“And have no horse?” He was little enough we could have shared a mount. I said as much, but he interrupted. “Can’t leave my post. Besides, someone needs to be here to spread the word of your foolishness when they report your demise.” He stomped back into his little station, and with a deep breath, we headed out.
For a time afterward, his warnings crackled like a low-gas lamp about to go out.
“That was good reasoning, Dell.” Moonlight brushed Robert’s strained face. We’d rolled the window shades up as far as they’d go, allowing each of us a view. He kept his rifle on his knees. Randolph had decided to sit close to the driver up top, watching the jehu as much as the landscape. “You’ve a good head on your shoulders and are compassionate too. I’m not sure I would have invited the old guy along, though I suspect he can shoot alright.”
“Which is more than I can.”
“We’ll remedy that, come Helena.”
I wanted to tell him about the conflict of feelings racing through me when he’d deferred to my wisdom or lack thereof in our decision. But I needed a little more time to consider what his referral really meant.
Dust billowed up through the open curtains. I could smell it, but it was hard to see now. We’d put out the lanterns to make ourselves as invisible as possible as we tensed our way through the night.
Robert righted himself when the stage jerked us forward and back. He was all of twenty-six years old but had already seen what old soldiers had. He’d been a printer, a newspaper reporter, a soldier, an author, and now the head of the Union Pacific’s new Communications bureau, writing pamphlets and the New West Illustrated that came out three times a week. I wrote my mother three times a week to assure her I was still a “lady.” I wondered how he’d write of this, as his copy was meant to inspire people to leave their pasts and burdens behind and bring their families to the mountains, plains, valleys, and vistas of this previously unexplored land.
“What if people really do come out here because of your good words?”
“That’s the hope, Dell.” He didn’t look at me as we whispered, his eyes always on what happened outside—or might happen.
“But would you want them to experience this?” I coughed from the ever-present dust.
He patted my hand. “Shhh. Sound travels far in this landscape. Risk is a part of any new undertaking.”
“But some people don’t do well with this kind of uncertainty. They’ve been known to go mad with worry,” I whispered.
“Women mostly.” Robert’s words stung. He’d given me the decision, then suggested that the female form is prone to go mad? I wished I could have seen his eyes. There was no humor in his voice.
“Then you took a risk giving me the choice for our being here or staying back at that station.”
“I knew you’d make the right call. And that’s in part why people—men included—go mad in these circumstances. They lose sight of the possibilities and let their emotions rule their reason. Your train trip at Christmas is an example. I talked to some of the railroaders on that same line. They told me they could almost see you think, the way you were concentrating. Gave them confidence too. A level head in a time of trial, that’s admirable.” He paused. “And a belief we have some say over our destiny with the courage to live or die with the consequences. It’s what keeps a soul from going mad. It’s one reason why I wanted you with me on this venture. I knew you had that kind of ability to see clearly and take the consequences without laying blame on another.”
A compliment, certainly, but it also framed an expectation that would define me for years to come.
“Are those fires?” I leaned farther out the window and saw flickering at a distance I hadn’t before. My mouth went dry. The horizon was dotted with flames. “Are they trying to burn us out?”
“They’re communicating with each other.” He leaned back. “They’ll have stationed braves along the way. They’re watching us move across. Not sure what’s keeping them from pulling down on us, but so far I’ve seen nothing coming at us.”
I was quiet. That many fires meant a great many warriors and we were “moving ducks” but as much a target as if we’d sat and waited at that station. The only difference was, we had some hope of making it to the next stage stop where fresh horses and maybe soldiers waited.
The moon rose and now I could see an Indian behind every sagebrush, as it was nearly as light as day. I had a night’s work ahead, keeping my imagination from racing to our certain death. My old pattern of memorizing Scripture came in handy, and I repeated a psalm as a mantra: “Be still and know that I am God.” I saw it as a promise that God would have our backs rather than as a chastisement to be quiet. The repeated words calmed my pounding heart. Then the stage pulled up, horses stopped, and the driver jumped down.
“Robert. Is that jehu—is he cutting the trace?”
He was out of the stage in a second, his voice raspy and breathless as he called up to Randolph. I thought he was trying to whisper loudly. “What’s the word?”
Every muscle in my body was stiff as old leather. I remembered my doctor father saying fear sent scads of chemicals through our bodies to heighten sound and senses.
Silence. Then the New Yorker’s words to Robert: “Loose wheel lug. Gotta tighten it.” I sighed relief. They finished their work as Randolph warned the driver, “Next time, you jehu, best you tell me what you’re about. I don’t want to mistake your effort for safety for something else and shorten your life.”
We heard the driver grunt his assent and the soft sound of Randolph re-holstering his pistol. Robert stepped back up into the stage. His breathing came short. Must have been the dust and tension. I would have liked to have stretched my legs, but we jerked forward on that rocky road, heading on to what fate we didn’t know. My teeth were gritty with dirt. We drove on into an abyss lit by fires of war and flushed by those chemicals of sustained fear keeping us filled with necessary alertness, proving that the human spirit can live despite hour after hour of uncertainty.
From Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage, vol. 1, by Carrie Adell Strahorn (page 82)
Thus the night wore on, while the sagebrush shadows seemed ever to conceal a dusky form, and the rumbling coach on the rocky roadbed sounded like the roaring of Niagara to our over-strained ears.
7
At the Table
Sustained uncertainty can either bring a person to their knees or it can open them to the reality of what is before them, in those moments of heartbeats that remind us that we live. I write this now so full of gratitude for the opportunity to breathe in that dusty Montana air, to hear the sounds of horses chewing at their bags, smell the sagebrush, watch the soldiers march in early morning drills. I love the feel of the rough lumber creating the makeshift fort’s gate. My heart swells at the sound of the trumpet. Small things become larger and matter more. I write filled up by the tiniest of joys. I may not be able to tell my mother of what transpired to bring me to this place, but I will remember and will find some way to write of it in that someday-memoir.
July 20, 1878
We arrived at the stage stop at nine o’clock in the morning. The station bustled with life. Wagons pulled in carrying settlers from far-off ranches seeking safety; dogs and children scampered, oblivious to the dangers as they chased hoops close to a high stockade surrounding the corrals. Best of all, protecting the horses and the people were armed United States soldiers. Yes, the military had arrived during the night from the direction we were heading, and we learned those Bannock signal fires were not following us so much as monitoring the troop movements. The Indians had been pushed back, seeking their own safety.
It was comfort, relief for however short we’d have it, that there were others seeking safety just as we had. Fresh horses awaited the stage when it would pull out again. And meanwhile food filled us and we walked around. Free at last from anxiety, my legs moved me forward.
I spoke briefly to the proprietor of the station, a Mrs. Corbett, thanking her for allowi
ng us pitcher and bowl to freshen up and for her fine viands.
“Would you like a room? That lovely jacket must weigh an extra five pounds with the dust. I hope the tooth powder helped. You’ll surely stay.”
I would have liked to have had a bath, slept in a bed, washed out a few unmentionables. Behind me I heard someone at the table tell Robert we were “foolhardy” and thought for a moment what that word really meant, made up of “fool” and “hardy,” both words applying to pioneers in many ways and, yes, to us.
“Stage is leaving. Mail has to get on its way and we should take advantage of this Indian calm to make it to the next stop and one day closer to Helena.” This was Robert.
“I guess I won’t be needing a room, but thank you for the offer,” I told the proprietor.
Mrs. Corbett took my hands in hers and nodded, a shared moment of women’s understanding. “I wish you’d stay,” she said. “We could have a nice conversation, two women finding themselves in a foreign place.”
“It would be pleasant. A rare treasure.” I released her hand, pointed to the stage. “We’re rolling on.”
“It’s what we do, we women.”
By impulse, she pulled me to her, held me as a sister. Her back felt bony yet strong, her arms firm and warm. We held each other for a moment, wiped tears as we let loose our embrace.
“God go with you,” she said.
“And stay with you here.”
She nodded, returned to her kitchen, and I savored that sweet gesture of kindness, let it nourish me as fatigue leached away into wonder.
Once outside, I rolled a hoop back to a girl about six years old, with two missing front teeth awaiting their replacements.
“Thank you, Missus.” Her eyes lowered and she curtsied, well-mannered. I imagine it was the silver pin at my throat, a once-white blouse with high collar still buttoned, a blue-dyed linen skirt and jacket that stood out among the calicos that suggested to her I was from a far-off place. Or perhaps it was my hat with feather bobbing that inspired such formal manners. I was a contrast to the local women wearing aprons and bonnets, their faces strained with worry about the safety of their children and the status of their chickens and goats and milk cows that they’d left behind at their homesteads as they sought safety at this station. They carried uncertainty on their work-and-worry-stooped shoulders. How long could they remain at this partially fortified post where the horses, not the people, were protected behind the stockade? They’d have to decide when it was safe to go home again or if it would ever be safe once they returned. Or their husbands would decide, unless they were men like Robert who shared the load and made a marriage a true partnership. I remembered what Robert had said about the spirit going mad if it had no say in its destiny. Did these women have a voice?
I stepped up into the stage, still looking at the mothers rounding up their children to get them out of the way. Mrs. Corbett waved at me from the doorway. The scent of horseflesh filled the crisp morning air. A child I assumed to be an older sister spit on her handkerchief and wiped a smudge from her struggling sibling. These were the very souls Robert’s books and articles were designed to lure to these dust-laden climes. These people, not the railroaders, would take, then tame, the West.
For the first time I really understood what the railroad had in mind with this new kind of development. They wanted towns already established, with buildings built up, crops and products stacked at the depot waiting to be shipped back east before the railroad even arrived. In fact, the UP wanted entire towns to be raised up with the promise of the railroad to come, bringing more people and goods but having a full train of paid product to take back to feed the East. The railroad tycoons wouldn’t be delivering people to the end of the line waiting for them to create a town; the town would be waiting for the trains.
That meant the hard work of building would be done as Helena and Boise and other towns had begun: with hopes and dreams of a better life created by plows and lumber moved by horses and wagons and the spunk and hardiness of people like those waving as we pulled out.
I wanted to interview them, ask them all the questions about how it had been, how they’d decided to come to this remote place. What did their ranches consist of? How had they endured the hardships of tent-living for months, of the dust clogging their children’s eyes, of burying a baby for lack of medicine, their ranches being too far from medical help. Had their families been here for forty years and thus built up a ranch and constructed a house with lumber from their own land? Were they asked their opinions? And what of days and nights alone while a husband and maybe an older son took a meager crop to the nearest town or drove cattle miles through Indian country to where the railroad ended to trade for rice and beans and real coffee. Viands.
I’d never mock the simple fare spread out at these distant posts or farmsteads. These settlers themselves were viands, the “meat” of life, that French word growing from the Latin vivere, meaning “to live,” and giving rise to “victual,” revive and survive. They did all that, these foolhardy women.
And when the time came for a big feast to celebrate the forming of a town and the railroad coming to it, I vowed that day I’d make certain that women like these came to my table too to lend viand as they dined and told their stories to the politicians, corporate heads, and city leaders who wouldn’t be there without these weary-lined faces having gone before them.
From Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage, vol. 1, by Carrie Adell Strahorn (page 84)
It was surely a place devoid of all comfort except that gleaned from a table well-laden with pork and beans, bread and black coffee, all of which better satisfied a hungry stomach than all the dainties at a rich man’s table though not the viands an epicure would select.
8
Mates
The proprietors of the Cosmopolitan Hotel laughed when we asked for a key to our room, because no one in Helena ever locked their doors, which surprised me, it being a mining town. We weren’t approached on the street by beggars either, never saw anyone without a purpose. I suspected that the churches found little to do for charity, though with the brewery up and running, there’d soon be temperance and poverty to address. Here freedom to come and go and be oneself wafted the streets like the cool mountain air that we drew from the wide, blue-sky vista all around. The telegraph lines had been cut by the Indians, but it made little effect on those Montanans. People carried on without news from the outside except from those like us, and they seemed the better for it. Business, mostly at the brick assay office, carried on, and we were given that tour, shown scales that could weigh a single thread, not to mention a tiny speck of gold dust. They had me write my name on a piece of paper that had been weighed and then weighed my signature. The result: 1/264 of a grain. This I would surely write to my mother about.
August 23, 1878
Robert got all the politics about Helena, the territorial capital. His news came not only in meetings and interviews but in those lax moments at a fishing hole when men calmed by streams awash with trout let down their guard. As their hands slowly stripped a line luring a fish toward a fly, they might reveal an insight about a political rival or even express a worry over some piece of territorial legislation. I wasn’t invited on those little excursions, sadly. I’d fished in Europe and found dropping a worm into water to be a soothing activity.
What I really longed for was purposeful activity. A life without a purpose is a story without an ending.
Robert was driven to write his books. He’d also started a newspaper of sorts that the railroad circulated. When he felt he’d met with all the major influencers who would sing the praises of a railroad—and made copious notes, wrote his weekly New West Illustrated articles—he was ready to head for shorter trips to places like Butte and Virginia City, keeping Helena as a base for a time. The Cosmopolitan was our new home.
I suggested writing a piece for the female reader for Robert’s New West Illustrated. “Men need mates,” I said. “And women will be interested in whe
re they might fit in.” I served him cold tea. The water here was so bracing, surging out of mountain streams, that even the oldest tea leaves sparkled to life.
“Has it occurred to you that in these mining towns there’s little need of women?”
“Then these towns are doomed. Sugar?”
“Think about it, Dell. Chinese chambermen clean houses and do the laundry. Boardinghouses and hotels serve hot meals, provide baths, a change of linens now and then. Saloons offer a brew without a clicking of one’s chastising tongue and not an ounce of disparagement. Why would a miner want a mate at all?” I figured Robert was teasing—at least I hoped so.
“The mines will peter out and then they’ll be alone.” It didn’t seem like a strong argument. I embellished. “For companionship, of course, that’s why they need their wives. For shared dreams and hopes and to live through the hard times. To start families as men begin to see their efforts amount to little if they have no one to hear their stories of exploits, of successes and failures as they form legacies to leave behind. Yes, families, that’s why men need mates.”
“Could be a good theme to explore.” He set his tea aside, lathered his face for his shave. “Yes. Write a bit on that. Give male readers words to convince their women to let them come west.” He added more soap to his face. “I’m off to Butte this morning.”
“You’ll spend our first anniversary without me?”
He looked at me in the mirror. I think he’d forgotten.
“Helena’s beautiful. We’ll celebrate later.”
“And what am I to do here?” I pouted, I know, my back up against the high headboard, my stocking feet not yet slipped into my high-tops, though I had donned my corset, soft bustle, slips, and stockings, and my ruffled dress. My hat and gloves were on the table beside the door. I held a crocheted bird, like one we’d handed to guests as wedding mementos. It was stuffed with goose down and I pressed it between my fingers. Along with the linens, it was my way of making each room we found ourselves in, our “home.”
Everything She Didn't Say Page 5
