by Jane Smiley
"You know," said Mrs. Bush, "that’s what makes me mad! They shout and rant about our aid company and all the money we’ve got to finance our malicious invasion of their rightful territory, but they can’t get enough of our money themselves. If they don’t have their hats off and their hands out, then they’ve put a gun to your head. It’s just like everything else they say—they need to do it, they have a right to do it, and anyway, they’re going to do it. Take your money or drive you out or kill you. It’s all the same!"
Mr. Johnson smiled again. "We soon showed them we weren’t leaving! Well, they sent a war party over. And I can tell you, we weren’t especially well armed then. All of them, we thought, had pistols in every pocket and a traveling armory of Kentucky rifles."
"Not to mention," exclaimed Mrs. Bush, "a bowie knife to scalp you with!"
"Well, they came over in a train of wagons and set up on the north side of the ravine there, and you could hear them from everywhere in town, shooting and shouting and cursing and threatening how they were going to ’exterminate all the d— Yankee abolitionists that dared come into K.T.’ We listened to them all day, and then some more came late in the afternoon. Our tents were within range for them. Must have been a hundred or more. Whether they were going to shoot us out of drunkenness or out of intention, it would all amount to the same thing, and I tell you Dr. Robinson was deadly concerned. The carousing went on all evening. We sent over some representatives, to ask the meaning of their display, and they said that we all had to leave or we’d be cleared out and all that.... They got quiet about midnight—"
"When the whiskey ran out," asserted Mrs. Bush.
"Then some more showed up about dawn, just screaming and yelling, so then there were about a hundred and fifty. Not long after that, they sent over what they called a formal notification that we were to take down our tents and pack up our things and get out of K.T. for good, and we had till ten a.m. to do it. At ten a.m., they would cross the ravine and do the job. So we drilled with what we had—sixty men or so, and some rifles. Well, ten a.m. came and went, and along about ten-thirty, we had another formal notification that they would give us another half hour and no more to pack up our tents. Of course, this one was more threatening—they would not hold themselves responsible for what might happen should we exhibit further resistance!"
"Pah!" Mrs. Bush almost spit, except that she held spitting in the extremest contempt. "They don’t hold themselves responsible for anything; that’s the whole trouble with them!"
Mr. Johnson allowed his little smile to grow larger. "You know, that hour went by, and then they formed up in military style and just stared at us across the ravine, and then one of them came along and said, ’Ten more minutes, or the direst consequences will follow!’ We were laughing! Dr. Robinson was laughing hardest of all, and you bet they could hear us over there, because they were cursing and yelling and shouting oaths, and screaming that we didn’t know the danger we were in!" He paused, and now Mrs. Bush smiled, knowing the last of it. "Toward dusk they just loaded up their wagons and moved off. Once night came on, they weren’t slow about it, either. You almost had to think that they were a little scared we would chase after them and do a little damage ourselves!" He finished with a shout of laughter, and Mrs. Bush and I joined in, especially Mrs. Bush, but then she got serious and said, "You can’t count on them all being cowards. If a party of them gets you alone out somewhere, on the California road or something, well." She shook her head. Yes, the Ruffians had been routed once, but it could go differently the next time. Mr. Johnson and Mrs. Bush fully agreed that there would be a next time. I agreed, too.
For I was all for Lawrence. None of my antecedents had come from New England—New York and New Jersey and I think Pennsylvania, places where life was slacker than it was in New England, were the states they all hailed from, and before that England itself and Halifax. They were not the sort to make a stand but the sort to go along. My sister Miriam had been considered very strange, and offensive, too, for purporting to live by her conscience. She stood accused of putting herself above the rest of us, adopting moral airs, even though she didn’t press any of my sisters on the subject and never even spoke of it unless she was asked. Merely doing what she did was flaunting enough for Harriet, Beatrice, and Alice, not to mention their husbands. I had often heard Harriet exclaim, "I don’t know why she brings these ideas into the family! You sit down to supper, and there’s ideas there; and then you get up in the morning and make the tea, and there’s ideas again. It makes you feel all outside of yourself, looking out the door of your own house, that you look out of a hundred times a day, but there’s ideas making it look all different. There’s no comfort in it, I’ll tell you that!" All the sisters agreed. What they disagreed about was whether she did it on purpose to annoy them, or whether she had simply been strange since childhood. Another thing all the sisters and all their husbands agreed upon was that even though Miriam might have considered herself better than the rest of them, this certainly wasn’t so. I had always liked Miriam the best, but not because of her ideas. I had always thought her livelier and sharper. And to tell the truth, she had always liked me. That was enough.
Alice would have the last word: "Miriam is an uncomfortable woman and was an uncomfortable little girl, and that’s just what she likes, taking your own hearth and home, that you’ve worked hard for, and making it just as uncomfortable for you as she can."
Following Miriam’s yearly visits to Quincy, a feature of every June, such conversations would go on for days. Then all of the sisters found a way to end the yearly visits. "She only does it out of obligation to Father," said Alice. "But Father doesn’t know her anymore, so..."
"So she might easily save herself the expense."
"Each year, one of us should go visit her, instead. We can easily afford it. We can be better sisters and better friends one at a time, anyway," said Beatrice, but although Miriam stopped coming, no one ever went to Yellow Springs to visit her. I suppose that her visits stopped when I was about twelve, and so when she died, I hadn’t seen her for eight years. I have to say of my sisters that they were sorry enough when they heard of her death. After that, all the discussion was pitying rather than vexed: if only poor Miriam had been prettier, she wouldn’t have wasted herself on such muddleheaded ideas but would have gotten a husband and some children to occupy her.
These thoughts reminded me to write my sisters.
September II, 1855
Dear Sisters:
I am writing to let you know that Mr. Newton and I arrived safely in Lawrence, Kansas Territory, about five nights ago, after eight days traveling. We are now staying at the home of some friends of Mr. Newton’s from New England
There was nothing I could tell my sisters about the architecture of the leaning house that would not excite and appall them, so I paused, then passed over that subject.
named Jenkins. His name is Mr. John Jenkins, Vermont Street, Lawrence, K.T., and you may send me letters in his care for now. Mr. Newton and the other men in the company (well, not all of them, for there are some I haven’t met) are out at our claim putting up a cabin for the winter. I am in town, making purchases of provisions. I have bought two chairs, two pans, two buckets, some forks and spoons and tin plates, and additionally a stove and a horse. The stove is of the newest type. I will say that although not everything to be had in Quincy is to be had in K.T., what is here from the States is all of the newest sort, though sometimes a little worse for wear from the travel, and always, always very expensive. Horace would be amazed at what he could ask in price for the simplest piece of merchandise if he had a store in Lawrence. You may tell brother Roland that I have bought myself a horse that he would be proud of, who is "as smart as I am and twice as useful," as he used to say about Dolly. The weather is hot, and everything is fine. We made the trip in excellent health, though there were many, even most, who were not so lucky. The saddest story I have heard is about a man who camel out here with his wife and five-month-ol
d baby, whose wagon broke down and whose baby died, and he had to carry the baby on foot to three Missouri towns, wrapped in a shawl, before he could find a coffinmaker to make a baby coffin, or a preacher to say a service. The wife didn’t see the husband for three weeks after the baby died, and stayed with strangers, waiting for him to return and grieving for her child. This happened to a woman who has been pointed out to me in the street. Of course, one wishes to say a word of comfort, but then that would reveal that she is the subject of gossip; even though it is gossip of the most sympathetic variety, it would be painful. I’ve heard many sad stories that people in the States simply would not believe. Everyone in Lawrence has a story.
But everyone in Lawrence is full of energy and enterprise, and I like it here very much. Soon I shall be writing you from our very own claim, on the river. Mr. Newton’s friends speak very highly of it.
Your affectionate sister,
LYDIA
Postscript: Please give my best to Frank, and say that I wish he were here with me to stroll down the streets of Lawrence and marvel at the sights.
And I did wish that, I really did.
After writing my letter, I rode Jeremiah through the streets of Lawrence and then up to the top of Mount Oread. The vista over the prairies from there was large and delightful. From a distance, I saw the much-discussed Mrs. Robinson. Many people said that for sheer singleness of purpose, Mrs. Robinson had her husband all beat. Later, both he and she became famous—he for being the governor of Kansas, and she for her writings. Although we didn’t speak, Mrs. Robinson gave me a friendly smile, and I watched her after she walked on. This encounter stuck in my mind, I must say, because very shortly—by the time I had gotten back to the corral and the leaning house—my confident notions about my health in Kansas became false. As I walked toward the tall, triangular end where the doorcloth hung, the whole thing seemed to swell to vastness, then shrink to glittering smallness. When I pulled aside the doorcloth, the interior seemed pitch black. I could see nothing, and I felt a vapor of perspiration start from every part of my body at once. Then I fell down.
Many settlers in Kansas fell into such fevers and, if they returned to themselves ever again, did not do so for many weeks. My fancy, however, throughout my fever, was that Mrs. Robinson was walking toward me, and that it was she who was the doctor, not her husband. It was my fixed belief that when she got to me, she would say something, and I would be cured of my fever. She came closer and closer, always with that friendly, self-assured smile, the "Kansas smile," I called it in my dream. And then she did approach the bed, and then she did speak, though I couldn’t decipher the words, and then I woke up, feeling weak but lucid. The woman beside the bed was Mrs. Jenkins, holding a basin of broth and a spoon. I said, "What did you say?" and she said, "Mr. Newton should be back today," and by that I knew that I had been in my fever for only two days. There was much speculation as to what it might be—typhoid? bilious fever? a case of the ague? Mrs. Jenkins said, "Well, my dear, it’s passed off so quickly that we didn’t have a good chance to look at it."
I was a real pioneer now, for in those days it seemed that everyone was sick with the fever or the ague more often than not. Susannah Jenkins could have stood for a portrait of the typical settler of Kansas Territory. Her face was pale and sallow-looking from the ague, even though her shaking days were only one in three and she wasn’t as bad as some on those days. People said it was the land itself—it was so rich that when a man first plowed it up, it sent off a miasma that made everyone ill. Sickness was just the price settlers had to pay for the good things that would come later. There was much nursing back and forth. Every woman got plenty of practice nursing strange men who were sometimes so sick that they couldn’t say who they were or who their friends and relatives were. All of the women I knew had cared for at least one man who died unknown and whose fate friends back in the States would forever wonder about. Some of these men were boys, really, younger than I was by three or four years. Mrs. Bush, who was a great believer in Spiritualism, always tried to persuade us that they would come to their mothers somehow, but even so, it was wrenching to see them dying, to hear them cry out, and, worst of all, to be thanked and loved and called "Mama," when those who really loved them were a thousand miles away. Mrs. Bush said that surely the Missourians had no hearts at all if they could look on such suffering, "the true face of Death," and then go to lynching, shooting, hanging, scalping, and clearing out. "There’s enough suffering in this country already," she exclaimed, "and they want to make more!" I told her I thought it was deplorable. We were getting to be good friends.
I was still weak from my fever when Thomas returned. That, I think, is why I didn’t actually recognize, him at first. Also, he was wearing K.T. clothes now—blue trousers, a blue shirt, a red neckerchief, and a large - brimmed soft hat. I, of course, looked different, too, no longer quite the tall, strong girl that I had been when he left. I saw that we looked at each other, for just a moment, in the speculative way that strangers do, and that that moment was followed, for each of us, by a moment of shock: She my choice? He my choice? I realized just then that for all our plans and travels, I had somehow expected Thomas to bring Boston to me, not to lose Boston in the west. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep for a few moments. When I opened them, he was sitting beside me, his hat off, holding the basin of broth that Mrs. Jenkins insisted was to be the sole element of my convalescent diet. I could smell the fresh corncakes cooking across the room.
Thomas said, "My dear, our cabin is rather humble. There was no window glass to be had, and the floor is only partially planked, but I like the claim, for both convenience and fertility."
I said, "Did they tell you I bought you a horse?"
He nodded. "An extremely fine horse. A horse from Missouri."
I sat up. "Who told you that? I don’t know where he’s from. The man had a string of horses, all for sale."
"I saw the horse. We may be sure that he’s a horse from Missouri and that he’s used to elegant work." He looked at me steadily. "But at any rate, he’s ours, and we need a horse. Jenkins was generous with his mule when we were building the cabin, but that can’t last."
"I should have bought a mule."
Thomas cocked his head, and for the first time I saw that amused look I remembered from before. He said, "Mrs. Newton, you were not moved to buy a mule."
"His name is Jeremiah.’’
I told him about the stove, the buckets, the forks, the pans, the plates, and the chairs. He told me about the river, the soil, the planking, and the cow a neighbor of ours planned to give him when, one of these days, he gave up and went back to Indiana. At the end of all this discussion, I had taken the broth. A bit later, my husband slipped me a hot corncake.
Later that evening, I listened to them talking about the Kansas Weekly Tribune. While I was down, the editor, Mr. Speer, had published a defiance of the gag laws, on page three, all in large black type, with words like "Now we DO ASSERT and we declare that PERSONS HAVE NOT THE RIGHT TO HOLD SLAVES IN THIS TERRITORY," and coming out for freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Everyone in the room, all our friends, were warm in their praise of Mr. Speer, and all had bought copies, for keeping and using to paper the walls of our dwellings.
My fever meant that we put off our departure from the Jenkinses’ house for two extra days. On the second night, another family from the east—a man named Holmes, his wife, who was Mrs. Jenkins’s cousin, and their small children—came to stay with us. We now had a crowd of fifteen or more, but that was K.T. for you, as Mrs. Bush would say. In the emigrating season—that is, spring and early summer—you might find fifty in one house.
The great topic of conversation was that just the night before, the new governor of the territory, Shannon, the very man who had been feted and celebrated by the Missourians in Westport around the time of our arrival in K.T., had passed through Lawrence and gone on, after only just looking in at the Cincinnati House, where the contagion had passed
. Two or three citizens went to him and urged him to stay for the night and meet some of the people of Lawrence, but he had declined them in no uncertain terms, for the sake of traveling convenience! He elected to spend the night in Franklin or thereabout, rather than in the largest town, the only real town, in K.T. Everyone said that he had no time for Lawrence but that he proposed to spend his Sunday, the next day, with a slaveholder who lived at the Shawnee mission school.
The indignation of our friends knew no bounds. Shannon’s sentiments were clear and his want of manly qualities, according to the few who had caught sight of him, evident in his person. "Shambling Shannon" was what Mr. Bush named him. He was a tall, rough, undistinguished man, red-faced, red-nosed, clearly a man both sound on the goose question and equally sound on the highly rectified whiskey question. Mr. Bush and Mr. Jenkins were horrified but not surprised, for it was their firm belief that the stealing of the Kansas elections by the slave power in Missouri and everything that had happened since, including the departure of Governor Reeder, who had been inclined toward the Free Staters, expressed a policy that had been colluded in, and even devised by, the Pierce administration, which was, Mr. Bush said, in the thrall of Jefferson Davis and all the rest of them. No one knew what hold these southern men had over the President and his advisers, but, said Mr. Bush, whatever it was, it was a powerful one. "The lawlessness," declared Mr. Jenkins on our last evening in the leaning house, "runs right to the top."
