Emma was a teetotaler. She didn’t even drink coffee, and she took great pride in that fact, making a point to turn it down outright, a hidden lecture buried in her refusal. But she knew of the battles that had seized the region and she tried to be careful as she plodded through.
She was startled when a man stepped from behind a tree.
Are there any houses around here? she asked.
Not around here, he said.
The man introduced himself as Mr. Parker, and another man walked up to them, Mr. Burch. They told her they had been checking on their hogs, which roamed free in the woods, each wearing a cowbell, and they were camping at a lean-to a few miles away. If she could walk there, she was welcome to stay, they said.
They seemed nice enough. She agreed, and Mr. Burch took her pack and carried it toward the shelter. When they arrived, another man, Mr. Enloe, joined them. They gave Emma straw for a bed and let her dry her wet clothes by their fire.
In the morning, two of the men left after breakfast and said they’d return by dinner, leaving Emma alone with Mr. Burch. She had decided to take the day off to give her aching legs time to recover. They asked her to make cakes out of the stewed potatoes left over from breakfast, so she mixed the potatoes with flour and eggs and fried the loose patties in a skillet over the fire. She’d come to the trail for solidarity with nature, for peace, and here she was, doing chores for a group of men.
That afternoon, the forest warden and game warden stumbled upon Emma and Mr. Burch. They though Emma was Burch’s wife. She was embarrassed, but didn’t correct them. She didn’t want to explain what she was doing out on the trail. She didn’t want to talk about why she was walking, or what she had walked away from.
He found her in the dark.
She was walking home from church in Crown City, Ohio, on a chilly night. He rode up beside her on his horse, Dick. Her cousin, Carrie Trowbridge, knew him from town and introduced them.
P. C. Gatewood was the catch of Gallia County, Ohio. He was slender, with a soft tan complexion and short brown hair. He was a strident Republican, and he came from plutocrats—regional royalty, or at least they presented themselves in that fashion. His family owned a furniture factory in Gallipolis. At twenty-six, he was eight years older than Emma, and he seemed worldly, aristocratic even. He had earned a teaching degree from Ohio Northern University, making him one of a handful in the region with a college diploma, and he taught children to read and write at the one-room school-house nearby.
He asked if she wanted a ride and she accepted. He helped her up onto Dick. She had never ridden behind a man before, and as they galloped down the road she could scarcely stay on the horse. There was no way she was going to put her hands around P.C.’s waist.
He carried her home several times that winter, through the barren trees that cast crooked shadows on the hollows, but she never grew bold enough to slide her hands around his body. That wouldn’t be proper. One night, she fell off—slid right off the back of the animal. P.C. stopped long enough to give her a hand back on.
Winter turned to spring and P.C. began making more advances. Emma hadn’t spent much time thinking about a future with him, but in March he suddenly grew more serious. Out of the blue, he asked her to marry him. For the life of her, she couldn’t understand why he was rushing. He seemed to want to get married right away. She wasn’t ready. She bided her time and put him off for two months.
They’d come from different lives, raised in close proximity but worlds apart. She’d been born in October 1887, in a puny house near Mercerville, a mile from where the creek forked. The house had a barn, a well, and a terrible view of an ugly bluff, but the children played over the hills. There were twelve in all at the time, and their parents shoved them off to the one-room Cofer School when they didn’t have chores at home, which was rarely.
Her father, Hugh Caldwell, was a Civil War veteran, Union tried and true, whose parents had come from Scotland to farm. He was famous for having raised his head above a stone wall in the heat of battle to see where the enemy was. He was wounded later and then lost his bad leg, and after the war he was considered an old reprobate with an affinity for gambling and a taste for whiskey. Her mother, Evelyn Esther Trowbridge, was of British decent, offspring of a clan of Trowbridges who came to America in the 1620s. She was not far removed from Levi Trowbridge, who fought in Capt. Thomas Clark’s Derby Company in the Revolutionary War, and with the Green Mountain Boys under General Ethan Allen.
Emma had lived a dozen lives by eighteen. She still bore the scars from the day her sister, Etta, was heating water to wash in a kettle and a spark jumped out of the fire and caught Emma’s clothes. Her mother applied medicine with a feather. Emma ate fruit from the blackhaw tree and chased her cousin around the barn. When her family moved to Platform, in Lawrence County, near Guyan Creek, her father intended to build a new house. He set the stone but never got around to erecting the rest. They stayed instead in a log cabin, and her father built an extra bedroom on the front porch. The children slept four to a bed, and in the winter the snow on the clapboard roof would blow in on them and they’d shake the covers before it could melt. They peed off the front porch when their parents weren’t looking.
Her mother birthed three more children in that house, making fifteen in all, ten girls and five boys. On hot afternoons, they waded into the creek to get their clothes wet before they took to the fields to hoe corn or plant beans or worm and sucker tobacco or harvest sugar cane and wheat. They’d work until their clothes had dried, then repeat the cycle. Once, when Emma was instructed to plant pumpkins, she grew tired of the monotonous chore and planted handfuls of seeds in each hill. Every plant came up and her little secret was out.
On Sunday mornings, they put on their best clothes and walked a mile to Platform to Sunday school, and after church, the children would climb into the fingers of young trees and ride them to the ground. They hunted wildflowers and climbed all the cliffs they could find, and on one they held firm to a bush and rappelled down its face to peek into a small cave. Once, Emma’s older sisters told her she could catch sparrows at the cattle barn if she threw a little salt on their tails. For hours she worked that Sunday, trying to salt the birds’ tails.
The children would take a jug of water and set it by a bumblebee nest, then punch the nest. The bees flitted out of the nest and went straight into the jug, and the children plunged their hands into the nest for raw honey.
They went to school just four months a year, due to their farm work, and sometimes that dwindled to two. A gander stood guard outside Guyan Valley School, and when he saw the kids coming he’d stretch out his neck and flap his wings and hiss. Occasionally he’d make contact and bring tears.
In 1900, when Emma was thirteen, her father sold the farm and bought another on the Wiseman’s side of Raccoon Creek, a mile above Asbury Methodist Church and a mile below the Wagner post office. They sent the children to Blessing to school, but all were behind in their grades. They tried hard and finally caught up, but the school only went to eighth grade.
When Emma was seventeen, her father fell at work and broke his good leg. Her mother took him to Gallipolis and he was hospitalized for two months. Emma stayed home from school and did the work. She milked the cow before breakfast and did the washing on Saturdays. The boys killed hogs and Emma had to make the sausage, lard, and head cheese. Her mother was surprised that things were in such good order when she returned. Emma had done all the mending, cooking, and cleaning, too.
In 1906, when she was eighteen, she left home for eight weeks to work as a housemaid in Huntington, West Virginia, across the Ohio River. She hated it and came home as soon as she could. That summer, her cousin Carrie Trowbridge asked her to come and stay with Mrs. Pickett, her grandmother, who lived near Sugar Creek. Mrs. Pickett paid Emma seventy-five cents a week and she was responsible for the milking, washing on the board, ironing, cleaning, shelling corn for the chickens, bringing in coal for the cooking, and washing dishes.
/> Emma, third from left, in front of Blessing School in Green Township, around age seventeen. Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds
That’s when she met P.C.
There she was, away from home, him asking her to marry and her keeping him at arm’s length. But he’d had enough of this game of hard-to-get. He threatened to leave, to head west and never come back, if she refused to be his wife. She begrudgingly said yes.
She quit school and collected some clothes and went to her aunt Alice Pickett’s house, where Perry was waiting with her uncle, Asa Trowbridge. On May 5, 1907, the two exchanged vows and Emma Caldwell became Mrs. P. C. Gatewood.
They celebrated with a large dinner, then rode in a covered buggy up the Ohio River to Gallipolis and out to her mother’s place above Northup, where they spent their honeymoon night in a room fashioned out of bedsheets, before heading up to the little log cabin he owned on a hillside above Sugar Creek.
It wasn’t long before the honeymoon was over. P.C. began treating Emma as a possession, demanding she do his work. Mopping, building fences, burning tobacco beds, mixing cement. It wasn’t what she had in mind, but she tried hard to make the best of it.
They were married three months before he drew blood.
Standing Indian Mountain jutted from the earth nearly a mile, the highest point on the trail south of the Great Smokies. Emma, after a full day of rest and a good night’s sleep on a bed of hay in the lean-to, saying farewell to the men and pigs, and having a breakfast of leftover potato cakes, pushed forward, canvas Ked in front of canvas Ked, until she crested the mountain in the mid-morning.
P.C. and Emma Gatewood, shortly after their marriage. Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds
The mountain was named by the Cherokee, who told of a great winged creature that made its home here. A bolt of lightning shattered the mountain and killed the creature, but it also struck a warrior, who was turned to stone. The mountain was named on account of a peculiar rock formation that used to jut from the bald precipice and looked very much like a man.
It took her an hour and a half to ascend, and behind her was a superb view of the Georgia Blue Ridge Mountains from which she’d come, through Deep Gap and Muskrat Creek and Sassafras Gap and Bly Gap. She needed to doctor her feet, but it was too early to stop, and even without a map she knew the toughest part of the journey so far was just ahead of her.
After a long trek through Beech Gap and Betty Creek Gap she began to climb Mount Albert, scrambling much of the way over steep rocks, and it was indeed the hardest climb yet in the thirteen days she’d been hiking.
That evening, after twenty miles of walking, she ventured two miles off the trail to find a place to stay. She discovered an empty lean-to at White Oak Forest Camp. The night was cold and she tried to build a fire, but her matches were wet and would not strike. She squirmed into a corner of the shelter and shivered under the blanket until she fell asleep.
She was greeted by rain the next morning, so rather than set off she walked to the game warden’s house and introduced herself. The warden’s name was Waldroop, and he and his wife drove Emma two miles back to the trail on their way to town. She started off slow, rain falling all day, and she arrived at Wayah Camp at 4:00 PM and built a small fire to dry her clothes. The nearest lean-to had an earthen floor, which was cold, so she heated a long board over the fire and rested atop it for warmth. When the board cooled, she did it again.
She left ten minutes after six the next morning, greeted by the early birds of the Nantahala—a Cherokee word meaning “land of the noonday sun”—a vast and dark forest visited by Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in the sixteenth century and the naturalist William Bartram in the eighteenth. When Bartram came through, he “beheld with rapture and astonishment a sublimely awful scene of power and magnificence, a world of mountains piled upon mountains.” He continued:
The mighty cloud now expands its sable wings, extending from North to South, and is driven irresistibly on by the tumultuous winds, spreading his livid wings around the gloomy concave, armed with terrors of thunder and fiery shafts of lightning; now the lofty forests bend low beneath its fury, their limbs and wavy boughs are tossed about and catch hold of each other; the mountains tremble and seem to reel about, and the ancient hills to be shaken to their foundation: the furious storm sweeps along, smoking through the vale and descending from the firmament, and I am deafened by the din of thunder; the tempestuous scene damps my spirits, and my horse sinks under me at the tremendous peals, as I hasten for the plains.
Here walked a new pioneer, her swollen feet inside worn-out tennis shoes, climbing up to Wayah Bald, and up the steps of a stone fire tower built twenty years before by the Civilian Conservation Corps, spinning now, absorbing the breathtaking views of the surrounding range, the world of mountains piled upon mountains, alone, happy.
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RHODODENDRON AND RATTLESNAKES
MAY 19–31, 1955
The hiking past Wayah Bald was difficult. The trail was unkempt and not well marked. By the time she crossed the Nantahala River on a railroad bridge she was growing hungry, but her supplies were gone. She ventured off the trail and found a small sassafras tree in the forest. She picked the tender young leaves from the tips of its branches and made a salad. Nearby, she found a bunch of wild strawberries. They were tart, but nice.
The path to Wesser Bald had been washed out by the creek and the muck made walking difficult. She stopped at a little trailside store to restock, buying a quart of milk, some cheese crackers, fig bars, two eggs, and a pocketknife. She’d lost her old knife somewhere along the trail.
The next morning, she began her ascent of Swim Bald, which took about three and a half hours, but just before she reached the top, she slipped on a slick boulder, fell, and broke her walking cane. She picked herself up off the rock and checked to see if everything was in order. It was, and she pressed on. She found a new walking stick and crested Cheoah Bald by 10:30 AM. She came down through Locust Cove Gap and Simp Gap and Stecoah Gap and Sweetwater Gap and, growing tired, looked for a place to sleep. There were no shelters, and a tall mountain loomed before her. The sun was fading, so she found a bare spot along the trail, built a fire, and settled in to rest for the night.
She was surrounded by unfamiliar territory, alone in a foreign place, full of curiosity and also dread and fear of the unknown. She hadn’t seen another soul on the trail since the men, days before. Most of her routine had been set in the deep solitude of a southern spring, surrounded by a nature very much alive, by chirping birds and buzzing insects, but uninterrupted by human activity. That was about to change.
The stretch of fertile farmland along the Ohio River in Gallia County was dotted by white wooden houses built snug against the hillsides, the occasional tin-roofed barn beckoning you to CHEW MAIL POUCH TOBACCO. People marked time here by floods and snowstorms, and they kept track of their lineage on the front pages of their Holy Bibles. Their ancestors were French Royalists, and they had been swindled. Five hundred noblemen, artisans, and professionals had bought parcels in Ohio, sight unseen, from a sham company, and they sped west across the Atlantic in January 1790. Upon arrival they learned they owned nothing but paper. Most of them left within two years, but the twenty families that remained etched out a harsh and uncertain living until settlers from Massachusetts and Virginia joined them and set about building a stable community a stone’s throw from the river. They called it Gallipolis, “the city of Gauls.”
A century later, the town had a newspaper and electric streetcars, a hospital and a library. Trains rolled through daily and steamboats slogged by on the Ohio River and preachers set up big tents in parking lots to holler about temperance.
South of town, in a cabin on Sugar Creek, Emma Gatewood learned she was pregnant with her first child not long before her new husband struck her for the first time. He smacked her with an open hand, and the sharp sting of his palm on her cheek stunned her, frightened her. She thought of leaving him that day and that night and on int
o the next, but where would she go? She had no paying job, no savings, and her education had ended in the eighth grade. She couldn’t return home and be a burden on her mother, who remained busy rearing children.
So she bit her tongue and stayed with P.C.
In October 1908, she delivered her first child, Helen Marie. P.C. wanted boys, and told her as much, so she gave birth again the following year, 1909, and again the child was female. They named her Ruth Estell. Their third child was born in June 1911—finally a boy—and they named him Ernest but took to calling him Monroe.
In the spring of 1913, P.C. bought an eighty-acre farm on Big Creek from his uncle, Bill Gatewood, for $1,000. Emma went to work hauling rocks and suckering tobacco, picking apples and pulling hay and coaxing the cows down off the hill—all while taking care of their growing family. She was a practical woman, a Roosevelt Republican, and knew how to do things for herself. She had a set of books from 1908 full of home remedies and concoctions that would take paint off the door or cure dandruff or kill ants. She had ripped out the page that explained how to ferment grapes to make wine.
When she wasn’t working or cooking for P.C. or cleaning the house or taking care of the kids, she’d park herself somewhere out of the way and get lost in a book. She read encyclopedias, but she was particularly fond of classic Greek poetry, quest stories like The Odyssey and The Iliad, and she read them cover to cover when she could find the time.
Their fourth child, William Anderson, was born in January 1914. The following year, the two eldest girls, Helen and Ruth, started school at Sardis, a one-room schoolhouse on the hill near Crown City, by State Route 553.
Then came Rowena, their fifth child, in 1916, and three months later Emma was pregnant again. A few weeks before she was due to give birth, P.C. assaulted her. He didn’t drink or smoke, but he could lose his temper without aid, and he punched her in the face and head so many times that for two weeks she could barely rest it on a pillow. They named the baby Esther Ann.
Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail Page 3