“People want commerce, but they also hate to give up their way of life with new people arriving.” He read a few of the letters to the editor, including the one chastising that “author Robert Strahorn.”
“Change threatens people, Robert. And you’re whipping up change like Mama whips up egg whites. They’ll make a fine meringue, but meringue can go soft and sticky in the right conditions.”
“I guess the UP is getting what it wanted. Interest in the West. They’ll have to live with the demands that’ll come for running the tracks ‘through my town. No, my town!’” He acted out a town meeting with raised fists, depending on which town got chosen for that short line.
“Let’s hope we don’t get run out on those rails when they arrive to a site that rivals another. People won’t take kindly to that rebuff.” I had no idea how prescient I could be.
I tried to put the news of Robert’s mumps and the repercussions from my mind as we rode the train west. I’d focus on the adventure. It might have even been then that I began to think about those developing towns full of hopeful pioneers and how I might mother them rather than children.
We grabbed the thrice-weekly stage one morning later that summer and approached the many soda-laden springs after days of travel toward Idaho. More than one hundred pools of water gave the place its name Soda Springs. A pungent smell wafted upward from some circles; others looked clear as crystal, no steam above any of them, merely tiny bubbles.
Our guide was another military man originally from Boston but now the owner of a lovely home in view of the sulphur springs that had become a kind of oasis for travelers on what people called the Oregon Trail. The Codmans had traveled all over the world with Mr. Codman as a former sea captain, and these were the waters he and his wife wanted as their summer view. No steam—so no bathing in this place like the hot springs we’d visited in Montana—but good water for horses and laundry. Some pools cast off strange smells.
“Check that pool over there.” The captain directed my dear Pard toward a pond maybe five feet across. “You leave your mount right there and take in a nice deep breath at that spring. Breathe in. You’ll like it.” The captain winked at me.
Robert always listened to men with “Captain” or “General” before their names. He leaned his lanky frame over and inhaled.
His legs buckled under him and he fell in.
“Robert!” I shouted, then lifted my skirt over the hook on my saddle, catching it as I dismounted. By the time I reached the spring, the now very chastened captain had pulled Robert out by his boots and my husband stood dripping wet and coughing up a storm. “What were you thinking, Captain?”
The captain had been fast on his feet, I gave him that. He’d pushed past the ammonia smell and had Robert back in seconds. Robert coughed and vomited.
“I wasn’t thinking, ma’am. I’ll never joke with that again. Didn’t think the fumes would fell him like that.”
“I should hope not.”
“Don’t be hard on him, Dell. He didn’t mean it. I—I’ve had tuberculosis.” Another assault on fertility and the lack of frankness in our marriage. The immediate demanded my attention.
“You could have drowned.” I glared at Captain Codman, who kept his distance from me. I clucked my tongue in disgust. Silly men, one playing jokes, the other brushing it off. “Let’s get him back. Dry clothes are in order for you both, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes, ma’am. My Tilly will rustle up some Boston chocolate for him. You’d make a good captain, Missus.”
I was in no mood for cajoling.
Sometimes Robert’s charm and the way he had of deferring to others to inflate their ego led people to believe he was a tenderfoot. My Pard may have behaved as such by doing what the captain asked. I’m sure that old captain would call me hawkish for being a shadow watching over my husband, but Robert could be naïve. I’d just seen another example of it.
He dripped, wet. His horse wasn’t too happy to be so close to the smell, and the animal skittered, taking a bit of time and attention from a sound we heard next: a woman’s voice, frightened.
“Lacy, you come back here.”
A small girl, maybe five, her thin dress flowing out behind her as though she raced the wind, had darted away from her mother’s hands. We saw the child dance toward the same pool that had overcome Robert.
“Lacy!” Her mother deserted her scrub board, ran.
“Can you grab her, Captain?” I shouted.
Curiosity, the lure of the fascinating, maybe even seeing Robert plunge in, then be pulled safely out, all tumbled the child into the fetid water. The captain was right there, held his breath as he plunged in. I prayed for that child, that mother.
The captain pushed her out into her waiting mother’s arms. But it was too late. She had aspirated the noxious stuff into her lungs and lay limp, her bare toes looking so cold.
“No, no, no, no.” I heard that mother’s words for days after that, as her husband, then perhaps a brother and a sister-in-law, swarmed around her. One man took the child from her arms. Tears marked his dusty cheeks as she thanked him.
I hear her still, echoing in my own lament, that cry of wishing for what isn’t. We each mourned the shortness of life but also railed at what we could not control. I struggled with what it all meant, the death of innocents. What was this desire to go forward into a new land, to pioneer, and how would this mother, like mothers past, put the death of this child to rest so that she could move on? How did any of us come to terms with disaster and disappointment; keep ourselves from despair?
There was nothing we could do now. But on the ride to the captain’s quarters these thoughts filled me when it should have been gratitude that my husband was safe. His larger body (than the little girl’s) and the fact that he had fainted from the fumes before falling in likely kept him from greater damage to his lungs.
“What’s happened, John?” Captain Codman’s wife welcomed us and Robert’s wet clothes; her husband’s too. Their home displayed seafaring motifs.
“One terrible disaster and one rescue from a joke gone bad,” the captain told her.
She looked at me and nodded toward our room. “I’ll have hot water brought in. And chocolate.” She gave orders to a housemaid while her dear captain put his head to hers in what must have been a familiar gesture of affection for this childless couple. She lingered but a moment, then returned to her hospitable duties. She was all generosity and grace as she wrapped her arms around me. “I’m so sorry for whatever has made you all sad.” She didn’t try to cheer us up as I might have. She then walked me arm in arm to our room, gave us hot chocolate and a blanket for Robert that I soon wrapped around him after helping him strip from his soaked clothes.
We waited for the steaming water of a bath. “I’m sorry, Dell. Sorry for everything.”
I put my head to his and we sat that way, breathing in each other’s breath. I knew he spoke not of this latest episode but of the greater loss.
“It would be too difficult to have a child now anyway,” I said. “They’re hard to keep safe and—”
My voice cracked and he held me then.
“Maybe I’ll mother towns into being,” I offered.
“Shhhh. You don’t have to try to fix this.”
I remember those days in early 1879 as discomfiting. I was as vulnerable as a Boston lobster during its first year of life when it must shed its hard shell so many times in order to grow larger. Oh, the vulnerability while it grows!
From Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage, vol. 1, by Carrie Adell Strahorn (page 146)
The joys of motherhood have often been envied as fond parents watched the budding and maturing intellects of their children and noted their development into men and women of honor and refinement, but it is no small compensation to help make towns and cities spring from earth in answer to the demands of an army conquering a wilderness as it follows the trail of the pioneer.
12
The Chivalrous West
; Tonight I sleep with 26 men. Should I ever write my memoir, I’m not sure I will include this episode except that it speaks to the chivalrous West, where even the most crusty rancher removes his hat at the sight of a lady, holds it to his chest, and with watery eyes calls me “Ma’am,” as though he approached royalty rather than a bedraggled, dust-shrouded woman. Robert had warned me about the lack of privacy at times, but this is surely the prime example.
April 15, 1879, at a stage stop somewhere in the West
They were as miserable as I was. The worst for me was that I couldn’t undress and there were no bathing options, except for the pitcher and water bowl provided (and refilled by the agent).
But the occasion did affirm what I was coming to learn: chivalry was alive and well in the West. Yes, this country was wild, with whole towns overtaken by corrupt lawmen and gun-toting inebriates who intimidated, raped, and pillaged. (Robert didn’t write about that. He didn’t want to scare off the travelers seeking their dreams. And I certainly didn’t write of that kind of thing in my epistles to my family.) But they were brought under control by good men and women bravely stepping up to take their towns back. It would be those same kinds of people who built the settlements that Robert promoted.
Indeed, those miners and buckaroos sharing their blankets were examples of what I wanted to believe was the real West. And it’s true: Sir Walter Raleigh had nothing on the cowboy. Those wiry men remove their hats in church; and when a lady enters a room, western men hold those weather-worn John Stetson beaver hats or simple felt chapeaus to their chests. Men give up their horses and walk in rough terrain so a woman can ride. They even take the outside windows in a coach, despite the closer attack of dust surging through the openings allowing air in but also assault by the elements.
We’d traveled through forty miles of such sagebrush desert with no water along the way except what was carried for the horses, only to find ourselves in that room with twenty-six men, all of us stuck in the only structure at the station. We’d rattled through ashy earth, clouds of dust shrouding the stage wheels as though snow poured up from the ground instead of down from the sky. We breathed through scarves over our noses. Everyone in the stage looked like racoons, eyes framed by dust. Or like bad bandits hiding behind our bandanas.
“We can’t accept all these blankets,” Pard told the men that night. “We have enough with our own. Let’s all be as warm as we can. But we thank you for your generosity.”
“Well, take the place by the stove then.” This from a miner with one bad eye he kept patched.
Pard agreed and then they all moved as though choreographed as one unit, away, so we could lay our blankets down.
Those twenty-six men were all as dusty as we were. The room we were in had but one small window, though a wide gap at the bottom of the door let in skiffs of snow and dust and bracing March winds. Robert took one of those proffered blankets and used it to stuff the opening under the door. Our spot by the stove felt heavenly despite the hard floor. I held gratitude that we weren’t trying to stay warm in the coach.
I didn’t mean to shriek when a chivalrous traveler grabbed my ankle instead of a chunk of wood in the night as he hoped to stoke up the fire. It was a miracle he didn’t faint dead away with my screech. My mother was of the belief that a woman’s ankles were as untouchable as her bosom. I, on the other hand, had read a suffragette say that “until we get control of our ankles we women will never have control over our brains.” I had control of my ankles; my scream proved it as he dropped the blanket like a hot poker.
The poor buckaroo (that’s what they call cowboys in that Idaho country) apologized profusely, but I assured him he was forgiven and Robert insisted he’d take no revenge on his wife’s limb being mistaken for a log.
“At least you didn’t imply he’d touched your property,” I whispered when we’d settled back down beneath our blanket.
“And have you beat me over the head with your umbrella? You’re no property of mine, dear woman.” I felt more than heard his chuckle. I wished he could have seen my grin with his recognition that I belonged to myself and not to him as chattel.
And that was another thing about the West: women were seen more often as equals, despite that cowboy’s horror that he’d touched another man’s wife’s ankle. Wyoming allowed women to vote as early as 1869. Oregon’s married white women could own property in their own name from 1850. Even single women could own land there. Robert opined that suffrage for women came to Wyoming before anywhere else in the States because there were few women, and men didn’t feel threatened by them getting the vote. I, on the other hand, suspected those men granted the vote to attract more strong women. Granting franchise was a golden glow to many women that could lure them west even without a husband to accompany them. Robert’s West was also a place that could bring new beginnings to women who might be seeking a mate or an independent life. If they were willing to work for it, their male neighbors would grant respect to their efforts, if sometimes a bit grudgingly. Those twenty-six men I bedded down with (I didn’t write it that way when I wrote to my mother) likely hadn’t seen a woman for weeks or even months. They treated me with such deference so as not to scare me off.
There was no begrudging my presence that night, and there is something to be said for opportunities for generosity. Giving makes us feel better about our own circumstances and receiving can be a gift as well. Our accepting that warm place by the fire appeared to be a gift to all those men.
In the morning, their generosity continued with Robert and me allowed to sit on chairs at the table while others stood. We knew we’d all be heading out again into the same dust and chilled weather they spent their days in until they reached the mines clutched in the mountains’ hands. There’d been no bed within twenty miles of that stage stop.
We departed that morning, six of us inside and another six up top the coach. They were farther from the dusty wheels but more exposed to the mercury hovering below freezing, at least until the sun came up. Our fellow passengers spoke of trials, of longing for family not seen in months or years. One started to speak of a child’s death by a rattlesnake, and I coughed, interrupting.
“Maybe some references to danger in your pamphlets would be good,” I suggested to Robert that evening. We had a room to ourselves for that night.
“I don’t want to frighten people.”
“No, but they must know it’s not always soft pillows and popped corn. Perhaps telling of an occasional tragedy would be a providential warning so there’d be no claim that they were misled.” He seemed to consider my suggestion, tapping his lead against his lip. I added more. “And perhaps share the message that despite the hardships, people endure. That immigrant family from Inspiration Pass is doing well in Montana, didn’t you tell me that?” Robert had followed up on that Missouri family.
He nodded.
“So you see, a few authentic stories of pain and the resilience of recovery could be good additions in your books.”
“It’ll appeal to the adventurous side of a woman too, I imagine you’ll try to tell me.”
“Yes, the adventurous side. The mountain-climbing, ferry-operating, boardinghouse-owning, gold-mining woman. Just the kind to win over a western man.”
“They like ladies too, I’ve noticed. Beautiful ones, like you.”
“Charm will get you anywhere with me, Mr. Strahorn.”
He returned to his writing and I filed my nails, feeling a little lost despite his appreciation of my suggestions and his compliment. I picked up my little wedding-favor bird, squeezed it. I’d have to find another purpose besides hoping one day to have a family of my own or merely playing second fiddle to a maestro. Without that, I’d become morose and bring Robert down with me. No, I was still an adventure-seeking woman. I just had to let her come out.
From Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage, vol. 1, by Carrie Adell Strahorn (page 153)
I was the only woman, but there were twenty-six men, all looking for a place for a few hours�
�� rest; yet almost with one voice every man demanded that I should have his blanket, insisting that he did not need (?) them, and instantly putting them in a pile down by the stove. . . . It was a strange night and I wondered what the good folks at home would think if they could have had a glimpse of our surroundings.
13
What Fools We Mortals Be
Doing what I haven’t ever done before has become a kind of purpose for me. This month, I proposed something truly exciting. Robert had conceded that it could be exhilarating. He also has an adventure planned for me “if we survive.”
May 10, 1879
The day before Mother’s Day, we were going to cross over the 650-foot Dale Creek chasm coming out of Cheyenne toward Salt Lake City with the steaming power of the train pushing us forward while we rode the cowcatcher. All because we could. Robert negotiated favors with the UP, allowing us to do things most people couldn’t.
The cowcatcher fanned out in front of the engine and I gripped the iron with my gloved hands that day. I anticipated that the thrust of the wind as we raced down the grade at ninety feet to the mile (those are Robert’s statistics coming out of me now) would drive us back against the cowcatcher so fiercely that we couldn’t have moved if we’d wanted to. Still, the engineer’s admonition to “hold on tight for it is sure death if you loosen your hold even a little bit!” did make me think we might want to lash ourselves on. We didn’t, trusting to Providence, though I’m not sure Providence would intervene in such willful foolishness.
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