Westering Women

by Sandra Dallas

  “And how many would have died if they had stayed at home—from tuberculosis or accidents or God knows what cause? They came willingly.”

  “Did Clara?”

  Joseph thought about that for a moment. “I believe from what Mary has confided that you may have saved the child from a far worse death. You must let the Lord take this burden from you, Willie.”

  “He will not take it from Mrs. Hale.”

  “In time He will.”

  William didn’t seem to be listening. He brushed away mosquitoes that were thick around his head. “Go on back, Joe. I shall continue the search alone.” He turned to his brother-in-law. “Look at you, your clothes are torn, and you are covered with mud. What would your congregation think?”

  “They would think—” Joseph stopped abruptly as Maggie screamed.

  “There,” she shouted. “There is Clara. We found her!” She pushed ahead of the ministers, then knelt in the water, holding her child’s head in her hands. “Clara,” she whispered. “It is Mama. Open your eyes. You are safe. I have you, Clara.” She untied the ripped sunbonnet and threw it into the willows. She ran her fingers through Clara’s wet hair, then touched the scratches on the child’s face. “Wake up, Clara. There is a fire to warm you, and I will dress you in dry clothes. We will have soup for supper, and Penn will make strawberry ice cream.” She picked up the child and held her close, water dripping from Clara’s clothing.

  “Let me take her,” Joseph said.

  “She is sleeping,” Maggie told him.

  Joseph reached for Clara, but Maggie would not give her up. “She is mine. I will carry her.”

  “She is too heavy. You must save your strength.”

  “She is mine.”

  William touched Joseph’s arm, and Joseph was still. Together the two men, Maggie between them carrying Clara, trudged back up the river. Maggie was cold, her damp clothes weighed her down, and her arms ached. She stumbled along, tripping over dead branches, sliding in the mud, but she refused to relinquish her daughter. She would hold her forever. At last, they neared the camp, and William went on ahead to tell the women that Clara’s body had been found.

  Maggie saw them waiting for her and clutched Clara tighter, still refusing to let go of her. “She is sleeping. She is mine,” Maggie said. “I want to hold her hand.”

  “She belongs to all of us, Maggie. She is gone. God is holding her hand now,” Mary said, reaching for the child.

  Maggie stared into the face of her daughter, touching the child’s eyelids and her pale hair. Then, with a deep sigh, she relinquished the small body.

  “I shall dress her in warm clothes. She will never be cold again,” Mary said, then added, “Dick will keep her warm.”

  Maggie nodded.

  “Wrap her in my blanket,” Evaline said. Her face was drawn, and she had been crying.

  “I picked flowers for her grave.” Penn held a bouquet of wildflowers in her hand.

  One by one, the women came forward, offering tokens or words of condolence. Maggie did not hear them.

  * * *

  THE TWO MINISTERS conducted a service for Clara, then buried her on a hillside far above the river. “Her final resting place should be dry and warm,” Mary had said.

  After the prayers were done and the hymns sung, the men began to dig the grave, but the women insisted on doing it themselves. Winny went first, taking a shovelful of dirt, then handing the shovel to Penn, who gave it to Bessie when she was finished, and so on until each of the women had taken a turn and the hole was deep enough. Just before Clara’s body, wrapped in Evaline’s blanket as a shroud, was lowered into the grave, Bessie reached down and cut a lock of the little girl’s hair. Then Clara was buried, and the women shoveled dirt over the body and piled rocks on top of the dirt to keep coyotes and wolves from digging up the grave.

  When it was over, the women walked solemnly back to camp. “How sad a thought to die so far from home,” one commented, as she brushed tears from her eyes. “Her grave will be lost. Maggie will never find it again,” said another.

  Bessie stayed behind and unfastened a locket from her neck, one that she always wore because it contained a few strands of her first husband’s hair. She removed the glass that secured the hair and held out her hand, letting the wind carry away the strands. Then she placed the lock of Clara’s hair behind the glass. When the others were gone, Bessie came forward and gave the locket to Maggie.

  Bessie left then, but Maggie stayed by the grave. She stretched her body beside it, her face against the damp earth. She could feel the cold in her bones. Mary found her there later on when she came back with a tin mug of tea and ordered Maggie to drink it. In her other hand, Mary carried a cross that she had made from two slats from the back of Bessie’s rocker. Bessie had said they were oak and would last longer than pine or cottonwood. As Maggie held the cross, Mary pushed it into the ground at the head of the grave. Then, using a rock, she pounded it even deeper. “The cross will last. Someday we will come back and find the grave and put up a proper stone,” she said. To mark the grave even further, she lifted a huge rock shaped like an egg and set it in back of the cross.

  Maggie ran her fingers over the crude letters that Mary had carved in the crosspiece, whispering each letter. “Clara Hale,” Maggie said. “Her real name was Clara Kaiser.”

  “I know,” Mary said. “But she is Clara Hale to all of us.”

  Maggie grasped Mary’s hand and said, “I think she would like to live in eternity with the name of Clara Hale.”

  Fifteen

  August 17, 1852

  Great Salt Lake City

  “Clara would have liked the snow,” Maggie murmured as she stared at the white mountaintops beyond South Pass. “I have never seen snow in summer.”

  “She would beg for snow ice cream,” said Penn.

  “That last Monday that we stayed in camp because of the rain, she wanted you to make ice cream,” Maggie remembered. “That was before…” Her mind drifted off, and she could not finish.

  “I’d climb up that mountain right this minute and get the snow for her,” Penn said.

  Maggie did not reply. She had barely spoken since Clara’s death, but she had thought of little besides her loss. She once had told herself that her years with Jesse had been worth the pain because out of that agony had come Clara and Dick. Now both children were dead. The marriage had had no purpose besides heartbreak. Why had God given her a son and a daughter, then taken them away? What was the sense of it? She tried to remind herself of the happy times, but she felt only grief. “Why?” she had asked the ministers.

  Reverend Parnell had shaken his head and turned away, but Reverend Swain had replied, “I do not know the meaning of death, but there is meaning to life.”

  Some of the women maintained that it was best not to talk to Maggie about Clara, that Maggie would not want to be reminded of her loss. Those who shared Maggie’s campfire believed otherwise, however. “You think she’s going to forget Clara’s death if you don’t mention it?” Penn asked.

  “Remembering Clara makes me happy,” Evaline said. “I wish it would make Mrs. Hale happy, too.” The night Clara was buried, Evaline stayed by the campfire for hours, drawing the girl’s likeness. In the morning, she presented the portrait to Maggie, telling her, “It was Miss Mary’s idea for me to draw it.” Of course, Maggie thought. Clara was Mary’s loss, too. And Evaline’s. Caroline’s and Sadie’s and Dora’s. The ministers’. At first Clara had been afraid of the two men. Jesse might have made her afraid of all men. But the preachers’ kindness had eventually drawn her to them.

  The picture Evaline had drawn was stored in Maggie’s trunk, and several times each day, she took it out and stared at it as she fingered Bessie’s locket, which she had not removed from her neck since Bessie had given it to her.

  Those days following Clara’s death had been hard for all of them, Maggie most of all, of course. The others tried to ease her grief by taking over her chores. When it was
Maggie’s turn, Penn harnessed the oxen and walked beside them on the trail, and Sadie and Bessie did Maggie’s cooking. Dora, big with child now, took over the laundry. During the day, Maggie stumbled along behind the wagon, and at night, she sat staring into the campfire, until Mary told the others that Maggie was too caught up in sorrow, that doing her part would help heal her. So one night, Mary said, “It is your turn to cook, Maggie. You cannot sit idle.”

  Maggie, resting on the ground and staring out at the sage, looked up. At first she was surprised and then she was annoyed that others expected her to take over her duties when she was so wracked by sadness. She started to protest at the unfeelingness of Mary’s demand, then saw the determination on her friend’s face and rose and went to the wagon. She took out the beans and salt pork, the cornmeal and flour, and spent an hour preparing supper. Only after the meal was finished did she realize that as she had prepared it, she had put thoughts of Clara’s death aside. The next day, without being asked, she went with Mary to harness the team.

  Still, she treasured those moments of sadness that cloaked her and was reluctant to let them go. She had sorrowed over Dick’s death, too, but she had still had Clara. Now she had no one.

  She pondered all that, the might-have-beens, the what-ifs, wondering if she should have stayed in Chicago. She knew in her heart, however, that she had made the wise decision, the only one that would have taken Clara and her out of danger. Only it had not turned out as she had hoped. She should have been the one to die, not Clara. If only she could change places with her daughter. She could not, however. She was the one who lived.

  Of course, she could join Clara. She could go back to Clara’s grave and die. It was a coward’s choice. Clara had not been a coward, and Maggie was not one either. Clara would want her to go on with the others, and to go on joyfully. That meant she must do her part. Nonetheless, the grief that weighed her down did not lift, and Maggie wondered if it ever would.

  * * *

  “WE HAVE CROSSED where the waters divide,” William said one day.

  “What’s that?” Penn asked.

  “At the west side of these mountains, the water in the rivers flows west, to the Pacific Ocean. On the east side, where we came from, it flows east.”

  “How does it know how to do that?”

  “God tells it.”

  “Well, I hope He tells us how to get across them mountains.”

  The mountains rose ahead of them now, and Maggie was glad to leave the prairie, with its merciless sun. Although it was only August, the mornings were cold. In the early dew, the sage gave out a pungent odor.

  Maggie was seasoned. She no longer felt the sand that worked its way into her moccasins. She walked miles on end without getting tired. Her eyes had stopped stinging from the campfire smoke. “We have been tried and not found wanting,” Bessie told her. Maggie only nodded. Clara had not been found wanting, but that hadn’t mattered. Maggie’s thoughts were back at the Green River.

  “The hardest part’s behind us,” Sadie continued.

  “The hardest part hasn’t even begun,” William chided her. “There are mountains ahead and perhaps snow. We must hurry.”

  Sometimes they encountered travelers returning east who told them about the way ahead. “I would trade all the gold fields out there for just one acre of good Missouri land,” one said.

  “Turn back,” another warned. “I seen hell, and its name is California.”

  Nearly everyone they encountered expressed wonderment that a group of women was going west to find husbands. Many had heard of the train of women from travelers who had passed them, and they stopped to stare. Some gave advice on which route to take.

  William had hoped to take the train along an arid shortcut called the Sublette Cutoff because he believed it would save time, but the women protested. They wanted to follow the Mormon Trail to its end in Great Salt Lake City. Edwin encouraged them to take that route, promising that they would find a warm welcome among the Mormons—good food and a chance to replenish supplies.

  “I would trade a week of my life for a fresh egg and a loaf of bread baked in a real oven,” Bessie said.

  The others began to talk about food then—puddings and cakes and pies. “Anything but vinegar pie,” Penn said.

  “Have they bathtubs?” Sadie asked.

  “I would be happy just to be in a real house,” Dora told Edwin.

  “I believe the sympathy of our women will help you with your sorrow, Mrs. Hale,” Edwin said to Maggie. He as much as the others had been solicitous of Maggie.

  “We will need to find teamsters to replace the Mormon men who are leaving us,” Joseph put in.

  William looked at Edwin and the women, and shook his head. “I cannot fight all of you. We will take the Salt Lake route.”

  * * *

  MAGGIE HAD NOT seen real civilization since she had left St. Joseph months earlier, and she was glad to reach Great Salt Lake City, which sat in a valley surrounded by mountain ranges. Penn stared at the buildings, most of them lumpy adobe squares set on streets that were white-hot from the midday glare. She pointed to a clapboard house and told Maggie, “I would like to live there.”

  Maggie nodded, not paying attention, and Sadie spoke. “Don’t like it too much, Penn. Some polygamous Mormon is likely to snatch you up.”

  “Some what?” Penn looked confused.

  “Polygamy. That is what Mormons do. It means they have more than one wife.”

  “They what?” Penn looked at Sadie in shock.

  “Like in the Bible. The men have more than one wife,” Maggie said, joining the conversation.

  “I never was much for Bible reading on account of I can’t read,” Penn said. “How many do they have?”

  Maggie turned to stare at a house where two women stood in the yard. “I do not know. Two or three. Maybe a hundred.”

  “A hundred! How could that husband remember all their names?”

  “Maybe he gives them a number.”

  “Number Twenty-four, you come fix my supper,” Penn said, and even Maggie smiled.

  “Why, one man could marry all of us, and we wouldn’t have to go on to California,” Sadie remarked.

  Penn thought a moment. “You think a woman could have two husbands here?”

  Maggie shrugged. “Most likely it is against the law.”

  “When was the law ever a fair thing?” Mary asked.

  “You mean the law lets a man have all the wives he wants, but a woman can’t have all them husbands?” Penn asked.

  Sadie smiled. “That is the way of it, since men are in charge.”

  “Well, maybe it’s just as well. What would I do with two men ordering me around? What if they didn’t want the same thing for supper?” Penn thought a moment. “I guess that’s all right. I wouldn’t want two men that could beat me. I already had me one.”

  “So did I,” Maggie said softly.

  “Then it’s a good thing your husband’s dead.”

  Penn asked Edwin what the polygamous wives were like. He laughed. “Why, just like women everywhere. I myself have two and intend to take more. Our women like nice houses and pretty dresses. They cook and wash and raise children. The women are happy with the arrangement. They help each other in times of trouble or loss. Those who are barren share the children of sister wives.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t like it,” Sadie told him.

  “You might if your salvation depended on it,” he replied.

  Joseph, who had been listening, interrupted. “It is immoral. Polygamy is a sin.”

  “The prophets in the Bible practiced it,” Edwin told him. “Abraham had two wives. Do you believe the Bible is wrong?”

  “Nonetheless…” Joseph didn’t finish.

  “The first wife has to approve before her husband takes another wife,” Edwin continued.

  Caroline interrupted. “I would never say yes to a second wife.”

  “And I would never ask you,” Joseph said.

  “S
till, it would be nice to have someone to help with the washing,” Caroline added, glancing sideways at her husband.

  “Caroline!” he said, and she bowed her head to hide a smile.

  * * *

  MAGGIE DISCOVERED SHE and the other women were of great interest to the Mormons. News that they were going to California to find husbands had made the rounds of the city, and several men called at the camp and asked to escort them to a dance the Mormons were holding that night. Most of the women said no, but a few agreed to attend, including Maggie. She had not wanted to go, but Mary insisted, and it was easier to give in to Mary than to argue with her.

  When they arrived, they stared at the groups of women clustered around men. Several of those women were grandmothers, but many were barely into their teens.

  “I expect those are their harems,” Mary said.

  “Look how pretty some of the women are. I thought they would be old and dried up. And their dresses!” Winny remarked, looking down at her own faded and patched calico. “What do you think of them, Maggie?”

  Maggie had not paid attention to the women’s clothing, but now she studied it. “Most appear homemade, but there must be professional dressmakers among them, for many of the garments are as fashionable as those in Chicago. Someone has studied Peterson’s Magazine and Godey’s Lady’s Book and copied the latest styles.”

  “So many of the women are pregnant,” Dora observed. “It seems that every third one is expecting a baby.” She, too, had been reluctant to go to the dance, because her own pregnancy was advanced, and her arm, while healed, still ached from the break. She stared at the Mormons, who in turn stared at the little company of women.