The Daughter's Walk

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “I’d always have Olea,” Louise said. “I guess it would make us money, having boarders.”

  “Assuming people want to come to Coulee City,” Olea said.

  “The dam,” I said. “It’ll bring in people. The New York Times says so. And there’s good ranch land available now.”

  “You haven’t even gotten to the expense of wheat seed and paying a manager to farm it.”

  “I’m going to contact my brother Olaf. He’s a good farmer, and I hope he’ll be open to working for us, farming the wheat on shares.” He may not want land of his own, but he might be willing to work for me.

  They sat silently while my own heart pounded. Summarizing it as I had did make it sound a lot more involved than what I had imagined. Maybe at first it would be, until I had things pieced together. Buying a house. Acquiring property to trap. Then the wheat land. Right now my vision wasn’t something we could all see and understand.

  But I could imagine it, I could. And for the first time, I felt excitement about moving forward in my exile.

  We sat silent for a time, late-night-reveler sounds rising up from the streets to interrupt the teapot scream.

  “I see what you’re after,” Franklin said. “But get someone locally to trap for you.”

  “I want to learn that part myself. If you won’t teach me—”

  “It doesn’t make sense for me to do it,” he said. “Find the men who have been trapping that land. Engage them.”

  Olea nodded in agreement.

  I deferred to their wisdom. I’d find local help. Between Franklin’s and the women’s advice, I’d learn about pelts and their quality. We’d move, make a change. It would be one we chose, not one thrust upon us.

  “Change is kind of like a prayer, isn’t it?” Louise mused as she refilled our cups with hot water. “We present it and have faith it’ll be received as intended, perhaps even better, trusting that one day it’ll be answered in a way we hope is fruitful.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Change is a bit like that.” Risk too.

  Once I learned the trade, had my own property, my own way of doing things, no one would be in a position to take advantage of me. I’d be financially secure. I’d have an independent business that could sustain me well into the future. If it served as a way to reconnect to my brother, then that was a bonus. Yes, moving intertwined Olea and Louise with me in new ways, but they were people I imagined would remain in my life. I wanted them to stay. Wasn’t that the purpose in taking risks? Wasn’t that why my mother had wagered everything to walk across the country, doing what she thought best for family and financial security too?

  But I was making better choices than she had. I’d thought my plan through. I didn’t hear any voice telling me not to pursue it.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The Artistry of Risk

  FALL 1902

  After we returned to Washington, I purchased land from the government, short of three hundred twenty acres, a half section. An additional sixteen acres became available from the Department of the Interior, and not long after that another quarter section, all in the same region in the wide bend of the Spokane River west of Spokane. The sixteen acres had a little more open farmland that didn’t need to be cleared at all and could support orchards. It was close to the LaPray Toll Bridge, so I had road access and could easily arrange for a wagon to pick me up and help get my pelts to storage. A couple named Welch had opened a small store/hotel and post office near the bridge, so I could keep Louise and Olea aware of my comings and goings. My property west of Spokane was so intertwined with timber and streams that when I bent beneath the branches and untangled my bifurcated skirts from the blackberry bushes, it was as though the land reached out with fingers, clutching me to it, and I knew this would be prime country for weasel and martin, otter and skunk, bobcat, beaver, and wolf.

  That fall, after much ado, we found what we agreed was a suitable house in Coulee City. It had big bedrooms for the three of us and three more on the third floor to rent out to boarders, who could enter through an outside stairwell. Meeting each of our needs in selecting a home proved daunting, and I wondered how Olea had ever gotten Louise to move all the way from New York those years before.

  Louise’s concern had to do with the privy. She counted the steps between the back porch and the hollyhock-decorated house, wanting no more than one hundred between them even though the main home had a water closet with a flush pulled by a handle near the ceiling. The house even had indoor water, so we wouldn’t have to go out to the pump in the winter. Louise didn’t care all that much about the water in the house; it was the outhouse that concerned her, “Because all these newfangled things break down, and eventually we’ll be glad we have the privy. I don’t want to be walking that far in the dark,” she insisted. “You never know what will slither across your path in the night.”

  She also wanted a bedroom close to the kitchen, “For late-nighters.” She took a room on the second floor with a back stairway into the kitchen.

  Olea had other needs. She desired a room where the sun wouldn’t come up in her eyes but that wouldn’t get too hot in the afternoons when she liked to take her nap. I suggested that she use the shades to keep the sunrise from bothering her, but she wanted her window open “a crack” at night in all weather and didn’t want the breezes to rattle the shade. These preferences were unknown to me when we lived together in Spokane. Olea wanted a room on the first floor, so we turned what must have been a sewing room into a bedroom for her.

  The house’s features were not an issue for me. I’d slept in haymows and train stations, in lovely hotels in Minneapolis, and with my mother in a small bed in Brooklyn, and with Ida and Bertha until I went to work. What mattered to me was that my home be a place that no one could take from me, that it remained in my name so I would always have a roof without the fear of losing it, that it be free of a bank that had more leverage than I did.

  Because the women had given me money and allowed me to invest it, I bought the house and the river properties outright. I could afford to be generous in meeting the needs of my good friends by selecting a house we could all appreciate.

  A stray dog, a bushy-tailed mongrel with Newfoundland-like proportions and bearing one chewed-up ear, arrived at our porch, his fur matted with seeds and weeds. Louise took him under her wing. “He’s lucky you found him,” Olea teased.

  “That’ll be his name,” Louise said. “Lucky.” We all became attached to the dog, and even Lucy didn’t object to his presence. He lay at Louise’s feet while she knitted and Olea and I read by the evening light, awaiting the cold weather and my foray into trapping.

  Coulee City held promise in its isolation, the very qualities I wanted. I was on my way to complete financial independence in the fur trade. My goal was to be successful by the time I turned forty, which would be in 1916. Years away. I set forth. This was my destiny now.

  When I celebrated my birthday, the best present of all was that I had a path and still had money in the bank.

  No letters had been forwarded to me from Olaf, and I received none in those first months back. After we moved, I took a chance and wrote to him care of the Elstad family, asking if he might want to work my farm. If he was interested, he could even come and help me find the right property. The return address I marked simply as “Clara” and our box number in Coulee City. No need to rub salt in the wound by using the Doré name; no need to remind myself that I wasn’t an Estby by using that name either.

  Olaf wrote in October and said he was inclined to accept my offer. He’d winter in Spokane and contact me in the spring. “Don’t write to Aunt Hannah’s,” he said. “Papa won’t like it. I’ll come help you look for land next year.”

  Arthur’s birthday was in November, Johnny’s too if he had lived. I thought about sending Arthur a card but didn’t want to do anything that might upset the family. Still, if I sent a card and gave them my address, maybe they’d contact me one day, open a door of return. I had to give them a way.


  With property purchased, papers signed, and winter approaching, the next steps meant trapping my own land—or at least learning how. A bit of the bravado I’d had in New York waned when the skies spit snow and temperatures dropped. Maybe Franklin and my friends were right about letting others do the trapping. But no, I’d sold them on this, and besides, if I was to eventually ranch fur-bearing animals, I’d have to begin by livetrapping wild game for my breeding stock. To compete with the Finns one day, I needed to know firsthand what I was doing.

  I visited with the LaPrays, for whom the nearest road to the property was named. They told me of the Warrens, father and son, two men more intimate with the streams and timber than anyone who had actually owned it. They’d been trapping the government property for years. They truly read the land. “But they’ll be wary of you,” Joseph LaPray told me. “You being female and all and them being Indians.”

  The LaPrays said they’d put the word out, and one week when I finished work on the shack I’d built, two men appeared. They were from the Spokane reservation across the river. I wore men’s pants I bought at the Coulee store, dressed with fur-lined boots and gloves and a fur hat. I looked like a man, I’m certain, and maybe that was good. The men remained silent to my questions, and finally I stopped asking, said that I needed their help. The elder Warren let a smile creep across his round, weathered face. “We know this,” he said. “We wondered if you did.”

  Warily, they agreed to let me watch them set the traps that fall and winter. I assured them I wouldn’t restrict their trapping on what was now my land, and I vowed to stay with them on the long treks in the snow, even sleeping out in the curl of the rocks at night if need be. “My grandmother knows the hides,” the younger Warren told me, and I sent a prayer of gratitude to her for the spirit of acceptance she must have instilled in her descendants. The Warrens treated me as a daughter in need of guidance, with a nod to my femininity during my monthly flow. Those weeks through those winter months I remained in the hut and fleshed and prepared pelts so as not to attract coyotes or wolves to the trap line.

  The Warrens showed me how to set the traps myself, explained what to look for in a tree crotch that, along with bait, might lure a weasel in. They demonstrated how to field dress and flesh the animals, stretch and cure beaver hides on circular frames. When I set and began checking my two trap lines, they commiserated with me as I told them a coyote took more than one animal, leaving just bits of fur behind. Like an indulgent grandparent, the elder Warren smiled when I described my delight at sleeping beneath twinkling stars when work along the trap line kept me from my shack. They nodded approval at the harness I made for Lucky, whom I used to pack the hides. They shook their heads at my clumsiness when my knife slipped through a pelt, ruining it. Franklin wouldn’t like that either, and it took money from my hands. But I learned about desirable color, coverage, and other grading qualities from these two grisly men. They called me Miss. “Miss. Stick must be inside trap, not outside, or muskrat will trick you, go home another way.” They snickered at the written logs I kept, writing down what was trapped where, how many skins I collected. I suspect they had years of oral listings they could tell me about, but paper and pencil did not appeal to them.

  Still, they gave me wisdom. “Eat dark meat,” the Younger told me. “Very good. Builds muscles for next time you set traps.”

  I also endured their grunts about my curling iron when they saw it, and I let them pick up my hair extension and shake their heads in wonder as they tossed it back and forth. These men were skilled, and I needed their wisdom to accomplish my plan. Even more, they were men who appreciated the passion of this intense dance in the wilderness, wits against animals, rivers and land, and the joy in the morning when my efforts proved fruitful and I said out loud my prayer of thanks.

  After the first season, back in Coulee City, Olea, Louise, and I attended the Presbyterian church, meeting a few more of our neighbors. The Lutheran church, with a pastor riding from Wilbur every other Sunday, was organized by the Danes. Olea suggested it was a good time, moving to Coulee City, to try out something new. As one could “never be certain about the Danes,” we became Presbyterians. We took on boarders and attended meetings about the possible reclamation dam, and I waited for Olaf to contact me so we could look for that farm together. I’d been reconsidering grain, thinking a chicken farm instead so I’d have protein when I started my own fur-ranching, but I didn’t know if Olaf would approve. I wanted to speak to him in person. Besides, I had plenty to keep me busy, just looking after the big house, continuing to be the bookkeeper for the women, and readying myself for the next season of trapping.

  The women became more like sisters to me than partners in real estate or the fur business. I cared about them, but it wasn’t in my nature to speak of inner thoughts with others; I’d had enough of rejection from people I loved. I’d put my risk in business, where the consequences of failure, I thought, wouldn’t hurt as much.

  We women moved into a routine that included a monthly shopping trip to Spokane, a trip we made by train, though I still threatened to buy an auto one day. On the April morning in 1903 that found us there, Olea followed up on her legal affairs while I stopped by the local furrier to see about having our furs cleaned and stored for the summer. Afterward I met Louise at Crescent’s department store, where she toyed with bolts of material to find the perfect lavender for her bedroom curtains. I fussed over the Godey’s Lady’s Book the store kept in the ladies’ lounge. I shouldn’t have looked at that; I compared myself to the women with beautiful hair.

  When Louise finally finished, we stepped from Crescent’s at the same time as a couple entered, and we bumped into each other.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, grabbing at my hat. I gasped.

  It was my stepfather and Ida.

  I caught my breath. “Ida. How—”

  Ida’s eyes grew large. She looked away.

  My stepfather walked quickly down the steps, motioning for my sister, who then trailed along behind him. But she turned, hesitated for a moment. Did she nod?

  “Who was that?” Louise said as the two hurried away.

  “My stepfather and my sister,” I said.

  “They should have stopped and talked,” Louise said.

  “Did it look like Ida recognized me? Did you see her nod?”

  “If she didn’t, it’s only because you’ve changed your hair with those extensions. You look quite sophisticated, Clara. I bet they didn’t see it was really you.”

  I watched my family cross the street, then turn the corner without a backward glance.

  I stood motionless, a fly caught in a spider web.

  Then, “Let’s get you a new dress, Louise,” I said, taking her elbow and moving back inside Crescent’s. “My treat. We’ll pick out a purse for Olea too. Maybe shoes. A nice surprise for her when she comes back from the lawyer.”

  “But we finished. I thought you were … bored.”

  “Bored? No. Not ever. Only uncreative people are bored. Let’s see if they have this style I saw in the magazine. It’ll look good on you.”

  “A store-bought dress? They’re so expensive, Clara.”

  “You deserve it,” I said.

  Inside I caught the attention of the clerk and showed her the dress I had in mind. They had one in a pink as sweet as sunrise. It needed altering and it was expensive, but that was fine, I could do that for Louise. I picked out a leather purse with brass trim for Olea. A pair of shoes to go with it fit right into the shopping bag. Money could buy things for people, nice things. There was nothing wrong with spending money on friends.

  “She’ll love that,” Louise said. “Won’t you get a new frock for yourself?”

  I shook my head. “Let’s go back to the fabrics, Louise. Get a few more yards of material you’d really, really like.”

  I let Louise’s chatter about fabric deaden the memory of the moments before. Except for Ida’s faltering recognition, I might have been the striped pol
e outside the barbershop instead of an Estby relative. I wished I were that pole; I wouldn’t have felt the piercing pain.

  More determined than ever to move my plan forward, I wrote to Olaf again at the Elstad farm but heard nothing back. By June I let myself worry. Maybe my card to Arthur spurred a problem. Olaf might have said something to the family, and they might have told him not to get involved with me. Maybe Ida and Ole made comment about seeing me wearing the finery bought by “dirty money.”

  When July arrived without contact, images of my mother’s pretending we’d make our walking deadline loomed. I admitted the truth to myself and decided Olaf wasn’t going to follow his interest in farming with me. Maybe he’d decided working for the Elstads suited him fine. But he might have written and told me so.

  I’d locate a farm without his help. That’s what I’d do.

  “It really isn’t necessary, is it?” Olea said. “Extending yourself further by purchasing a farm? And you’re upset now. Why not wait until you’ve had more time to think about this.”

  “It’s an investment,” I said. One day it might support a breeding farm like the Finns’, only not with silver foxes but with mink. I didn’t tell Olea that. She would have thought me daft. “I can find someone to perform the labor. It’ll be a good place for Lucky to run. They’re still talking about the reclaiming act, and when it passes, prices will only go up. It’s better to buy now.”

  Louise actually found the farm I purchased. She’d taken the dog for a long walk and talked to the farmer out in his field. No stranger that she is, he was soon telling her of his daughter’s wish that he and his wife would move to Seattle to live closer to her. Louise walked home, got me, and before the week was out, I owned a wheat farm of one hundred sixty acres. I could raise a passel of chickens on it too.