The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  Your loving sister,

  HARRIET

  Well, I was not in a condition, but I thought that was just as well, with the winter to look forward to. Mrs. James, who was in a condition, looked as though she sorely missed her little cow, and so did the boy.

  I wish I could say that I savored and appreciated each of those quiet days in the fall, but I cannot. When the wind ripped my papers and the cold air crept into the cabin, when the stove went out and refused to light again, when my hunting was poor or my husband preoccupied, I felt prickles of dissatisfaction. My own ineptitude annoyed me: our bed tick was misshapen; when I sewed Thomas a shirt, I had to rip out and refashion the second left sleeve I set in; I was vexed with the mice and moles and other vermin who found their way into the house and against which we had to be ever vigilant.

  But in the midst of it all, I did have some valuable moments with my husband. One rainy afternoon, our conversation turned to the Missourians who had been driven off, whom we hadn’t mentioned in the intervening weeks. I had been over with the Jenkinses that morning, making soap, and I commented upon what a comfortable cabin I found it, and Thomas said, "I didn’t think we should have sent those men down the river. It was a miserable thing for them."

  "I’m sure it was."

  "We couldn’t find one of them for a bit. The rope tied to the log came loose, and he drifted off in the dark."

  "What did you mean to do—"

  "I thought sure the log had turned over and drowned the fellow, but it just drifted into some snags and hung there. He was deadly quiet, but Bisket saw him when the moon came out."

  "But what—"

  "We had the guns. Bush was all for shooting them and getting it over with, and maybe they deserved it, because they shot at us when we rode up, but I said I hadn’t brought all those Sharps rifles out here for that—"

  "Well, what did you bring them out here for?"

  "Defending our claims. But we were all hot to do something to them, and a dose of the river didn’t seem so bad in prospect. Afterward, I saw that we didn’t know what we were doing, and those men were just fortunate."

  "But you wanted to run them off, didn’t you?"

  "Yes, Lidie, I did." He sighed, then smiled a bit and said, "I generally want to do things, but often I don’t want to have done them."

  He must have seen alarm in my face, for I had been wondering that very day whether his quiet manner hid regrets about his choice of a wife, but he put his arm around my waist and drew me to him, then he murmured, "Small things only," and kissed me.

  A day or two later, we were alone again. Frank had gone to the Holmeses’, carrying a pot he had bought for them in Lawrence and brought home—he got a penny for running these errands. That evening, Thomas was in a more jovial mood, and he said, "Well, wife, we’ve been married three months now. Has your experience borne out your sisters’ advice?"

  "I think that must be United States advice, not K.T. advice."

  "That you’ll have to write up yourself."

  "Perhaps I can have an article in The Western Ladies’ Journal, or even make a regular appearance: ’How to keep your skirts from rustling when you are shooting turkeys.’ "

  "How do you?"

  "I tie them up about my waist. It’s a scandal."

  "What else?"

  " ’Prairie Mud: Would you be better off on stilts?’ "

  He laughed.

  I said, "The ladies’ boots have not been invented that can handle prairie mud, that is for sure."

  "You seem content enough. I’ve been watching you."

  "Have you? I’ve been watching you, too, and I hadn’t noticed."

  "Do I seem content enough?"

  "On balance, yes." I felt myself flush.

  "And you? Are you amazed and displeased to find yourself here?"

  "Amazed, yes. Displeased, no."

  "You’ve been watching me?" he said, softly.

  "Of course. Everyone does."

  "What do you see?"

  "Oh, well. I suppose I see the promise of a prolonged investigation."

  "Lifelong?"

  "Lifelong, indeed."

  "You are a mysterious woman, Lidie."

  I considered this high praise.

  I was always astonished at the speed with which news traveled in K.T. The solitudes of the prairies came later than my time—while I was there, the place was alive with travelers, messengers, and plain old gossips, galloping here and there to keep us all abreast of the latest events. So it was that on the very day it happened—it being the murder of a Free State man by a Missourian—we knew about it in our little cabin: Thomas had been over building fence at the Jenkinses’, and Mr. Bisket rode in from Lawrence and told them. Mr. Bisket being a single man, and not all that certain about his vocation, whether speculator, farmer, or merchant, he spent a lot of time riding from place to place and pursuing his avocation, which was talking politics. It didn’t hurt that he was helpful; he had never built much on his own claim, only split a few logs, but his friends’ places were full of his contrivances. While he worked, he talked. Over the subsequent days, he was like our own private newspaper.

  The story was that a Free State man named Dow had been shot "forty times" in the back by a Missourian, his neighbor, named Coleman. In the morning, Dow and a friend of his, named Branson, had driven Coleman off the land they were disputing about, and then in the afternoon, some friends of Dow’s found his body by the side of a road down near Hickory Point, some ten or twelve miles south of Lawrence, and so about fifteen south of us. It looked as though Coleman had pursued Dow and shot him down. This murder provided the perfect occasion for the officials of the state government to demonstrate that holding office rendered them responsible to all the citizens of the territory. But of course, no one expected such an outcome.

  Free Staters thought nothing of the so-called sheriff, just as they thought nothing of all the other "state officials." These "duly constituted" authorities, from the governor on down, were creatures of the slave power that had stolen the original elections, instituted the gag law, and rammed through a proslave constitution modeled on Missouri’s. There were no laws in Kansas that didn’t contaminate the very word "law," and no officials that weren’t partisans. The sheriff was a proslave partisan who used such authority as he had to harass and oppress Free Staters. As a southerner, his philosophy was that he wanted to do it, he ought to do it, and therefore he was going to do it—and what couldn’t be done by persuasion could more easily and amusingly be done by force. Coleman was a rich man from Missouri, and Dow and Branson were typical Free Staters—men of moderate means and independent habits. The sheriff knew what side his bread was buttered on without even thinking about it. No one knew Dow—he was new in the country—but he was a Free Stater, and his death quickly became an example of what they would do to all of us, under the guise of authority, if we didn’t stop them.

  The Bushes and the Jenkinses considered all the men of the southern party, top to bottom, to be liars and proud of it, either owing to the fact that their slave system was based on the lie that Negroes weren’t human, meaning that southerners couldn’t tell the difference between a truth and a lie, or owing to their determination to force the system upon others, which meant that they knew the difference and dissembled by design. Free Staters believed nothing that the other party said about Dow or his murder, assumed their every word and action was intentional deception. Was this true back in the States? I didn’t know. I’d come to think that before I came to K.T. I’d known nothing at all and that everyone still back there continued in that same state of ignorance.

  The night of Dow’s murder, the sheriff, an infamous little tyrant named Jones, stayed up in Leavenworth and did nothing. Folks in Lawrence were appalled but not shocked. That the southerners who styled themselves "state officials" would let one of their own go scot-free after killing one of ours was something all my friends declared they’d expected all along. Even so, it rankled. By Saturday night, a
lot of people in Lawrence had decided they weren’t going to stand for it anymore. Some men went down to Hickory Point—Mr. Bisket and one of the Smithsons among them. Thomas, whose fund of pugnacity had been used up by the incident at the Jenkins claim, stayed home but prowled our cabin and yard the whole evening. Of course, we heard all about it the next day.

  "Those boys said Coleman shot poor Dow in self-defense," said Mr. Bisket. "They just looked us in the eye and swore they would lie about it. Dow wasn’t even armed, and Coleman shot him forty times in the back! Yes, that’s self-defense in K.T.! Well, they’re gone back to Missouri now."

  "How’s that?" said Thomas.

  "All of ’em up and left. We got our Sharps rifles, you know. Every time they turn tail and run, they say, ’Them d— abolitionists got their d— Sharps rifles, so we better get outta here!’ " We laughed, but then, of course, it turned out that three of the Missourians’ cabins were burned down. This, the Bushes and the Jenkinses felt, they had done themselves, to cast blame on the Free Staters, who would never have done such a thing. The Holmeses felt the burning was so appropriately Satanic that forces not of our world could well be at work. The story was that some men, two Free Staters, had wanted to set the cabins afire, but the others had stopped them. Maybe they’d gone back later, but if they had, they were keeping mum.

  The tyrant Jones didn’t want his people threatened, so after the murderer Coleman took refuge with the governor, Shannon, he took Coleman and went to arrest Dow’s friend, Branson, because Coleman said Branson had threatened him—the sheriff went with the murderer to arrest a friend of the victim! As Mrs. Bush would say, and did say, that was K.T. for you all over—everything was turned upside down. I said, "Well, you know, to a southern man, his honor is always worth another man’s death."

  "They don’t think like we do, that’s the certain truth," said Mr. Jenkins, and everyone nodded. If there was any sentiment truer than that, I don’t know what it could have been. So Jones turned up with Coleman at Branson’s cabin and arrested him. They put Branson bareback on an old mule and rode him off, but they didn’t get far before a group of Free Staters intercepted them, freed Branson, and drove Jones and his ilk off, with, of course, plenty of blustering threats from Jones. Mr. Bisket knew all about it, but by the time we heard, of course, no one who’d been in on the freeing of Branson was talking about it. Even the names of the members of the party got to be a secret. Dr. Robinson called a meeting and said that the time had come to keep to ourselves and wait. There was no talk that he had been involved in the raid, but you got the feeling that plenty more about every little thing was known than was acknowledged.

  Now the Free Staters were in trouble, and we shivered with it all the way up to our place. To hear the southerners tell it, we were a band of illegitimate rebels in open defiance of the authorities—their fraudulently elected government was legal, their pernicious laws were valid, their method of using the system of laws to press forward personal feuds was the order of the day and the shape of days to come. We had laughed at them all fall, but suddenly it was much more frightening.

  Jones, like all Missourians and southerners, immediately began to shout that he was going to arrest and jail every abolitionist — and treasonous son of a — up in Lawrence. He had the guns and the men, and as with all their threats, it was hard to distinguish the bluster from the intent, and a wise precaution to act as if he did mean it and would do it.

  In our little cabin, Thomas and I felt each of these bits of news as a blow. We knew right off how to think of them but not precisely how to feel about them. A danger, yes, that galvanized us, yes, but also an intrusion, it seemed to me, like an unwelcome trickle of water that looked, at first, as though it might be stanched easily enough. Mr. Bisket and others came and went. We gave them tea and corncakes or whatever we had. We listened, exclaimed, deplored. They left, and we exclaimed and deplored some more. Thomas got restless. He had taken no part in the rescue, had been to no meetings, got the news rather than made it. He repeated, "I didn’t much like driving off those Missourians."

  I said, "But it’s better for everyone that they went. You yourself told me that they couldn’t live with us."

  "I know."

  Then, a bit later: "Driving off those Missourians wasn’t what I expected when I came out here."

  "Didn’t you think you’d have some fun?" asked Frank. "I did."

  "But," went on Thomas, "you have to expect that things aren’t going to be what you expect. You have to expect that your convictions will be tested."

  I said, "Maybe Branson’s rescuers made a mistake. Maybe they acted too hastily."

  That evening, Thomas picked up Mrs. Stowe again, but he didn’t even open the book. He said, "I suppose I’m of a reluctant turn of mind. I like to think I’m evenhanded and judicious, but perhaps I’m just reluctant. Perhaps I’m just one of those who hang back and then make up a good reason to do so. Perhaps I can’t see the moment when it comes."

  "What moment?" My tone was a bit sharp. I knew he was talking himself into something, and I didn’t know myself how I felt about what he was trying to talk himself into. What I knew was that we hadn’t had quite enough of those richly married evenings yet, and even as I tried to hold on to them, they were getting away from me. This sensibility made me suddenly breathless and ill. He didn’t answer my question, only looked over at me, surprised at my sharpness and, I could tell, somewhat put off.

  I suppose the people of Lawrence, or whoever were responsible, thought they had done a small thing in rescuing Branson. After the killing of Dow, no one knew what would happen to Branson once Coleman and his friends got hold of the man, and the Free Stater was reputed to be hotheaded, to boot, so likely as not he would have gotten himself killed. Therefore the people of Lawrence now did another small thing—they refused to turn Branson over to the "authorities" and also refused to say who had perpetrated the rescue. In retaliation, the Missourians poured over the border and joined the ranks of the territorial militia, which Governor Shannon, apparently in thrall to the tyrant sheriff Jones, ordered out. In other words, they did what they had been itching to do all along, which was to make war on Lawrence!

  Here was the end to all the talk of killing, hanging, shooting, and clearing out—they were going to do it.

  In the midst of this murder, it got to be December, and we had to admit that it was truly winter. Perhaps because we had had such faith in the advertisements that had brought us to K.T., or perhaps because, as well prepared as we thought we were, we knew we weren’t really prepared enough, we found this hard to believe. Each morning would seem colder than the previous one, and we would get up surprised, but something about the murder made us believe in the cold, too. The two seemed linked.

  At any rate, with no preamble, we began discussing whether to stay on the claim or move into town. Frank, who had been home for a few days, complaining that he couldn’t get to Lawrence because the wind was going to blow him away, was all for moving, but Thomas and I were undecided, even though the Bushes and the Jenkinses had decamped a week before and, the last we’d heard, the Holmeses and the Smithsons had been talking about it. We’d heard nothing of the Jameses.

  At first, I took the pro position and Thomas the con. I said, "Whatever the chances there for fighting, the only chances here are for freezing."

  Thomas’s rejoinder: "The weather is just as likely to moderate as not. Everyone says Kansas has a salubrious and mild climate, but every place has spells of bad weather."

  "The weather isn’t bad yet. This is good weather. There’s no snow, the river isn’t frozen, but we still can’t withstand it."

  "I think we can get used to it. It’s no use moving to Lawrence; the weather’s no different there, and the Missourians might attack any time."

  The next morning, we switched positions. Thomas said, "I ought to be there. Bisket and the Smithsons are there, and the Bushes and Lacey, too."

  I said, "I think it’s warmer today. And the sun is shini
ng. If we go there, where do we live? It’s one thing for us all to pile into one house in the summer, when we can spend a lot of time outdoors, and quite another now, all thrown together. And all our things are here."

  "At any rate, I have to get these carbines over there. We don’t know what Jones will do, or Governor Shannon."

  "If you and Frank leave here and take Jeremiah, anything could happen. We’re cold here, but all in all, we’re better off staying out of it, I think."

  But after I’d surveyed our stores again, I said, "Whatever happens, Thayer will make sure that Lawrence is provisioned. There’s safety in numbers. And we need to show what side we’re on...."

  "There’s so much work to do around here. If we leave now, no matter what we find, we might not be able to come back during the winter. If we let everything go, there’s no telling whether ..."

  I dreaded any step we made out of the cabin and away from our claim. I felt we’d hardly begun to live our life. And yet it was windy cold and discouraging.

  It was said that meanwhile the Border Ruffians were massing for a fight at Franklin. The carbines were needed in town, and Thomas was, too. All the men in Lawrence were busy drilling and building earthworks and talking of strategies for defense, but Lawrence was all too vulnerable— approachable from almost any direction, and especially open from the bluff. Against a real attack, with artillery and cavalry charges, the people of Lawrence could not defend themselves. All they had were their Sharps rifles and the moral high ground.