Angie and the Farmer
A Historic Western Time Travel Romance
Susan Leigh Carlton
Susan Leigh Carlton
Tomball, TX
Copyright © 2016 by Susan Leigh Carlton.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
Susan Leigh Carlton
Tomball, TX 77377
www.susanleighcarlton.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Angie and the Farmer/ Susan Leigh Carlton. -- 1st ed.
Contents
Description
Author’s Notes
Prologue
Jedadiah Lewis
On The Way
Angela Thornton
The Wagon Train
Angie’s Decision
Angela Meets Jed
What’s She Like?
Fort Laramie
Rescued
Angie and Jed
A Change of Heart
Out of the Desert
Angie’s Story
Green River
A Gift
Over the Mountains
Love Is…
The Barlow or the River
This is Me
The Home Stretch
It’s Bad
Our Place
Planning
We Can Move
A Tragedy
She’s Gone
A Wedding
After the Wedding
Where’s Seth?
A Confrontation
A New Beginning
Epilogue
Excerpts
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.
Stephen Hawking
Description
A western historical Oregon Trail Romance of 39,000 words, or around 150 pages. It is a clean story with one non-explicit sexual scene between a married couple. The heat level is 2 or rated GP.
Angie Thornton met Jed Lewis after being swept downstream in a flash flood. A small boy from a nearby wagon train found her perched in a tree beside a creek.
Jed Lewis, the eighteen year old son of one the rescuers, was immediately smitten when she first came to the train.
With 2,000 miles remaining on the Oregon Trail, will Angie be able to overcome her reluctance to accept help? Can she find love with Jed, a farm boy from Ohio?
What did either of them have to do with an iPhone found in a 90 year old grave?
Author’s Notes
Visit www.susanleighcarlton,com and sign up to be notified of new releases and to receive drafts of the first chapter when I start a new book.
This is a historic western romance. It contains one non explicit sexual scene between a young married couple and has a heat level of 2.
There are several journals in museums where the women recorded each day’s events, giving distances traveled, water availability and grass. Some of the references I use came from the emigrant journals kept during their travel. I used fifteen to twenty miles as a day’s distance depending on the terrain. One journal account detailed the passing of seventy trailside graves on a small portion of the trip. I purchased copies of the journals to use in my research.
Statistics tell us that one in ten travelers died during the trip. With over 400,000 emigrants using the trail, that is a lot of pain, suffering and death. Very few of the deaths can be attributed to clashes with the Native American Tribes. Accidents and illness were the cause of most, with cholera standing out as a cause.
Caravan, train, and company are used interchangeably as names for the group. The people on most trains passed rules and elected officers.
I used terms that were common in the day. For example, receipt is what recipes were called. Another thing to note, is Angie speaks using twenty-first century terminology and idioms while the others are using 1867 terms.
The iPhone was introduced on June 29th, 2007. In the story, I said one hundred forty years, it was actually one hundred thirty nine.
The First United Methodist Church of Salem, Oregon:
Following the precept of John Wesley to take the gospel to people everywhere, the Methodist Foreign Missionary Society sent a mission to the Indians of the Pacific Northwest in 1833. The next year the Reverend Jason Lee, Jason Lee's nephew, Daniel Lee and teacher Cyrus Shepard traveled overland to Fort Vancouver. At the urging of Hudson Bay Factor Doctor John McLoughlin, they selected a headquarters site in the Willamette Valley about ten miles north of the present city of Salem. Today this site is preserved as Willamette Mission State Park.
Regular church services began in the Mission in 1835, but it was not until 1841 when headquarters was moved to the Salem location, that the Methodist Episcopal Church of Salem was formally organized. Jason Lee was one of thirteen charter members and David Leslie became the first pastor.
The so-called cutoffs on the Oregon Trail, such as the Sublette Cutoff, and the Lander Cutoff were usually discovered by trappers and followed old Native American Trails. They were taken to bypass difficult passages, but some saved many miles of travel. The Sublette-Greenwood Cutoff shaved eighty-five miles or about seven days off the journey. It came at a price in that it required them to trek forty-five miles with no access to water, very little wood for cooking and poor grass for their animals.
Prologue
Haynes Falls, Oregon April, 2016…
Haynes Falls Mayor Wilton Chastain held the ceremonial silver shovel he would use to break ground for the badly needed new Meriwether Lewis High School.
“My friends, it is my great honor to signal the beginning of construction for Haynes Falls’ first new high school in nearly a century. This is a momentous occasion and I do this with great humility.”
He tried to push the shovel into the partially frozen ground with no success. He put his foot on the top of the silver-plated shovel and applied his considerable weight to the task, and managed to penetrate the frozen earth about three inches. He turned the shovel over and dispersed the dirt.
“Let the construction begin,” he pronounced in a sonorous voice. The eleven attendees dutifully clapped, and as a body, hurried to get out of the bone-chilling wind coming from the mountains.
The heavy equipment began excavations the next day, filling the air with a choking blue smoke from the huge diesel engines. At noon the next day, everything was halted.
“What do you mean stopped?” the bombastic mayor shouted at the project manager for the new school.
“Mayor, we dug into a grave,” the engineer said.
“Whose grave? The environmental study didn’t show any cemeteries on the property.”
“I know, sir. But we broke into a grave.”
“Well, move it then and get on with the work.”
“It�
�s not that simple,” the engineer protested. “The gravesite is protected by law.”
“What law?” the mayor demanded.
“The Oregon Legislature passed OREG CODE ANN § 22-3-802 in 2011. I’ll read part of it; ‘preservation in place is the preferred policy for all human skeletal remains, burial sites, and burial material; and (f) notwithstanding any other provision of law, this part is the exclusive law governing the treatment of human skeletal remains, burial sites, and burial materials.’
“It pretty well spells out our course of action, Mayor. We have to stop and get the state medical examiner involved. It’s not going to be quick or easy.”
“Get the City Attorney involved. It’s about time he earned his keep.”
“It’s going to cost a fortune for the heavy equipment just sitting there, not to mention the men.”
“That’s the construction company’s problem, not the city’s.”
“Their position is it’s our fault for not doing our due diligence on the impact survey.”
“Give that to the lawyer too. Do you have any good news for me?”
“Not at this time,” the project manager said.
“I should have stayed where I was, then I wouldn’t have to put up with all of this crap,” the mayor replied.
The construction site was turned over to the Oregon State Medical Examiner. Two weeks later, he held a press conference. “We have determined the remains are those of an unidentified Caucasian female and have been in the ground for over ninety years, therefore, there will be no criminal actions regarding this case. I will be issuing a ruling of death by natural causes. I will now accept a few questions.”
“What happens now?” a reporter for the Haynes Falls Herald asked.
“We have invited the Oregon Preservation Society to participate in the next phase of the investigation, which will attempt to determine identification of the decedent.”
* * *
Two days later, KNHF’s Breaking News featured video accusing the examiner’s office of stonewalling the media on developments at the gravesite. The State Examiner’s Office said they could not comment on an ongoing investigation.
Two days later…
“This just in,” a breathless street reporter announced on a Salem TV station. “KSAL News has just learned an iPhone has been found in the mystery grave at a construction site in Haynes Falls. We are concealing the identity and voice of the source since they are not authorized to speak for the Medical Examiner’s Office or the Preservation group.
“Our source informs us the iPhone and other items found at the site have been sent to Apple Labs in Cupertino, California for analysis in an attempt to identify the victim. We will continue to bring you updates as they become available.”
Three weeks passed…
KNHF Evening News, Breaking News…
“The mystery of the grave found at a construction site in Haynes Falls deepened today when it was learned the iPhone found in the unmarked grave on the site for the new Meriwether Lewis High School was registered in December, 2014 to a Miss Angela Thornton of Brevard, Missouri. Miss Thornton and her family were thought to have died in a flash flood. when one of the Missouri River tributaries swept the family car away in 2015. The bodies of the parents were recovered, but their daughter’s body was never discovered. A source in the Examiner’s Office revealed their investigation had determined the ground around the grave had not been disturbed in decades and the casket had not been opened prior to being pierced by the excavator.
“The source said a plea for relief from the City was granted, and construction can proceed, provided the remains are buried in the original location and the site preserved and protected.”
Chapter one
Jedadiah Lewis
Steubenville, Ohio, 1865…
Hiram Lewis was offered a princely sum for his farm near the Ohio River by the Steubenville Coal Mining Company. That night, he discussed it with his wife, Sophronia.
“Sophie, I’m going to take them up on this. We’ll likely never get another chance like it.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, I just don’t see the need for us to go through selling this place and starting over with another one just like it,” she said.
“I don’t either. A good many folks have been talking about going west like that Greeley fellow said back in ’65.
“Whereabouts west?” she asked.
“I was thinking California or Oregon.”
“Land sakes, Hiram, that’s all the way on the other side of the country.”
“It is. I was listening to a bunch of fellers talking about it down to the store the other day and they said it would take about seven months to get there.”
“Seven months? That means Jed and Mandy would miss out on the last part of the school year.”
“Mandy is eighteen and she’ll be getting married soon, so she won’t need any more. Jed has had enough schooling already, so it’s time for him to do regular work.”
“Jed’s only seventeen. He’s still a boy,” she said.
“You had just turned seventeen when we got married,” Hiram reminded her.
“Times have changed since then, Hiram.”
“Not so much. While I was gone to the war, things kinda got bad around here. Everybody is in the same boat. If we don’t take the money, someone else will. This is our chance to start over. It will be an easier life for the young’uns than it would here. Besides, I’m tired of the bad Ohio winters.”
“You’re the man so you make the decisions. When would we go?”
“We would have to leave in March, so as to make it through the mountains before winter.”
Resigned to the fact, she said, “I guess we would need to start getting ready, deciding what to take and all.”
“I already started looking and asking. I’m thinking we should plan to get two braces of oxen, and a big wagon. I spoke to a man yesterday who is planning to go to Oregon. He’s joining up with five others that will leave here the middle of March. I kind of signed us up for it.”
“You’ve done all of this without even talking to me first?”
“The chance was there so I took it. I’ve got a list of what he recommends we have. We’ll restock things along the way if we get low.”
“What’s on the list?”
He handed the list of staples to her. She read it aloud. “600 lbs. of flour, 120 lbs. of biscuits, 400 lbs. of bacon, 60 lbs. of coffee, 4 lbs. of tea, 100 lbs. of sugar, and 200 lbs. of lard, sacks of rice and beans, dried peaches and apples.”
Hiram said, “The bacon will be in large barrels packed in bran so the hot sun will not melt the fat. I’m also taking a rifle, a shotgun and my pistol. We’ll be taking a plow, shovel, scythe, rake, hoe; and some tools. I got some seed for corn, wheat and other crops.
“There’s another thing, Sophie. We can’t take all of our belongings, only what’s necessary, and then we can get new things when we get there.”
“Will we have enough money to do all of that?”
“Yes. It’s an awfully good price for the land. There’s coal underneath us and they’re going to sink a coal shaft here so they were willing to pay.”
“Papa and my brother worked in the coal mines in Pennsylvania. I think it shortened Papa’s life and Micah’s not doing too well right now either. Papa was only forty-seven. I tell you, I hate the idea of Jed working in the mines and that’s what he’d wind up doing. It’s the right thing for us to do.
“I’ll tell them about it come morning,” he said.
* * *
Mandy was clearly not happy with the news. “Why do we have to go all that far?” she asked.
“It’s our chance at a better life,” her father told her. The government gives you free land; all you have to do is live on it five years. Between your Ma and me, we can claim two sections, and Jed can get a section when he turns eighteen. When you get married, you and your husband can claim the same amount.”
“Papa, how am I going to g
et married? I won’t know anyone out there. What about Calvin?”
“Has he said anything about marrying up with you?” her mother asked.
“No, but he will.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
“I never favored him for you anyway,” she said. “We’re going to leave the end of the second week in March. If you’re determined not to go, I’ll speak to your Aunt Mabel and see if you can stay with them.”
“Aunt Mabel? I can’t stay with them.”
“Then you best think on it.
“How do you feel about this, Jed?”
Jed was excited. “I think it’s great. I can help drive the wagon and all. It’s going to be a real adventure. Since it isn’t likely there will be another war, I can hardly wait.”
Later…
“Mama, I can’t live with Aunt Mabel and Uncle Jake,” Mandy pleaded.
“Why not?”
“Uncle Jake has grabby hands. He tries to touch me every time we’re over there. He’s always hugging me and bumping me, making it look like an accident and such.”
“Why haven’t you told us about this?”
“Papa would have been real mad, and I didn’t want any trouble. I just wasn’t going to be alone with him. Don’t tell Papa. I won’t say any more about not going.”
Jed went with his father when he purchased a new wagon, a spare axle and a spare wheel to be slung under the wagon, called a prairie schooner. They also purchased eight oxen. Hiram planned to add at least two horses also.
Jed was curious about the choice. “Papa, oxen are slow. Wouldn’t we go a lot faster with horses?”
“That’s a good question. In fact, I asked the very same thing. They told me horses would be faster, our speed will be limited by the cows anyway. We would need to carry a good bit of grain to keep the horses fit on the trail. That would take up space in the wagon we need to store our provisions. The horses aren’t as strong as the mule or oxen and they are more likely to stray or be stolen by Indians.
[Oregon Trail Time Travel 04.0] Angie and the Farmer Page 1