by Daniel Knapp
Elizabeth's Aunt Clara, a cold, austere woman whose husband had fled the iciness of their bed, owned a small general store as well as the modest dairy farm her man had abandoned in his flight westward. She expected nothing so much from Elizabeth as the labor and obsequiousness of a servant girl, adding long hours behind the counter of the dry-goods establishment to Elizabeth's voluminous chores around the house and in the milking barn.
Men who worked the boats on the Ohio River often patronized the store, but Elizabeth took little notice of them, until the afternoon Billy Ralston and Alex Todd ambled in to buy some work shirts and overalls. They lingered briefly, making small talk with Elizabeth after purchasing the clothing, then left when Clara made it plain they had worn out their welcome. A half hour later, after Elizabeth's aunt had gone on an errand, they were back.
"We've decided," said Ralston, as Alex Todd tried to conceal his discomfort, "that we have both fallen in love with you on first sight." Todd involuntarily rolled his eyes in despair. Unable to look at Elizabeth, he turned away and began absently fingering a pair of overalls. "And it's simply a matter," Ralston went on, "of you deciding which one of us you like best."
"I think you are mistaken," she said, smiling.
"How is that, Miss, Miss...?"
"Purdy."
"Miss Purdy."
"I believe your friend has fallen in love with a second pair of overalls."
They both looked at Alex Todd, and then all three were convulsed by uncontrolled, totally disarming laughter.
For a month or so, while the river was iced over and the two young men waited to go back to work, Elizabeth innocently spent as much time with them as she could manage under her aunt's watchful eye and incessant demands. They were an odd pair, Billy and Alex, both eighteen and inseparable friends. Ralston was the pragmatist, Todd the dreamer. Billy planned to the last detail his next move "up the ladder." Alex didn't know what he was going to do beyond a vague urge to follow in the footsteps of his cousin Talbott to "find his fortune" in California.
Todd was the more attractive of the two. Elizabeth soon found his sandy-haired, ruddy good looks, his quiet, gentle manner, and his appealing if undefined dream of moving west someday a persuasive combination. When the opportunity came to head south for work, where the river was free of ice, Ralston left immediately and Todd stayed behind. It was obvious that he could not bear to part from her, and the sacrifice, combined with the importance she placed in someone caring so much for her, unlocked a depth of feeling she had never known existed.
In less than a month she could scarcely remember Billy Ralston's face or voice. In the evenings, after her aunt had gone to bed and she had made her way to the barn where Alex Todd waited, she found it difficult to stop at kisses and long intervals of standing pressed together in each other's arms.
He took a temporary job as a drayman hauling lumber to Cincinnati. He was gone for a week. The night he returned, she let him in through her window, and immediately took his hands and placed them on her breasts as she kissed him. He asked her to marry him. Her answer was to strip off his shirt slowly and sit him down on her bed while she took off her own clothes.
During the hours when they were not together, her aggressive sexuality puzzled and disquieted her. Her aunt's silent condemnation of her "shameless" behavior—spending time alone with a man—was simply a more severe manifestation of the way Elizabeth herself felt about such things. But only for a time. She never considered evil anything she and Alex did when they were together, never really gave any thought to it at all.
In late March, after concealing her early morning nausea from everyone, including Alex, she realized she was pregnant. When she told him, he insisted they get married immediately. That touched Elizabeth, made her deliriously happy, and she accepted. But it did not assuage her concern about the ostracism she would suffer when the baby was born and it became obvious the child had been conceived out of wedlock.
"There is a simple answer," Alex whispered to her, as they lay on a blanket near the riverbank. "You can't stay here, and I want to go to California, so we'll pack up and go."
He pulled a folded envelope out of his pocket. In it was a letter from his cousin Talbott in Monterey. It had taken more than six months to reach him, coming around the Horn by ship and then inland to Ohio. Talbott's employer, a man named Thomas Larkin, had agreed to hire Alex if he could be in Monterey before January 1846. Larkin had been appointed U.S. Consul in California, and in anticipation of "expanding political duties," as Talbott put it, Larkin planned to turn management of his business enterprises over to Alex's cousin at the turn of the New Year.
"I am certain," added Talbott, "you can learn what I have in half the time and become my assistant manager within three to six months of your arrival."
Elizabeth did not respond as Alex expected.
"Don't you see? It's the solution to our problem."
"But I have to stay here at least through the fall! That was a condition of the agreement I made with Aunt Clara."
"Your slave-driving aunt has already sweated a year's work out of you in return for six months' room and board!"
He bought a horse and buckboard with a small portion of his substantial savings, and they eloped the following Saturday night while her aunt was attending a church quilting bee. They were married in St. Louis by an itinerant Baptist preacher, who raised his fee to three dollars after taking note of Elizabeth's slightly swollen belly and the thickness of Alex's money belt.
On the way to Independence, Elizabeth's incapacitating headaches and nausea began, then intermittent light fever started to plague her. Two weeks after they had sold the buckboard, purchased a Conestoga wagon, and passed beyond the beginning of the Kansas Territory, it became obvious that Elizabeth should see a doctor. Reluctantly, Alex reined his team off the trail to Fort Laramie and headed southwest. Bent's Fort was out of the way, but it was closer.
The regimental surgeon at Bent's Fort, Captain Elisha Canby, had white hair, a handlebar moustache, and unlimited wisdom and understanding. He was sixty and a doctor, and he had seen it all.
"Young man," Canby said after examining Elizabeth, "your wife is having a difficult pregnancy. All I can do is give you some advice. If I were you, I would not allow her to travel until the baby is born."
Alex calculated time and distance for a moment. "She should have the baby sometime in mid-autumn."
"That's what present indications point to."
"By then it would be too late to cross the Sierras."
"Without a doubt. It would take you more than sixty days to reach them, even if a wagon train were traveling so late in the year, which I seriously doubt. By then I should think the snow in the Sierras would make passage impossible."
"That means staying here until spring."
"Or moving on to Laramie or Fort Hall. You could do that a month or so after the child arrives. But I don't see the sense in it. I should think it wiser to remain here, where there is ample room for you and accommodations are better."
"But I have a job, a very good job, waiting for me in California! If I don't reach Monterey this year..."
"Is it all that important to you? There will be other jobs."
"This one holds great promise for the future."
"Then you have a difficult decision to make."
"What do you mean?"
"It seems to me you have a choice. Remain here with your wife, or go on alone and have your wife and child join you next year. It's simply a matter of whether or not the job is worth it—to both of you."
"No. I should be with her. She may get worse. She may need me."
Elisha Canby smiled and put a fatherly hand on Alex's shoulder. "Son, aside from moral support, there is little you can do. I fully understand your concern, and I tell you this only so you may have an objective, unsentimental basis upon which to make your choice. Troublesome, vexing as it is, your wife's condition is not extremely serious. If it follows the course I have seen many times
before, it will get no worse if she does not exert herself unduly. And the final weeks of the pregnancy will be normal."
"But where would she live? I'm not taken with the idea of her being alone here with a regiment of troopers."
The men have their outlets, believe me. There are a number of officers' wives here, including mine. And
your wife would be welcome to stay with us. In fact Mrs. Canby, who teaches the children here at the fort would relish the company."
"I'm much obliged to you, sir, And I thank you for your offer. But I am not disposed to leave my wife. Even if I were, I can't see how it would sit well with Elizabeth."
When Alex casually mentioned the conversation to Elizabeth, she would not hear of him passing up the opportunity in Monterey. "If it were any ordinary job, I could not bear the thought of it. But Alex! Sixty dollars a month! And the chance to advance so rapidly. I've had a feeling about it all along. About California. I believe there will be great good fortune for us there, as there would have been had we been among the first to settle, say, in Massachusetts. Think of what happened for the industrious, the foresighted there. The descendants of those who seized opportunity in the beginning are now the merchant kings of Boston!"
So it had been decided. Not without reluctance on both their parts, not without misgivings and equivocation that lasted a full two weeks. Elizabeth had shed so many tears during that final fortnight she felt almost a sense of relief when Alex drove their Conestoga over the crest of low hills to the north of the fort.
Five
She named the baby after her father and her husband. John Alexander Todd was born on his mother's seventeenth birthday, October 26, 1845. The Frémont expedition had long since come and gone on through the Rockies farther west. Her condition, unstable through the summer, grew better with the onset of cooler weather. There were no complications at birth, though little John Alexander weighed only six and a half pounds when Captain Canby held him by his ankles and gave him his first stinging smack on the buttocks. He seemed healthy enough, Canby told Elizabeth. In time, nurtured by her ample supply of mother's milk, the baby should easily gain his way to normal weight.
Lying in bed with her infant suckling at her breast, Elizabeth reread once again the letter from Alex that had reached her in late August. He had joined a train of one hundred wagons heading mainly for Oregon. Fifteen of them, including his, would separate from the main column beyond Fort Hall, veer southwest, and continue on across an even more forbidding stretch of the Sierras to California. By then the greatest danger from the Indians would be behind them, he wrote. He anticipated little difficulty with the savages anyway. There were too many men and arms in the train to fear more than occasional harassment. He expected to be in California by the end of October.
Camelia Canby sat opposite Elizabeth's bed, rocking as she knitted booties for the baby. "Wouldn't that be something!" she said. "If he got all the way to Californee by the time his son is born."
Elizabeth smiled. Silver-haired Camelia Canby was given to talking too much, and too often about things not worth talking about. But she had been a blessing while Elizabeth was still sick, caring for her as if she were her own daughter. Alex had left Elizabeth three hundred dollars, more than half his savings. She offered to pay the Canbys for board and lodging, but Camelia stubbornly refused to accept a penny.
After the Christmas holidays, Elizabeth began helping Camelia at the schoolhouse. John Alexander still lagged in gaining normal weight, but aside from carrying his crude rocker cradle to the school where she could keep an eye on him, Elizabeth trusted in Elisha Canby's optimistic expectations.
In February, Camelia traveled east for a last visit to her failing, eighty-four-year-old mother in St. Louis. Elizabeth took over her teaching duties temporarily. By then she had read through most of Elisha Canby's shelf of classics and medical texts, some books of more recent vintage owned by Charles Bent, one of three brothers who had established the fort as a trading post in the thirties, and had begun borrowing volumes from the regimental commander. The increased demands of the schoolroom were a welcome distraction from boredom and the tediousness of marking time until she could rejoin her husband.
Absorbed by her teaching duties, Elizabeth almost resented Camelia's return, but within a few days she had her hands too full to feel anything but apprehension. Seizing upon the baby's frail little body, the croup quickly developed into pneumonia. John Alexander hovered near death for a month. Then, as quickly as it had started, the fever and the illness left him. With Elizabeth still breast-feeding him, he began a steady climb back to robust health and normal weight, but it took time. It was not until early June that Elizabeth tearfully said good-bye to the Canbys and headed north for Fort Laramie with one of the Bent brothers in a supply wagon accompanied by two squads of dragoons.
They arrived during the third week of the month. John Alexander had thrived during the rapid journey on his mother's milk and Camelia's Canby's finely ground corn mush. Still, Elizabeth let one wagon train, then another pass on from Fort Laramie until she was absolutely certain her infant was as healthy as he looked. Early in the fourth week she arranged to travel west with the James Frazier Reed family. Reed, a well-to-do furniture manufacturer from Springfield, Illinois, and his friend "Uncle" George Donner were the de facto leaders of a group of twenty wagons carrying some eighty people. They planned to split off farther west from the larger, Oregon-bound train in which they traveled, and to head for California.
There was room enough for Elizabeth and her son. Indeed, happening on the Reeds seemed to her an extraordinary blessing. James Reed had spared nothing in providing on the long journey for his frail wife and for Virginia, her fourteen-year-old daughter by a former marriage, and their three small children. He had three wagons, the largest of which carried his family. Appropriately named the Palace Car, it dwarfed the other wagons in the train. On either side, steps made entrance easy. Inside, what amounted to a small room was furnished with stagecoach spring seats. An iron stove, its insulated chimney punching up through the wagon's sun-bleached sailcloth cover, warmed them on chilly mornings. On a second tier laid across the vehicle there were beds for the entire family. Margaret Reed's aged mother had begun the trip with them but had died before they were halfway across the Plains. At James Reed's insistence, Elizabeth and John Alexander took her bed.
Elizabeth thought Reed's occasional haughtiness and the spoiled, somewhat jealous temperament of his stepdaughter easy enough to overlook, considering his generosity. Beneath the bed platforms there were spacious lockers packed with sacks of clothing, provisions and delicacies unheard of on the wagon trail. From the moment she joined them, the Reeds shared freely with Elizabeth. When she offered to help, James Reed proudly told her there was no need. His hired girl, Eliza Williams, did the cooking and washing and helped with the children. He had three drivers and a hired hand to take care of the livestock and anything else that needed tending.
They celebrated July 4 amid the splendor of the Rockies. Although Elizabeth had read of these mountains as well as the Alps, she was filled with awe and wonder that anything could so completely dwarf the mountains of her Vermont childhood. By July 17 they had begun their descent down the far side of the Continental Divide at South Pass.
Late that day a rider coming up from the direction of the sunset met them with a handbill-letter printed by Lansford Hastings. The author of a book about California, which some of the pioneers carried with them, Hastings was touting a new, shorter trail he had just explored. Rather than the well-worn route that passed through Fort Hall and then branched southwest toward California where it left the Oregon Trail, Hastings urged them to veer off sooner to Fort Bridger. He was waiting there to guide them on the new trail, which angled south of the Great Salt Lake.
Elizabeth paid little attention to the conference between James Reed, George and Jacob Donner, and several other heads of families who gathered about the sweatstained frontiersman. After all, she thought, these men k
now what they are doing. In addition to their families, they had cattle, and in the case of Reed and the Donners, a small fortune in personal possessions and commercial goods to protect. Surely they would make the wisest decision about which route to take. But that night Elizabeth awoke in the darkness of the huge wagon dripping with sweat. Once again she had dreamed of a blizzard. This time with more detail and two additional characters...
She was wading through thigh-deep snow, John Alexander slung across her back in a makeshift carrying pouch cut from skins. A man dragged at her arm, jerking her upright and then forward through almost impassable drifts. He wore buckskins and had a sharply curved, full moustache, much like the one the frontiersman carrying the message from Lansford Hastings wore. Then the snow was swirling out of the night sky, pelting Elizabeth full in the face and blinding her. She stumbled, and as she fell the baby slipped from the carrying pouch. The man cursed at her, then said something that was lost in the roaring of a wind so cold it made her feel as though she were lying naked on an icy lake. Coughing, spitting snow out of her mouth, she pushed to raise herself and sank deeper. She rolled on her back and pulled at her knees until she gained a sitting position. It seemed hours before she was standing again. She tried to breathe and choked on flakes of snow as broad as silver dollars. She covered her mouth with her shawl and took a deep breath. The baby... the baby... the baby. Frantically spinning, almost losing her balance again, she searched the snow around her feet. The baby was gone... He has the baby... He must have the baby... She tried to find his outline in the driving, wet, stinging sheets of white that nearly toppled her backward. He was gone. The baby was gone. She closed her eyes and screamed. The sound was even more deafening than the wind.
In the morning she waited for the appropriate moment and drew James Reed aside as the hired hand doused the breakfast campfire.