First Girl Scout

by Ginger Wadsworth

  Generals Ulysses S. Grant (left) and Robert E. Lee (right) met at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, to discuss the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to end the Civil War. According to the terms, the men of Lee's army could return home in safety if they pledged to end the fighting and deliver their weapons to the Union army. Library of Congress

  Daisy, her sisters, and their mother stayed in Chicago during the early part of that summer. Throughout those long months, Mamma wrote letter after letter to her husband, with both good and worrisome news, as well as constant assurances that she loved him. But he did not always receive the letters.

  If Daisy sensed any tension, she never mentioned it. Instead, she flourished under the loving care of Grandmother Kinzie. "Ganny," as the girls called her, was a spirited yet kind person who was very well educated, especially for a woman of her time. She spoke English, Italian, Spanish, French, and Latin, played the piano, and had finished her schooling at Miss Willard's Troy Female Seminary in New York State.

  No doubt, Daisy and Nell begged their grandmother to repeat the stories of her years as a new bride and pioneer, when she married Grandfather Kinzie and traveled west from New York's Hudson Valley to Chicago in a covered wagon, camping in the wilderness and carrying a knife and a tin cup. Their favorite story was about Ganny's mother, Eleanor, who had been kidnapped by a band of Seneca Indians when she was nine. Their great-grandmother lived with the Indians for four years, and because she was a lively girl, the chief called her Little Ship Under Full Sail. Eleanor was eventually returned to her family after the chief saw how much she missed her mother.

  Daisy especially loved the "Little Ship" story, and over the years her family called her by that nickname too, because she exuded the same lively energy.

  Daisy's grandmother's book Wau-Bun was based on her experiences at Fort Winnebago in what was then the Michigan Territory, and was published in 1856. Author's collection

  As Daisy, Nell, and Alice recovered from the lean war years and grew strong again, their beloved Grandfather Kinzie was becoming ill and weak, probably with heart-related problems. Willie Gordon had returned to Savannah, and he finally decided that it was time to go north to see his family. To do this, he had to pledge allegiance to the "new" United States. This was not easy for Willie, a former captain in the Confederate army. Still, it gave him the freedom to legally travel beyond Savannah, and he knew his family needed him. He arrived in Chicago shortly after his father-in-law's death in June.

  The defeat of the South had left Willie depressed, but being with his wife and three daughters helped lift his spirits. Alice was a busy toddler and no longer thin, although her family would always call her Skinny. Both Nell and Daisy looked tan and healthy. Willie stayed on in Chicago to help settle John Kinzie's business affairs.

  Finally, on August 23, 1865, after eight months of being away, the Gordon family returned to Savannah. Mamma rushed inside the house and threw open the shutters. The dusty furniture was still there! Decorative marble mantels stood untouched, and the heavy front doors with their brass fittings were unmarred. Someone had walked through the house, leaving muddy footprints, and most of the kitchenware was gone. But the Gordons were lucky, and they knew it. Throughout the South, many other fine homes and plantations had been damaged or destroyed. Perhaps General Sherman had ordered that their house be protected.

  Papa in his Confederate army uniform. Girl Scouts of the USA-JGLB

  During the war, when most men were off fighting, many women had worked the fields themselves as they struggled to feed and clothe their families. Now the fields surrounding Savannah were thick with weeds. Crops had been eaten by troops, burned, or trampled in battle. The turbulent era of Reconstruction had begun.

  Federal troops were present throughout the South to make sure that Southern leaders did not reunite and try to secede again. On December 6, 1865, the necessary number of states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which officially abolished slavery in the United States. Many former slaves moved north to find factory work in the big cities, and some headed west to start over. Others stayed near their homes in the South.

  The Civil War left wide swaths of destruction in many areas in the South, as illustrated by this 1865 photograph of Columbia, South Carolina. National Archives

  Yankees who came to be called carpetbaggers swept into the region, and many literally carried their clothes in inexpensive bags made of carpeting. These outsiders sought political and economic opportunities during this unsettled period and acquired abandoned farms or buildings for just a few dollars in back taxes. Some were honest; most were not.

  That first year, the Gordon family focused on restoring their personal property and Papa's business. With lots of scrubbing, followed by new paint on the porch pillars, the house began to look beautiful again. According to one source, Nellie Gordon may have inherited some money from her father's estate or sold some property she owned in Chicago. The money probably helped Willie restart his business, and the family was able to hire some help.

  Daisy and Nell were delighted to race around the neighborhood with their cousins, and many of their harsh memories of the war faded. By the following spring, the Gordon girls had a new brother, William Washington, named for their father and grandfather. He had bright red hair and an energetic personality. Everyone loved Willie, or Bill, as he was also called.

  And now that she was nearly six years old, Daisy was looking forward to the end of the summer, when she would attend her first real school with Nell.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Summers and Schools

  DAISY'S FIRST SCHOOL was in a house on Hull Street near Chippewa Square. The other students were children from the neighborhood, both boys and girls. Mademoiselle Lucile Blois was their teacher, assisted by her sister, Marguerite. Nell recalled that Mademoiselle Lucile always wore a plum-colored dress, a large gold pin at her throat, and glasses.

  Up to this point, Daisy's education had been limited to a short time spent with a governess or whenever an adult could sit down and work with her. The first book she learned to read belonged to her mother and was called Very Little Tales for Very Little Children. It was written entirely in single-syllable words.

  At the Hull Street school, Daisy and the other new students did lots of repetitive drills, such as copying the same words over and over again from books. She learned quickly in most areas, especially foreign languages. But she was a terrible speller, something even years of schooling and nagging by Mamma would fail to improve. Daisy simply did it her way. She once said, "There's just no use in me having a dictionary. Here I want to know how to spell scent, you know, scent of a flower. And I've looked under se and ce and it isn't here at all."

  Another time, she complained in frustration, "Well, it's not my fault, it's because people drag in such fancy words." Her father was also a poor speller, so perhaps it was an inherited problem. Math challenged Daisy too, and all her life, her family teased her about her difficulties in these two areas.

  But during her school years, Daisy discovered something she was really good at: drawing. She was better than anyone else, even the older students. Once, after she received a B in French, Daisy blamed the teacher, who took away points for drawing in class, claiming, "It is hard to pay attention in her stupid old class, but I will try." It wasn't the first time Daisy doodled in school, nor would it be the last.

  During those early years following the Civil War, Daisy's family moved back in with her grandmother until the eventually saved enough money to buy a small house down the street. Their cousins, the Andersons, lived next door. The children often gathered under a large pittosporum tree in the garden. With its sturdy, low-hanging branches and dark green leaves, the "spittosporum," as they called it, was a great playground, especially on a hot day.

  Sometimes, Daisy and her cousins perched on the branches or pretended that the tree was a house, with imaginary rooms for each child. At Grandmother Gordon's, they raced along the garden paths
edged with colorful violets and flowers called snowdrops, hid under tree-shaped camellias, and darted past the carriage house in the back.

  The cousins even strung up a sort of communication system between the two houses. Messages swayed back and forth in a basket hung from a sturdy string on a wheel. One read,

  This very day at a quarter past three

  We all will meet at the Spittosporum tree.

  In the late afternoons, Daisy and her siblings and cousins cleaned up and joined Grandmother Gordon for tea. They were expected to be quiet and polite. Despite Mamma's reputation for acting naughty and spoiled when she was young, she demanded proper manners from all her children, as did their grandmother.

  Hot, humid summers followed the end of each school year. Before the Civil War, many wealthy families, including the Gordons, would leave the sweltering city of Savannah for an extended vacation. But after the war, Papa, like many of his friends and relatives, was struggling financially and could not afford to take his family out of the city for so long. Planters slowly returned to growing cotton and other crops, and Willie helped them sell their bales of cotton to manufacturers. In time, W. W. Gordon & Co. was again a successful operation.

  During the years following the war, though, the family stayed close to home or visited the nearby Isle of Hope, a summer resort, as Willie rebuilt his business. The resort was situated on a tidal river that flowed into the nearby ocean. There were dangerous sharks and rays, so each family used a large bathhouse that jutted out into the salty water, with a partially submerged fence of palmetto boards protecting them. All the children learned to swim at an early age.

  Just as businesses and cities were rebuilding during this era of reconstruction, families needed time to mend too. Daisy's parents' relationship had become strained while they were separated, but that time was finally over. Now Mamma and Papa were more in love with each other than ever.

  Papa remained loyal to the South and devoted to his family. A calm man, he preferred to sit on the sidelines and enjoy the lively banter between the children and his wife. Mamma adored her husband, and her endless energy and animated personality complemented his steady ways. She kept everyone in the family laughing, whether she was playing the piano, singing, riding horseback, or hosting a dinner party.

  This 1866 editorial cartoon shows President Andrew Johnson holding a leaking kettle labeled "The Reconstructed South" while a woman with a baby urges him to mend it quickly. The baby represents the newly approved Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment, which provided citizenship to recently freed slaves. The illustration makes a strong political statement while portraying the difficulties families in the South faced during the Reconstruction Era. Library of Congress

  Between school terms, the family celebrated the holidays together. On Christmas Eve, everyone squeezed into the library to listen to Papa recite A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore. Then they changed into their nightclothes in front of coal fireplaces in the upstairs bedrooms and tried to drift off to sleep. On Christmas Day, the Gordons opened presents, and the children were allowed to eat dinner with the grownups in the dining room. The day ended with an outing to a Savannah park to enjoy a fireworks display.

  The Gordon children grew up loving their parents and loving one another as friends. Daisy was especially close to her father. Besides their problems with spelling, both father and daughter were terrible at keeping track of time and were often late for meals. And they both adored animals.

  Mamma didn't share their sentiments, but she tolerated the stray kittens and puppies that Daisy continually brought home. One cold night when she was about eight, Daisy worried about one of the family's cows, so she took some safety pins and a blanket out to the barn and wrapped it up. Another time, she picked up a dog that had been hit by a carriage and that lay on the side of the road. She brought it inside and tried to warm it on a pillow in her mother's bed. Mamma finally convinced Daisy that the dog had been dead for some time. It was no wonder that her brothers and sisters nicknamed her Crazy Daisy!

  In 1870 Willie and Nellie finally felt they could afford a family vacation. They traveled north to spend the summer on the south shore of Long Island, New York. The town was called Amagansett, a phonetic interpretation of a native Montaukett Indian word that early colonists took to mean "a place of good water." There were cool breezes and sandy beaches for picnicking and swimming, activities that were popular with many well-to-do families at the time. Mamma believed that breathing the brisk salt air made her children healthier, while swimming made them physically strong. Daisy and her sisters wore swimming outfits that came to their knees and were made of wool or other thick fabric. They were heavy, especially when wet, but a more revealing bathing suit would have been considered immodest. By then, Daisy was already a good swimmer and was used to her attire.

  Daisy's Grandmother Kinzie, who still lived in Chicago, joined them on Long Island. Daisy and Nell had remained close to Ganny after their long stay in Chicago at the end of the Civil War. Ganny sent many letters over the years, all addressed to "Miss Juliette Magill Kinzie Gordon." But inside, she always wrote, "My dear little Daisy."

  Ganny Kinzie continued to write and publish books. In 1869, J. B. Lippincott Company had published her novel Walter Ogleby, which was based on her experiences living in the Hudson Valley in New York State as a young woman. Now, at Amagansett, Ganny was revising a draft of her next book, a novel called Mark Logan, the Bourgeois. It was based on the life of the Winnebago chief Red Bird and Ganny's early married life at Fort Winnebago.

  Juliette Kinzie was a gentle, devoted grandmother, and she spent plenty of time away from her writing watching Daisy swim and playing with her other grandchildren, Nell, Alice, and Bill. She also fussed over her own daughter, Daisy's mother, who was expecting another baby in October.

  A formal portrait of Juliette M. Kinzie, Daisy's maternal grandmother. Girl Scouts of the USA-JGLB

  One September afternoon, Ganny felt she was coming down with a cold. She asked a doctor to send her some cold tablets, which at that time contained quinine. After the unmarked packet of pills arrived, Ganny Kinzie felt hesitant about taking two of them as the doctor had prescribed.

  Nellie Gordon encouraged her mother to take them, and she swallowed a pill herself to prove they were safe. Nellie seemed fine, so Ganny took the two pills. Soon, both women felt strange. They grew drowsy and wanted to lie down. Knowing that something was very wrong, Papa sent for a different doctor, who hurried to the house.

  The doctor informed them that the pills were not quinine but morphine, a powerful painkiller. Ganny had taken a dangerously high dose, and her body began to shut down. Her breathing slowed, and within four hours, she died.

  For the rest of the night, Willie and the doctor walked Daisy's mother up and down the halls of the house. They made her drink strong coffee to keep her awake. Because she had taken a smaller dose of morphine than Ganny, Mamma survived.

  Alice, age seven, and Bill, age four, stand on either side of their sister Daisy, who was about ten years old when this photograph was taken. Girl Scouts of the USA-JGLB

  No one who was there, including Daisy, would ever forget that long and frightening night. After the tragedy, Willie, always steady and calm, accompanied Ganny Kinzie's body to Chicago so she could be buried beside her husband. The rest of the family returned, grief stricken, to Savannah. On October 28, 1870, Daisy's sister, Mabel McLane Gordon, was born. To everyone's relief, she suffered no problems related to the morphine her mother had taken.

  In August 1872, Nellie and Willie had their sixth and last child, George Arthur Gordon, who would go by his middle name, Arthur. The Gordons had strong feelings about the importance of good schooling, and they decided they would pinch pennies and do whatever it took to ensure that all their children continued to be educated after they graduated from the school on Hull Street. They sent their sons, Bill and Arthur, to St. Paul's, a private boarding school in New Hampshire, and then to college at Yale Univer
sity in Connecticut. Mabel, Alice, Daisy, and Nell went to boarding schools for young women, as was the custom for wealthy nineteenth-century families.

  As the oldest, Nell left home for boarding school first. The Virginia Female Institute was in Staunton, Virginia, more than five hundred miles from Savannah. When Daisy was almost thirteen, she claimed she was too big for the little school on Hull Street and insisted on following in her sister's footsteps. Although she was old enough for boarding school, Daisy was physically very small and frail, probably due to the early-childhood illness she suffered in Chicago. Nonetheless, her parents agreed that she could go. Daisy danced about for days, gathering her drawing pads and art supplies and making sure she had packed all her hair ribbons and favorite dresses to take with her on this exciting new experience.

  Daisy and her sisters attended several boarding schools, including the Virginia Female Institute, shown here. Stuart Hall School

  Finally, it was September and time to leave. Daisy kissed Alice, Bill, Mabel, and Arthur goodbye, then hugged her parents and climbed inside the coach with her sister Nell. As the horses trotted down the road to the train station, Daisy decided not to look back for fear that she might cry.