s mother, born in 1869, was the eldest girl.
Amy was slender and pretty and popular. She had a delicate face and the high Harres forehead; her most arresting feature was her mass of chestnut hair, which as a child she wore in thick braids that were long enough to sit on. With her brothers and sisters she attended the Latin School, a private school organized by the Martins, the Ingallses, and her parents. She grew up cared for by her grandmother Maria as well as by her mother, with all the comforts that Alfred’s wealth could command. She loved to ride, first on her own Indian pony, a hand-me-down from a brother, and later on increasingly powerful mounts, and was watched over by a succession of upstairs maids and the Otises’ two faithful servants, Mary Brashay and Charlie Parks, both of whom would be there still to care for Amelia Earhart. Amy’s best friend and schoolmate was Constance, the daughter of their neighbor, Senator John Ingalls. When the senator was in town, he and the two girls would go out for rides every morning, the girls, like proper young eastern women, decorously riding sidesaddle.
As the 1860s drew to a close, Kansas effectively put its violent heritage behind; change accelerated by leaps and bounds. First the Indians disappeared, dispossessed of their deeded lands and resettled in the so-called In
dian territories. Next, the great herds of buffalo dwindled, then disappeared, as they were slaughtered for their hides.
Kansas was a famous state in Amy’s youth, and Atchison a famous town. The Atchison Globe was well known and quoted clear across America. Mark Twain wrote about two of its colorful characters: Slade, superintendent of the Ben Holliday stage line, who chased stolen horses, mules, and thieves until he himself was hung by a vigilance committee; and Samuel Pomeroy, the Emigrant Aid agent who became Atchison’s first mayor and U.S. senator. Famous people such as Horace Greeley and Artemus Ward, and even Oscar Wilde, who “drifted” in to lecture, were “frequently” seen on its streets.
Following the Civil War came the period of rapid railroad development that changed the face of Kansas forever. By 1875 Atchison could boast of a railroad bridge spanning the Missouri, a mechanical marvel that turned in order to open. Senator Ingalls predicted that all the nearby towns, including Leavenworth, St. Joseph, and Kansas City, would start declining in importance and that the population of Atchison would zoom to 25,000 in a year. Ed Howe, the famous publisher of The Atchison Globe (known as the Sage of the Potato Patch), writing in 1877, trumpeted to the world that Atchison had “aspirations and prospects.” Everything seemed to point that way. Within a few years the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe reached Atchison. The energy emanating was such that it seemed as if the eyes of the nation were turned on the state. Soon, across America, everyone was singing about “The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.” By the mid-1880s Atchison had gas and electricity, a hospital, a good library, and an opera house. Not only was it booming commercially, but Atchison citizens, those young men who had settled Atchison in the 1850s, were the engine driving Kansas and making their mark on the national scene. The first Kansas senators were Atchison men. The first was Samuel Pomeroy, the second was John Ingalls, who served three terms; for the years from 1861 to 1893 there was an Atchison man in the U.S. Senate. Two Atchison men served as governers as well—George Glick, followed by John A. Martin, who served two terms. Considering that it was a town of only some 14,000 people, its vitality—the political and commercial clout it wielded both locally and nationally—was truly astounding. Alfred Otis was at the center of everything. John Ingalls was his best friend, George Glick was his law partner, and John Martin was not only his old friend and the colonel of his regiment in the Civil War but his nephew, by virtue of his marriage to Mary Ann Challiss’s eldest daughter Ida.
Alfred Otis and George Glick, partners in Otis and Glick since 1858, were the preeminent lawyers in that part of Kansas, having snared the biggest fish of all as a client—the Central Branch of the Union Pacific Railroad. The two influential men helped found the Atchison Savings Bank, the Atchison Gas Company, and the Atchison and Nebraska Railroad. And always, along the way, Alfred bought land.
In 1876 Alfred was elected judge of the Second Judicial District. He served his term with honor and declined renomination. He never went back to the law, instead taking over active management of the Atchison Savings Bank and the Atchison Gas Company.
Even as Atchison was the center of power in Kansas, and her family at the center of Atchison, so in her own way was Amy, the eldest daughter, the star in her own world. In later years she loved to tell her own children about her triumphs—how she and her best friend Constance Ingalls “were the undisputed leaders of the young social set, going to balls at Fort Leavenworth and cotillions at St. Joseph, often by specially chartered steamer.” But the stories she told to amuse her daughters were too glowing—Amelia Earhart at least would later detect the fairy-tale quality in them, writing, “Among the best stories my mother told were those of her own girlhood. My sister [Muriel] and I always spoke of that mysterious and far away period as ‘thousands of years ago when Mother was little.’ ” Amy glossed over the bad times. She survived two life-threatening diseases. At sixteen she was stricken with typhoid fever, which took her a long time to get over. Her practical grandmother, Maria, who was taking care of her, decided that her long hair was absorbing her strength, and so it was cut off. “Sheep shearing,” her kid brother Carl, four years old at the time, called it. Four years later a diphtheria epidemic hit Atchison, and Amy contracted the dreaded, highly contagious disease then without cure that would in later years kill two of her brothers. Maria, then ninety-one, saved her life. The usual cause of death was asphyxiation caused by the growth of a false membrane that slowly but inexorably closed off the throat, making breathing impossible. Maria brought Amy into her own bedroom, isolated her from the rest of the family, nursed her night and day, and recognized the moment when Amy was reaching the characteristic breathing climax caused by the growth of the false membrane. She had the presence of mind and the knowledge to have a doctor present at that moment; he inserted a tube into Amy’s throat and sucked out the material clogging the passage. The crisis past, Amy slowly, with her grandmother’s continuing care, beat back the disease.
Amy couldn’t face unpleasantness. In her well-meaning way, she always put the best face on everything, whether it was true or not. She told her children that she would have gone to Vassar the fall of 1889 if she hadn’t been recovering from diphtheria. That was the reason she gave for leading the traditional life of the unmarried upper-class young woman of her day. She was convalescing those years in Atchison, she said, keeping herself busy by organizing a Dickens Club, presenting “literary tableaux,” teaching Sunday school, and helping her father by copying his legal opinions. But it wasn’t true.
The real reason was that as far as Alfred was concerned, it was out of the question to send either of his daughters to college. Her younger sister Margaret, a born healer like Maria and a more serious candidate for college, wasn’t allowed to go either. As a teenager, Margaret with Amy’s help tried to adopt a tubercular child; she wasn’t allowed to, but she did contribute part of her allowance and persuaded her parents to make a serious enough commitment to fund the child’s stay in a sanitarium. When Margaret finished school, she spent her days poring over medical books in their doctor’s office—preparing herself to be a medical student at Cornell—but the Judge put his foot down and “that was the end of it,” she told her daughter, Nancy Balis Morse. “My mother had wanted to be a doctor so badly that she bribed the Otis family doctor until he allowed her to sit in his office and read his medical books but she told me her father wouldn’t hear of it. He [Alfred] didn’t believe in education for women. As for Aunt Amy, I doubt she ever applied.”
Amy embroidered the history of the family as well. Alone of the Harres descendants’ accounts in the Family Tree, she claimed that the ancestral Harres home in Philadelphia was on Chestnut Street when it was actually on prosperous but less elegant Northwest Tenth and Catherine.
She even fibbed about her slight deafness, claiming it was the result of her bout with typhoid fever, but typhoid fever is an infectious disease that causes inflammation and ulceration of the intestines, and as serious as it was in the nineteenth century, it would be stretching the imagination to blame it for a hearing impairment.
The truth was that deafness ran in the family. Maria Harres was slightly deaf, and Margaret was even more so. Margaret’s problem would later be diagnosed as otosclerosis, a hereditary condition in which one of the three small bones in the middle ear thickens so that it does not vibrate, causing deafness; Margaret became one of the early users of a hearing aid. Amy, in contrast, simply endured her bad hearing.
Tradition as established by Alfred simply did not admit the existence of flaws. Amy’s denial mirrors Amelia and Alfred’s denial that one of their children, Theodore, was retarded.
The summer of 1890 was an eventful and happy time for Amy because it was the summer of her coming-out party, a tale she told well and evidently often—Amelia and Muriel loved to hear her talk about it. The ball, “the way she told it,” according to Muriel, was a very grand party, held on an evening in mid-June when “everything would be lovely and yet it would not be too hot.” Seven musicians im
ported from St. Joseph sat on the front porch playing the popular waltzes and reels of the day. A wooden dance floor had been laid out on the lawn around a big wrought-iron stag, too heavy to move, that Amy had garlanded with scarlet roses. As the dancers whirled around the dance floor, they whirled around the stag. At nine o‘clock, just as the last light of day faded, Charlie Parks lit the candles inside the Japanese lanterns that were strung every ten feet throughout the garden and up to the porch. The almost-still night air on the bluff smelled of syringa and heliotrope. And that night Amy and Edwin Earhart met, for Amy’s brother Mark in time-honored fashion had brought his eligible college friend home for his sister’s coming-out party. Amy told her children about it this way: “I was standing by the porch steps with Grandmother and Grandfather greeting all our guests when up came your Uncle Mark bringing a young man with him. He said: ‘This is Edwin Earhart, the law student who has pulled me through this year’s examinations!’”
Edwin was mesmerized by the slender, plucky, pretty girl with the beautiful thick chestnut hair whirling skillfully around the dance floor. She seemed like a princess to him, not just for her social graces but for her social standing and wealth. Most of the important families in the state would have been there; it was the grandest party Edwin had ever attended—and Amy was the center of it all.
Amy, in turn, was fascinated by the tall, handsome young man. He was so obviously intelligent; so charmingly articulate; so incredibly well read. And best of all, he was studying to be a lawyer, just like her father.
They fell in love, and Edwin proposed.
Alfred was less than pleased.
Edwin Earhart’s ancestors were God-fearing, German-speaking Lutheran farmers who had also come to America when it was still a colony. The progenitor was Johann Earhardt, a Prussian who had served in the guard of Frederick the Great and emigrated to York County, Pennsylvania, sometime before the Revolution. Joining the Tenth Pennsylvania Regiment of the Line, he fought with his regiment at Brandywine, Germantown, and Bull’s Ferry, and in the Christmas Eve attack at Trenton; he wintered with George Washington at Valley Forge.
