The Quilt Walk

by Dallas, Sandra

  “No.” Ma thought a moment. “But she could be upstairs. You could build a stairway on the side of the building. I don’t imagine you could rent that space to a saloon or any other business.”

  “A lawyer or a doctor, maybe.”

  “Lucy would pay every bit as much in rent, and her clients wouldn’t spit tobacco juice on the floor,” Ma said.

  “Would women climb the stairs?”

  “Women would climb a mountain to buy fabric for their quilts!”

  “I don’t know, Meggie. I don’t like the idea of a woman renting from me.”

  Ma turned to face Pa, her hands on her hips, “You listen to me, Thomas. A woman’s money is every bit as good as a man’s. When we arrived in Golden, you said you were beholden to me for giving up everything I cared about and for following you west. You said I was a dutiful wife. Now it is your turn to be a dutiful husband. I want you to rent that space to Lucy.”

  Pa took a step backward, and still tending to a bucket, he put up his hands in surrender, water sloshing down his arms. Then he turned to me, the corners of his mouth lifted just a little. “Your ma does indeed have a stout heart.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  THE QUILT THAT

  WALKED TO GOLDEN

  Ma and Aunt Catherine soaked in the afternoon sunlight that came through the windows in Mrs. Bonner’s shop, Golden Sewing Supplies. It was in an upstairs room of what Pa had named the Hatchett Block. The frame was small, and every so often, the women stood to roll up a completed section and expose a new portion of the quilt. Ma looked down at Tommy, who was sleeping in a basket beside her, then stretched and sat down again beside Aunt Catherine.

  Mrs. Bonner picked up her needle and took several tiny stitches, but before she could pull the thread through the fabric sandwich of quilt top, batting, and backing, she stood up to greet a customer. It had been like that all afternoon. Mrs. Bonner would take a few stitches, then someone would climb the stairs to the store and ask for a spool of thread or a yard of calico.

  “Emmy Blue, do you want to sit down and stitch for a few minutes?” Ma asked.

  I had been putting away thimbles and buttons and spools of thread. This was Mrs. Bonner’s second shipment of merchandise. The first had all but sold out in a month. She paid me a dollar a week to help in the store after school and on Saturdays. “I have to finish this,” I said, and Ma and Aunt Catherine smiled. They knew I was better at stocking shelves than I was at sewing. I smiled back at them, as I placed the egg-rock on a paper pattern to keep it from blowing away. The egg-rock was the one that Joey had given me when he left our wagon train, and I had, in turn, given it to Mrs. Bonner the day the store opened. It was for good luck, I’d explained.

  Ma ran her hand over the quilt she was working on. It was a giant star, made from pieces of the dresses we’d worn on the overland trail. “Remember this one, Cath?” She tapped her finger on a white sprig on a black background. “That was going to be my best dress when I reached Golden.”

  “And this red was from Emmy Blue’s middle dress.”

  “Back in Quincy, you made a dress for Waxy from those yard goods, too,” I said. “She still has hers. Waxy wasn’t as hard on her clothes as I was.”

  “Nobody is,” Ma said with a smile.

  Aunt Catherine held up a green diamond shape. “That’s the dress that was scorched in the campfire the first week of our trip. I learned to be careful after that,” she recalled.

  Mrs. Bonner finished helping her customer, who admired the quilt before she left. She also told Ma she’d be back later in the week to give her a hand with the stitching.

  “You’d better hurry up and finish before she comes back,” Mrs. Bonner said after the woman was gone. “She takes toenail stitches.” When Ma didn’t understand, Mrs. Bonner explained. “Stitches big enough to catch your big toe. You’d have to take them out.”

  We all laughed. I glanced around the shop. It was small, and it still smelled of newly sawed wood, but it was cheerful, with the bright bolts of fabric stacked on shelves, the glass case of multicolor trims, and Ma’s quilt on the wall. The day Mrs. Bonner opened for business, Ma had brought her Friendship Quilt to hang in the shop. “Whenever I sit here to quilt,” she had said, “I can look up at it and remember my friends. And one or two of your customers might get the idea they would want one. Where do you suppose they would buy the fabrics for it?” She’d grinned.

  Now Ma looked at Mrs. Bonner, who was so happy she almost glowed. She hadn’t seen Mr. Bonner since the day she came to live with us. “Never should I have married such a man, but he’s gone out of my remembrance now,” she’d told us.

  “I expect we can finish this quilt today,” Ma told Mrs. Bonner. She tapped her foot to the piano music that came through the floor. “Who would have thought I’d be doing my quilting over a saloon. But I like the music. It’s snappy.”

  Pa had rented to a saloon. There was a bank in the space next to it, and two doctors and a lawyer rented space upstairs from it, next to the sewing shop. It was a grand building, two stories high, made of brick and wood, with plate glass windows in front. Ma had written to Grandma Mouse that the Hatchett Block was a great success.

  Tommy woke up and cried a little. Ma started to put aside her needle, but I said I’d take care of him. I picked him up and said, “Look at that big quilt, Tommy.” But he only sniffled, no more interested in quilting than I’d been back in Quincy. I jiggled the baby and showed him to Barebones, who was stretched out nearby. In a moment, I laid Tommy in his basket, where he fell asleep.

  I went back to my work, listening to Ma, Aunt Catherine, and Mrs. Bonner. Although I still wasn’t crazy about stitching, I liked the talk that went on around the quilt frame—the friendliness. I decided that was the best part of quilting.

  At last, the three women stood up and loosened the quilt. Ma took it out of the frame and held it up. “Done!” she said. The women clapped, and Barebones thumped his tail.

  The quilt was a single large star made up of hundreds of diamond shapes cut from the dresses we’d worn on our trip from Quincy to Golden. It was a happy quilt, and I thought it would always remind me of my quilt walk across the plains. Looking back on it, I decided that quilting as I walked along beside the wagons hadn’t been such a bad thing. In fact, I’d almost enjoyed it.

  “What is that pattern?” Mrs. Bonner asked.

  “I believe it’s called Lone Star,” Aunt Catherine told her.

  “What an ordinary name. We can do better than that,” Mrs. Bonner said.

  “We could call it Starry Night on the Prairie,” Ma said. “I loved lying on the ground and looking up at the stars. I believe that’s why I made another star quilt.”

  “Or Prairie Star,” Aunt Catherine suggested.

  Ma nodded. “Something like that.” She ran her hand over the star. “Who would believe the pieces of this quilt came from the dresses we wore one on top of the other as we walked beside the wagons on our way to Golden?”

  “That’s it, Ma,” I said. I shoved a bolt of cloth into place.

  “That’s what, Emmy Blue?”

  “The name of the quilt.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ma said. “What name?”

  I went over to the quilt then and touched a diamond that had come from the fabric of the first dress I’d put on that last morning in Quincy, a blue calico. “This quilt shouldn’t have a star name at all,” I said. “We are going to call it The Quilt That Walked to Golden.”

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  There really was a quilt that walked. The girl who may have made it was Alice Burgess. In 1864, Alice’s father, Thomas Burgess, and his brother, Jacob, set out from Ohio for Golden, Colorado. The two men planned to build a business block, which would provide space for stores and offices. The two Burgess wagons were filled with building supplies, and the brothers told their wives—both of them named Mary—there was no room for clothing. The women would be allowed to take only what they could wear. So the t
wo wives put on all their dresses, one on top of another, and they all set out for Colorado.

  Because riding in a wagon was boring and the seat was hard, the women walked most of the way. Alice probably walked, too. Family legend says that after the clothes wore out, Mary Jane, Thomas’s wife, cut them into diamond shapes and made a quilt of them. The quilt was known as The Quilt that Walked to Golden. It is now in the collection of the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum in Golden, Colorado.

  Like many quilt stories, this one seems to be as much legend as fact. Some of the fabrics in the quilt were not manufactured until long after 1864. And while Mary Jane probably cut out many of its pieces, the quilt may have been put together after her death, by her daughter or granddaughter. Nobody really knows for sure. The combination of truth and family stories is what makes quilt history fun.

  I wrote about Mary Jane Burgess and her quilt in my 2004 history of Colorado quilting, The Quilt That Walked to Golden. Jacob and his wife, Mary, left Golden before 1870. Thomas and Mary Jane stayed on for many years with their daughter, Alice, as well as two sons. Thomas operated the Burgess Block as a saloon, store, and public hall. Later it became a hotel and restaurant. The building at 1015 Ford Street still stands. It has been turned into apartments.

  When I wrote The Quilt That Walked to Golden, I was intrigued by the girl, Alice. What would the trip have been like for her? Did she have adventures on the way? Did she help her mother cut up dresses for the Star Quilt? And did she eventually become a quilter herself? Information about Alice and her family is sketchy. I wanted to know more about her. So when Amy Lennex, senior editor at Sleeping Bear Press, approached me about writing a children’s book, I jumped at the chance to create a girl who walks across the prairie with her family to Colorado.

  Although The Quilt Walk is based on a real incident in Colorado history, the book is mostly a work of fiction. That’s why I changed the names. I thought it wasn’t fair to make up stories about real people. So Alice became Emmy Blue, and her parents became Meggie and Thomas Hatchett. Emmy Blue’s adventures came from my imagination.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  While I’ve published eleven novels, I’d never written a children’s book and couldn’t have done it without the direction and support of Amy Lennex. She worked with me page by page to make Emmy Blue and her story come alive. I’m also grateful to Audrey Macks Mitnick, senior publicist at Sleeping Bear, and to my wonderful agents, Danielle Egan-Miller and Joanna MacKenzie of Browne & Miller Literary Associates, who encouraged me to take on this project. Emmy Blue couldn’t have better friends than the four of you.

  And I couldn’t have better friends than Bob, Dana, Kendal, Lloyd, and Forrest. They are the reason I write about the love and support of families. Forrest, The Quilt Walk is for you and your friends.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sandra Dallas is the author of eleven novels and ten nonfiction books for adults. With The Quilt Walk, she brings her much-admired storytelling talent to young readers for the first time.

  Sandra graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Denver, and began her writing career as a reporter with Business Week. A staff member for twenty-five years, and the magazine’s first female bureau chief, she covered the Rocky Mountain region. Many of her experiences have been incorporated into her novels.

  Sandra is the recipient of the Women Writing the West® Willa Literary Award, the National Cowboy Hall of Fame Wrangler Award, and is a two-time winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award. She has been awarded a Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for Historical Fiction. In addition, she has been a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Award, and the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award.

  Sandra lives in Colorado with her husband.