East to the Dawn

by Susan Butler

  The chronicle of his descendants is a chronicle of bare subsistence, of God-fearing clannish farmers fiercely protecting their Lutheran heritage and German customs, wresting farms out of the virgin forests of western Pennsylvania for several generations, intermarrying with other like-minded, German-speaking Lutheran families, working hard yet barely having enough to clothe and feed themselves. David, Amelia’s grandfather, one of twelve children of Catherine Altman Earhart and David Earhart, grew up working with his siblings at the backbreaking chores involved in turning the raw, timbered land of western Pennsylvania into productive farmland. He was born February 28, 1818, on a farm located between Johnstown and Pittsburgh on the Conemaugh River. Besides doing his share of farm chores, young David helped his father run his boat, the Liberty, between the two towns.

  In 1838 David’s father sold the farm at a great profit and bought timbered land ten miles north in Indiana County, and all the children, including two older brothers who had moved away, returned to help the family move and settle and then clear the property. At one point in David’s generation, too, food became short, and there was only cornmeal mush and milk to eat, but the bad time passed. After six years David’s father sold this farm too, which had been conquered from the wilderness at such great cost, again at a profit, built a raft upon which he loaded family, possessions, and furniture, and joining the many other ambitious, restless souls of his day, moved farther west. He floated down the Conemaugh and the Allegheny, then on down the Ohio to the Mississippi, ending up in Davenport, Iowa, where he commenced farming again. By the time he died, he was farming two hundred acres, owned extensive livestock, and was rich enough to leave Catherine and all their children adequately provided for; David’s share would be $150.

  David stayed east, however, attended an academy in Indiana where he studied “some English branches,” Latin, Greek, and mathematics, and became a Lutheran minister. He married Mary Wells Patton of nearby Somerset, Pennsylvania, who was a descendant of Colonel James Wells, of English extraction and Revolutionary War fame, granddaughter of an Irishman from Londonderry who edited a weekly newspaper and operated a bookbindery in Somerset. Mary would have twelve children, nine of whom grew to maturity. The youngest, Edwin, would be Amelia Earhart’s father.

  David settled with Mary in Pennsylvania near where he had been raised. He was a grim man, consumed with a sense of mission and possessed of an enormous amount of energy. Taking note of his proselytizing nature, his zeal, determination, and willingness to travel, the Lutheran Synod sent him out to organize the Kansas Territory. He arrived in June 1857, traveling up the Mississippi a few months after Mary Ann and William Challiss, bound for Sumner, three miles to the south of Atchison. There he succeeded in building the second Lutheran church in Kansas. He toiled there with only a small degree of success in attracting worshippers, but he must have thought the future of Lutheranism in eastern Kansas looked at least promising because he returned east to fetch Mary and their three girls and four boys, returning in the spring of 1860.

  He picked a disastrous year. A severe drought caused most of the crops to fail, then winds reaching hurricane force destroyed what was left. The situation became so desperate and life threatening that, even with the Civil War pressing in upon them, the neighboring states sent in aid—in all, eight million pounds of provisions, seeds, and clothes—to the starving Kansans. Sumner became a ghost town; his parish failed. In the ensuing years the county was ravaged by plagues of grasshoppers.

  Nor was that all. In those years the country around the beleaguered minister was in turmoil—because of the border war between Kansas and Missouri, which would claim 27,000 civilian lives by the end of the Civil War. To this man of God, however, this grimly determined preacher, such outside maelstroms were of interest only to the extent they got in his way. He doggedly pressed on, undeterred that more of his ministries failed than flourished, encouraged by the fact that he was highly regarded by his parishioners and was considered important enough to be appointed a regent of the State Agricultural College, in which capacity he served for many years. The unstinting nature of the Reverend Earhart’s labors on behalf of the Church (he thought nothing of traveling fifty miles by horse and carriage to conduct a service) would become legendary. But legendary also would be the meager results, as would be described by the Kansas Evangelical Lutheran Synod: “None labored so long as he in this pioneer work, and none endured such trials, hardships and privations, none sacrificed as freely in time and physical labor, and none left such permanent results in the Kansas Territory of his labors as he—yet it was eleven years before there were enough congregations to effect the organization of the Kansas Synod in 1868.”

  For his family it was a life of hardship and sacrifice. They survived only with help—$100 from a Lutheran minister in 1860 and $150 in 1861 and 1862 from the Home Missionary Society.

  On March 28, 1867, the last child, Edwin Stanton Earhart, was born. In these early years of Edwin’s childhood, nothing had changed for the better; the Earharts were as usual utterly destitute. A family anecdote gives us a glimpse of the Reverend’s single-minded vision and his youngest child’s first efforts to enjoy life. On a Sunday when Edwin was six and there was nothing in the larder except johnnycake (a form of cornbread) and turnips, the hungry boy sneaked off to go fishing. He brought home six fish, but fishing on Sunday was a desecration, and it was only after the anguished Mary Earhart pleaded that her children were hungry that their father allowed the fish to be eaten. Later that year Reverend Earhart finally gave up on Kansas and, with his wife and the five youngest children, settled again in western Pennsylvania, having secured a pastorate in Somerset County.

  Edwin was so bright that he entered Thiel College, a Lutheran institution in Greenville, Pennsylvania, that gave scholarships to the children of Lutheran ministers and teachers, at the unusually young age of fourteen. There the religious instruction started by his father, who for all the lean years had been his schoolteacher, continued. Since it was one of Thiel’s goals to make sure that this American-born generation knew the Lutheran catechisms and creeds in German, Edwin was also force-fed the German language. He received his degree at eighteen, the youngest graduate in Thiel history. Edwin’s oldest sister, Harriet Earhart Monroe, twenty-five years his senior, was the success in the family. A formidable lady, she had founded the Atchison Institute, a private school for young ladies and gentlemen in Atchison. When the Lutheran Synods were looking for a site for a college west of the Mississippi, they bought the Institute buildings and opened Midland College of the General Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.

  Upon his graduation from Thiel, Edwin became the first head of the Preparatory Department at Midland. He was twenty years old, tall and good-looking, with straight dark hair, a great deal of self-possession, and a disarming manner. He had been hired to teach at Midland at least partially because of his family connections, but he was well qualified for the work: he was an extremely literate young man with an extensive vocabulary, well grounded in the classics. A copy of the college catalogue lists the seven faculty members, presumably in their order of importance. Of the seven, Edwin is fourth: “Edwin S. Earhart, A.M., Instructor of Preparatory Classes.” Edwin taught those students who lacked academic credentials “all the studies of a thorough English education”—which included Latin, Greek, German, algebra, geometry, and outlines of history. Edwin taught at Midland for a year, then he went off to study law at Kansas State at Lawrence. He worked his way through law school, according to his father, by “assisting the professors in Belletres and in tutoring slower but more affluent students.”

  One’s religion was a serious matter in those years in that part of the world, and Lutherans didn’t rate at all high in the social pecking order in Atchison. They were nowhere near “the top of the pole” with the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, and the Methodists. Socially they were down somewhere with the Catholics. One of Ida Challiss Martin’s daughters married a German-speaking L
utheran, Paul Tonsing, about this time, much to the annoyance of the rest of the family. Of course the older generation (after all, Maria was alive and Gebhard had been a Lutheran) would have been kind to this couple, but kindness wasn’t enough—others in the Challiss family would permanently look down on this branch because it stayed so persistently German.

  Alfred, a man concerned with social and class distinctions, a man who had worked hard to achieve financial success and social standing for himself and his family, was not at all happy with Amy’s choice of Edwin for a husband; in his eyes it wasn’t enough that Edwin’s father David Earhart was one of the most respected Lutherans in the state—Lutheranism was the wrong religion. Nor did Edwin’s sister Harriet count for much in Alfred’s eyes, even though she was important enough for the local paper to chronicle her comings and goings. (“Mrs. Monroe will not leave the city before the middle of July” ran a typical social note in The Atchison Globe.) Alfred’s wife and daughters were as he wanted them to be—cultured (finished, that is, but not educated as in college-educated), and idle. “Energetic” and “useful,” the two adjectives The Atchison Globe used to describe Harriet, were not admirable from the Judge’s point of view. The desired role of the upper-middle-class woman at the turn of the century was not the woman who worked—rich women were supposed to be literate, well read, and genteel, and idle—only poor women worked. It was for exactly this reason that Alfred made Amy give up all thoughts of Vassar and made Margaret, who had plotted so industriously with her doctor to prepare herself, give up notions of medical school.

  Furthermore, any conceivable status that Harriet might have conferred upon the Earharts was decidedly offset by the lack of status of Edwin’s brothers, three of whom listed themselves in the Atchison Directory as roofpainters for all to see and hire. It was not Alfred’s kind of family.

  When, later in the summer, Alfred went west in search of a new minister for the church, in the classic manner he took Amy with him, hoping that the western air would clear her head. Amy had a marvelous time; it was on this trip that she became the first woman to reach the top of Pikes Peak (much to the chagrin and embarrassment of several men in the climbing party who were forced to turn back because of altitude sickness) and returned to Atchison more determined than ever not to give Edwin up. There followed for Amy several years at home when she kept herself busy helping her father and cultivating her “literary” tastes. All the while she and Edwin were courting.

  There may have been something else at work. Family accounts that come down to us suggest that Alfred simply didn’t trust the tall, dark-haired young man. Whether it was Edwin’s religion that was the sticking point and, rather than admit it, Amy’s family made up other compelling reasons why the marriage was unwise cannot be known. But others besides Alfred were against the marriage. Rilla Challiss, married to Amelia Otis’s nephew James, also thought it a mistake. Edwin was long on charm but short on substance, was the feeling; he told tales a bit too deftly. This minister’s son was very different from his stern father; he had fallen, Rilla thought, too far from the tree.

  Alfred wanted Amy to marry someone in their own social circle, as their eldest, William, had done. William had married Grace Hetherington, who was not only of impeccable Yankee stock but the daughter of his good friend William Hetherington, the wealthy founder and chairman of the Exchange Bank of Atchison.

  But finally, in the face of Amy’s persistence, Alfred agreed to the marriage if and when Edwin proved himself—specifically, when he achieved an income of at least fifty dollars a month. It was not an unreasonable sum—it was less than Alfred had earned when he had first hung out his shingle in Louisville, Kentucky, where he had briefly practiced after graduating from law school.

  Edwin started practicing law not in Atchison but in Kansas City, Kansas, setting himself up with an office on Minnesota Avenue with a partner, Mr. J. E. Barker. In 1895 his income reached the level stipulated by Alfred, and the young couple made plans to marry. By that time Amy was twenty-six.

  The wedding was held in Trinity Episcopal Church in Atchison on Wednesday, October 16, 1895, at eleven A.M.. Although there were two ministers—the Reverend John Henry Hopkins, the popular minister who had left just that summer and came back especially to marry Amy, and Reverend John E. Sulger, who replaced him—and the altar was bedecked with palms and white roses, the wedding was a very restrained affair. Amy and Edwin entered the church unaccompanied; the church was mostly empty; only relatives and “their most intimate friends” were present. Edwin’s father, Reverend Earhart, probably wasn’t there, not just because following the death of his wife Mary he had returned to Pennsylvania, but because as a devout Lutheran minister, he would have been bound by Church doctrine to disapprove of a marriage where the Lutheran religion did not prevail.

  There was no reception after the ceremony. The bride and groom went from the church to the station and were on the noon train for Kansas City, Kansas, where they would make their home. Their destination in Kansas City was a rather ordinary white frame house on a small lot only twenty feet wide, but the house was new, it was furnished, and it was all theirs—for the Otises had given it to them as a wedding present. They sent out proper engraved announcements that they would be “At Home after November First” at 1021 Ann Street.

  There is a wedding photo of the bride and groom. Amy looks happy and confident, her chestnut hair piled elegantly on her head, a curl accentuating her high Harres forehead, her large eyes under her arched eyebrows staring off into the distance as she smiles ever so slightly. Edwin, dressed impeccably, his dark hair neatly parted, stares straight into the camera with a look that is at once self-conscious, guilty, and pleased, rather like the cat that has swallowed the canary.

  By the time Amelia Earhart was born, her parents were living in an undistinguished house in the undistinguished suburb of a large town. She never witnessed the legendary days of her parents and grandparents and later regretted it—she would miss the excitement, the “wooliness” as she called it, that had vanished. She heard about the Indians in Atchison that Amelia Otis had found so frightening, that “lifted the lid of her basket and peered within, and felt the fabric of her dress, until she was quite terrified.”

  When she was a child, Amy Otis had seen the last vestige of the Old West—the stacks of buffalo bones by the sides of the railroad tracks. Once, picking berries near a tree, she looked up and saw a bear picking berries on the other side. She was thirteen when Jesse James, the last of the famous gunslingers who roamed Kansas, was shot and killed in St. Joseph, just twenty miles away.

  There were no Indians for Amelia to see; the old rotting robe made from buffalo hides that she found in her grandparent’s barn was the only trace left. She would remember as an adult of thirty-five how as a little girl in Kansas she had kept her eye out for Indians—had “hoped for many a day some would turn up.” She would never have been terrified, as her grandmother told her she had been.

  2

  Kansas Girl

  • • • • As Amelia Earhart recounted it in later years in The Fun of It, she had been sent off to live with her grandmother in Atchison because Amelia Otis was “very lonesome.” “I ... was lent her for company during the winter months,” as Amelia put it, “... until the eighth grade.” There is a certain charm about it—the little girl named after her grandmother sent to live with her, even acquiring the same nickname. It didn’t even seem that unusual an arrangement, for as everyone concerned knew, her grandfather had lived with his grandparents for a number of years.

  But Amelia was bundled off at the age of three to North Terrace because her grandmother needed companionship and distraction to cope with the trauma of the deaths, in three years, of her mother, her eldest son William, and William’s wife. First Maria, for the first time ever, took to her bed on a summer day; eight weeks later she died. Then Grace Otis, William’s wife, died of unknown causes in Colorado Springs, where she and William and their daughter Annie Maria had gone to live.
The following summer William died of diphtheria.

  And then Margaret, Amelia Otis’s younger daughter, upon whom not just she but everyone else in the family relied, left taking with her Annie, Amelia’s first grandchild. That was just as great an immediate emotional loss. Not only Amelia but everyone in the family relied on Margaret. It was she who had cared for Maria and then, on a visit to her brother in Colorado Springs, had nursed first Grace and then William. Margaret had then returned to North Terrace bringing with her Annie, who had become her ward. But Margaret had no intention of staying—she was twenty-eight and engaged to Clarence Balis, a Philadelphia businessman who had been patiently waiting for years for her to set the date. Now, having done all she could for her family, there was no further reason to postpone the wedding. The thought of losing their kind daughter, their ray of sunshine, and in addition the orphaned granddaughter who would go wherever Margaret went (including her honeymoon, Margaret’s own children always suspected) was more than Amelia Otis could stand. Even Alfred was dismayed.

  As the years passed, he had become increasingly withdrawn. “Dignified and of aristocratic bearing” was the way a reporter for The Atchison Globe delicately described Alfred, but to his children and grandchildren he was cold, remote, and impatient at best. At sixty-four he had suffered a complete mental breakdown. Mental illness was little understood at the time; softening of the brain and neurasthenia were the usual words used to describe the condition. Hospitalized in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1892, fully expecting to die, he went so far as to make a will, but within two years he had recovered and was managing his own affairs. But from then on he suffered recurrent bouts of depression. “He realizes fully, to use his own language, that he has passed the three score and ten and that the autumn leaves are thick about him. He seems to have no bodily ailments like so many old folks have, but there is nothing I wouldn’t give or do to give him ‘a quiet mind and a contented spirit,’ ” wrote a younger brother sorrowfully after spending time with him.