The baby boy, Jeremiah, was healthy and she had an easier time nursing than with the others, and Mary seemed to settle down some; by now she was thirty-five years old. She also took up her old interest in science, getting her husband’s “permission to pursue collecting a few objects in natural history.” And, for a little insight into the mores of the frontier: “Teacher’s daughter had a child born. Her father was enraged and threatened to shoot himself.” Then, in December 1847, came the horrible news. The Whitmans, the couple they had stayed with when they first reached Oregon, had been murdered by Indians, along with others in their mission. It became famous throughout the West as the “Whitman Massacre” and scared off some future settlers. What happened to the ones who escaped? That was Mary’s worry, along with her fear that her family, too, despite their friendship with the Indians, might be attacked. And she was once again ready to have a baby; a nine-pound boy was born a couple of weeks after the Walkers received news of the Whitman slaughter. The couple had been in Oregon just ten years and had produced five children. As hopeful as she now felt about the prospects for her family, Mary no longer expected success for their mission: “I fear our labors for the Indians must soon cease…. The hope of our seeing them much better than they now are, fondly as I would wish to cherish, is all hope against hope.”
And so, after all that, they abandoned the mission. Mary had married Elkanah because she wanted to be a missionary, and missionaries needed to be married. The missionary part didn’t work; the married part did. After the massacre, the Walkers settled in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, living simply and raising eight children. After almost forty years of marriage, Elkanah died; by then it was his company that Mary missed: “I think of so many things I want to tell Mr. Walker, I realize more and more how much more I love him than anyone else.” Either he had started talking to her somewhere along the line, or she had decided to talk to him regardless of response. They had actually made the trip all the way back to Maine once, after the railroad made it possible, but she didn’t stay there with those female friends she had so longed to see. Mary Richardson returned with her husband to the frontier, which had become their home.
Clyde and Elinor Pruitt Stewart: Married in Haste, No Cause to Repent
Not all pioneers were married. Single men, and occasionally single women, would set out on their own to try to establish homesteads in the West. One who thrilled to the enterprise was Elinor Pruitt, a hardworking woman who expected to make it on her own. But she ended up getting an assist, and some affection, from Clyde Stewart, a husband who delighted her.
Elinor Pruitt was born into a poor family in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the late 1870s. She took over as caretaker for her brothers and sisters as a young teenager, after her parents died. She went to work for the railroad, moving steadily west and managing to educate herself enough that she wrote articles for the Kansas City Star after she got married at the age of twenty-two to another worker for the railroad, Mr. Rupert. Four years later her husband was killed in a railroad accident, leaving his wife with a baby girl, Jerrine. To support her daughter and herself, Elinor moved to Denver, and hired out as a laundress and housekeeper to a woman named Mrs. Coney, who became her friend. But the young woman wanted to homestead, and in 1909, after she heard about the wide-open spaces of Wyoming from a friend, Elinor quickly placed a newspaper advertisement asking for a job on a homestead. A Scottish rancher looking for help, who happened to be traveling through, saw the ad and hired her. Instead of a journal, Elinor wrote letters about her adventures to Mrs. Coney, which were published as a book, Letters of a Woman Homesteader, in 1914.
Traveling by train and stagecoach, it took three days for the Scottish rancher, Elinor, and Jerrine to reach Burnt Fork, Wyoming. When they arrived, the new employee deemed everything “just lovely for me. I have a very, very comfortable situation and Mr. Stewart is absolutely no trouble, for as soon as he has his meals, he retires to his room and plays on his bagpipe, only he calls it his ‘bugpeep.’ It is ‘The Campbells are Coming’ with variations, at intervals all day long and from seven to eleven at night. Sometimes I wish they would make haste and get here.” Never losing her humor, Elinor shows herself a woman of endless energy and boundless optimism, easy to please, and eager to file for her homestead. After about six weeks in Wyoming, she did, choosing land adjoining Stewart’s and declaring herself “a bloated landowner.” The trip to the filing office meant taking Jerrine by wagon through snowstorms, meeting wolves along the way, enjoying the spectacular scenery even so, and then returning home to Mr. Stewart. “If you will believe me, the Scot was glad to see me and didn’t herald the Campbells for two hours after I got home. I’ll tell you, it is mighty seldom any one’s so much appreciated.”
Mr. Stewart soon married Elinor, but she didn’t want to tell her old employer. Instead, her next letter, in September 1909, dwells on the joys of the busy summer just past. Mr. Stewart had been unable to find enough men to do all the work, so, without asking, one day when he was out looking for help, Elinor took out the mowing machine, which she had learned to operate as a girl. “I had enough cut before he got back to show him I knew how, and as he came back manless, he was delighted as well as surprised. I was glad because I really like to mow, and besides that, I am adding feathers to my cap in a surprising way. When you see me again you will think I am wearing a feather duster, but it is only that I have been said to have almost as much sense as a ‘mon,’ and that is an honor I never aspired to, even in my wildest dreams.” This was a woman who worked day and night and seemed to love it, but she would occasionally take a day, ride up into the mountains with Jerrine, and just bask in the beauty, without any need of consort.
At Thanksgiving, a young woman in the neighborhood got married at the Stewart house, where “our dinner was a success, but that is not to be wondered at. Every woman for miles around contributed.” Elinor draws a picture of homestead weddings, where first the justice of the peace came, then an enormous dinner was served immediately in order to finish before the obligatory and much-anticipated dance. “Dances are never given in the home here, but in ‘the hall.’ Every settlement has one and the invitations are merely written announcements posted everywhere.” The accounts of Christmas also paint a happy scene; still, Elinor had not let on that she was married to the man of the house. The following April, she gave a clue. She told her former boss that she had built her homestead house adjoining Mr. Stewart’s, “so that I could ‘hold down’ my land and job at the same time.” Then she made a tantalizing admission: “I have not treated you quite frankly about something you had a right to know about. I am ashamed and I regret very much that I have not told you.” In the next letter, Elinor decides to “confess and get it done with. The thing I have done is to marry Mr. Stewart. It was such an inconsistent thing to do that I was ashamed to tell you. And, too, I was afraid you would think I didn’t need your friendship and might desert me.”
That didn’t happen, clearly, because Elinor kept up her correspondence. In the next letter she tells Mrs. Coney, “I have been a very busy woman since I began this letter to you several days ago. A dear little child has joined the angels. I dressed him and helped to make his casket. There is no minister in this whole country and I could not bear the little broken lily bud to be just carted away and buried, so I arranged the funeral and conducted the services. I know I am unworthy and in no way fitted for such a mission, but I did my poor best, and if no one else is comforted, I am.” It’s one of the few sad moments Elinor recounts over four years. Some letters show the playfulness in her marriage, like one she wrote in the fall of 1911, where after a long story about tricking Mr. Stewart into taking her to town, Elinor suddenly closes with this news: “I am not going to let my baby prevent me from having many enjoyable outings. We call our boy Henry Clyde for his father. He is a dear little thing, but he is a lusty yeller for baby’s rights.” She did keep taking her “outings,” camping trips with Jerrine and the baby on which they encountered all kinds of
excitement, be it horse thieves or snowstorms, in between many hours of work on the ranch, where she still insisted on making money to pay off her own homestead.
Finally, two and a half years after she arrived, Elinor decided to tell her friend all about her husband and her marriage. She said she hadn’t before because “I could not even begin without telling you what a good man he is and I didn’t want you to think I could do nothing but brag.” She was also still embarrassed by the speed with which she married him. “But although I married in haste, I have no cause to repent. That is very fortunate because I have never had one bit of leisure to repent in. So I am lucky all around. The engagement was powerfully short because both agreed that the trend of events and ranch work seemed to require that we be married first and do our ‘sparking’ afterwards.” Elinor explains that they had to “chink” the wedding in between the planting because “Wyoming ranchers can scarcely take time even to be married in the springtime.” He sent for a marriage license by mail and called the neighboring justice of the peace to come for the ceremony; she fixed up a dress, cleaned up the house, and cooked up a meal. “Everything was topsy-turvy, and I had a very strong desire to run away. But I always did hate a ‘piker,’ so I stood pat.” She described how she had wanted to “stay foot-loose and free” but first she wanted to try homesteading, so there she was.
Also, Elinor revealed that the dead baby she had written about was her own. “For a long time my heart was crushed. He was such a sweet beautiful boy. I wanted him so much…so you see our union is sealed by love and welded by great sorrow.” Over the next two years, “God has given me two more precious sons. The sorrow is not so keen now.” To read her high-spirited letters, it would have been impossible to know that Elinor had been grieving. She was always cataloging her blessings, among them her “clean, honest husband, my kind, gentle milk cows, my garden which I make myself.” As happy as she was with her husband, Elinor wouldn’t let him on her land. She was a great proselytizer for homesteading as the answer to poverty: “any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed.” She goes on to explain all about the Department of Agriculture’s role, and how the homesteaders can experiment with different seeds. “I would not, for anything, allow Mr. Stewart to do anything toward improving my place, for I want the fun and experience myself. And I want to be able to speak from my experience when I tell others what they can do.” Slowly, over the months, she opened up more about Clyde. In June 1913, four years after she arrived in Wyoming, Elinor wrote, “I am as proud and happy as the day I became his wife. I wish you knew him, but I suspect I had better not brag too much, lest you think me not quite sincere.”
In the last letter, written in November 1913, Elinor rejoices in her success. “I set out to prove a woman could ranch if she wanted to…now Jerrine and I have put in our cellar full, and this is what we have: one large bin of potatoes (more than two tons), half a ton of carrots, a large bin of beets, one of turnips, one of onions, one of parsnips, and on the other side of the cellar we have more than one hundred heads of cabbage.” She lists the pickles and preserves she’s made over the summer, the ten cows milked twice daily, providing enough butter to pay for a year’s supply of flour and gasoline, plus the chickens and the turkeys. “In all I have told about I have had no help but Jerrine.” Clyde’s mother came in the summer and helped with the cooking and the babies, but Elinor proudly concludes, “I have tried every kind of work this ranch affords and I can do any of it.” She didn’t need her Clyde to support her. She needed him to love her, and he did.
Elinor Pruitt Stewart’s experience with marriage was not the norm; she enjoyed it but didn’t need it. For most of the men and women of the plains and prairies, it was just the opposite—they depended on each other, they sought comfort and stability. After all, these couples were picking up their lives, shaking up their societies, reinventing their relationships. Romance was a little suspect, passion distracting. Marriage was a partnership, a bargain—he stayed sober, did the clearing and the plowing and the planting and the harvesting; she produced children, did the gardening and the cooking, the pickling and preserving, the spinning and the sewing, the candle making and the animal tending. The basic contract’s made clear even in some of the songs of the time:
[He] Go tell her to make me a cambric shirt…Then she can be a true lover of mine.
[She] Go tell him to clear me an acre of land…Then he can be a true lover of mine.
It might not have been the stuff of hearts and roses, but it worked. These practical people stayed together and settled the country.
NOTE: The writings of Keturah Belknap and Mary Walker have been taken from Women of the West, by Cathy Luchetti and Carol Olwell (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1982). We corrected spelling and punctuation for easier reading. Elinor Pruitt Stewart’s Letters of a Woman Homesteader was reprinted by the Mariner Books division of Houghton Mifflin in 1988.
IMMIGRANT MARRIAGES
We can both trace our origins to Europe—Cokie’s family first came from England early in the seventeenth century, Steve’s from Russia and Poland three hundred years later. And we both grew up with a strong interest in our foreign-born forebears and the stories of their journeys. Immigrants have generally tried to transport the customs of the “old country,” wherever that was, to their new homes, and invariably, those customs have crumbled under the pressures to be “modern” and “American.” When it came to marriage, couples quickly discovered that the old rules no longer applied. They were free to make choices and cross lines that would have been unthinkable for their parents.
In this section we focus on Steve’s tribe, Eastern Europeans, and in that world, the concept of romantic love was pretty foreign. Couples were often brought together by their parents, sometimes with the help of a professional matchmaker. Reporter Lillian Wald, writing about the immigrant Jews of New York early in the century, quoted a shocked father as saying, “What? Let a girl of seventeen, with no judgment whatsoever, decide on anything so important as a husband?” Alfred Kazin, in his lovely memoir, A Walker in the City, says of his parents’ generation: “Their marriages were neither happy nor unhappy; they were arrangements.” And he describes how stunned he was to hear his cousin and her friends talk about their romances: “They were the first grown-up people I had ever met who used the word love without embarrassment. ‘Libbe! Libbe!’ my mother would explode whenever one of them protested that she could not, after all, marry a man she did not love. ‘What is this love you make such a stew about? You do not like the way he holds his cigarette? Marry him first and it will all come out right in the end.’”
Similar stories run through all immigrant communities. In writing about our Greek experience, we describe Cypriot families fleeing from war who discover that in a refugee camp, the old custom of needing a dowry to get married has been destroyed, along with their home villages. Today in California, parents place ads in Indian newspapers seeking appropriate grooms for their daughters. But those traditions are struggling to survive. One of Steve’s students at George Washington University describes a family of Indian immigrants with three daughters. The parents demanded that the oldest girl, a doctor, enter an arranged marriage. The second daughter, while on a longer leash, was barred from attending her senior prom with a date. By the time the third daughter hit high school, the parents allowed her to fly to Mexico on spring break with a bunch of friends. In just a few years, the new culture of California had overwhelmed the old culture of India. Every Sunday, Cokie is struck by the banns of marriage announced in the church bulletin: the couples might all be Catholics, but there are a lot of O’Hearns marrying Garcias and Nitkowskis marrying Nguyens.
For the first generation of immigrants, as Kazin points out, marriage was often an arrangement, not a romance, and in some ways that was a whole lot easier. Expectations were lower and community support was
greater. But there was no escaping the change. As these immigrants and their children adapted their Old World customs to the New, one of their hardest adjustments was coping with a culture where everybody was making “such a stew” about love and marriage.
Irene Gut Opdyke: Only a Girl
In the fall of 1956, Irene Gut was having lunch in a small coffee shop on New York’s East Side, near the United Nations. The place was full, and a tall man with glasses asked politely if he could share her table. When he sat down, he looked at her more closely and said, “I know you.” The man was William Opdyke, and he did know her. They had met more than six years before, in a displaced-persons camp in Germany. She was a young Polish woman then, a refugee from the war, and he was an American working for the UN. That day in the camp she had told him her story, and he had never forgotten it. Or her.
We learned Irene’s full story during several long interviews that expanded on her memoir, In My Hands, a book aimed at high-school students. The tale starts in September 1939. Irene was a seventeen-year-old nursing student in the city of Radom on the day the Nazis invaded Poland. Raised a strict Catholic, she had never kissed a boy and wanted to be a nun. As the German forces pushed eastward toward Radom, she and other medical personnel joined the outmanned Polish army and fled to the forests of the Ukraine. One night she and several soldiers slipped into a nearby town on a bartering mission. She was posted as a lookout when a Russian patrol came by and spotted her. “I was brutally violated, beaten and left in the snow to die,” she recalls. “But I did not die. God did have other plans for me.”
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