The Blessing Stone

by Barbara Wood

  Emmeline was beyond frustration. This was the seventh wagon master to refuse her and the prospects were diminishing. Already the first wagon trains had left; in a couple of weeks there would be no more leaving because of snows in the Sierras. “But I can be of help. I am a midwife.” She waved her arm over the crowd of women and children. “By the looks of some of these women, they will be needing my services.”

  Tice frowned disapprovingly. No proper lady would make mention of so delicate a subject as a woman’s expecting state. He doubted she was a midwife. Too young, too genteel. And unattached. The sort that caused the worst trouble. The journey to Oregon was two thousand miles and with God’s help should take four months. That was too many miles and too many nights to have a woman such as this along. He started to turn away, presenting his broad back as his final word.

  “If I find someone,” she said quickly. “If I find a family that will take me, will you allow me to join your wagon company?”

  He scratched his beard and spat tobacco juice to the muddy ground. “Awright, but I gotta approve of the family first.”

  Independence was a bustling frontier town where all manner and varieties of people mingled: Canadian trappers decked out in furs; Mexican muleteers in bright blue jackets and white pantaloons; shabbily dressed Kanza Indians on ponies; Yankee opportunists selling everything imaginable under the sun; and the thousands of emigrants with their wagons and bright hopes. The spring air rang with the clanging of blacksmith’s hammers, the shouts of gamblers in the muddy streets, and the sounds of honky-tonk pianos pouring from the saloons. People in a hurry milled in and out of shops crammed with goods, while Indians gathered in the streets to sell their crafts.

  As Emmeline stood in front of the busy dry goods shop wondering which way to go next, she overheard one man say to another, “Yessir, heard it direct from my brother. Says that out in Oregon pigs run about freely and with no owner, fat and round and already cooked, with forks and knives stickin’ out a them so all you have to do is cut a slice off now and then when you’re hungry.”

  That was when she spied the young doctor, going into the apothecary shop across the way.

  Having a sudden idea, she hurried across and went inside. Pausing to let her eyes adjust to the dimness of the store, she saw advertisements for Windham’s Bilious Pills, Dr. Solomon’s Balm of Gilead, and Holloway’s Ointment. The shelves behind the counter were stocked with tonics and powders meant to cure everything from gout to cancer, all claiming guaranteed results. Emmeline picked up a bottle of Soothing Syrup for Babies. The label said it contained morphine and alcohol. The recommended dosage was “until baby is calmed.”

  Then she saw the young doctor, talking to the chemist.

  She had deduced he was a medical man by the black bag he carried—it was identical to the ones her father and uncles always took on house calls, the ubiquitous black bag of the physician. The young man himself was thin and pale, his suit ill-fitting. And Emmeline thought he seemed nervous. As she made her way through the customers and drew up next to him at the counter, the young man opened his black bag and produced a bottle for the chemist to fill. Emmeline saw the gauze and bandages, sutures and scissors.

  “Pardon me, Doctor, I was wondering if you could help me.”

  He rounded on her, startled. “Are you addressing me?” he said, a flush rising up from his starched white collar.

  Emmeline had been brought up well enough to know never to approach a strange man without first being introduced. But these were peculiar times, and this was the frontier. So she said boldly, “My name is Emmeline Fitzsimmons and I’m looking to go west. As I am a lady on her own, however, the wagon masters are reluctant to sign me on. Let me travel with you, Doctor. I can be your assistant. I am a trained midwife.” She held up her own leather satchel that contained the instruments and medicines of her craft. “But I am much more than that,” she hastened to add as he continued to stare open-mouthed at her. “My father was a doctor and I helped him in his practice. I wanted to be a doctor, too, but I wasn’t allowed in the medical college.” She added bitterly, “Only men can become doctors.” Then she smiled brightly. “But I would be a great help to you.”

  Matthew did not know what to make of the brazen young woman. Unlike his beloved Honoria who had been slender and frail, Miss Fitzsimmons was plump with a generous bosom. She had full red lips and her eyes were fringed with long lashes. She gave off a feminine perfume that nearly made him dizzy. He gulped. Her blatant femaleness made him uneasy, and he was horrified that she would suggest something so unthinkable as two strangers, a man and a woman, traveling together.

  “I…I’m sorry—” he stammered.

  “Look,” and she opened her bag and brought out blank birth certificates. “I saw death certificates in your bag. How more suited can two people be? I call this a sign!”

  But Matthew just mumbled his apologies, took his filled bottle from the chemist and hurried out.

  Refusing to be defeated, Emmeline returned to the vast emigrant encampment on the river and surveyed the scene once again. Many of the wagon trains had already left, few remained. She really wanted to join Tice’s company, which was due to depart in the morning. Unlike most wagon masters, Tice had been to Oregon and back, knew the way and knew the Indians. That was why his price was higher than what other men charged; but no matter how much Emmeline had offered to pay, it wasn’t enough.

  She paused to watch a dapper young man in a checkered vest and cocky bowler hat set up a camera on a tripod while a small crowd watched. The sign on his wagon said, “Silas Winslow, Daguerreotypist. All pictures guaranteed flattering.” The new invention was all the rage. Emmeline herself had sat for a portrait before leaving home in Illinois, a keepsake for her sisters. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to afford to have one taken of themselves in return, so Emmeline would have to carry memories of their faces in her heart.

  She continued among the wagons where men were checking provisions and greasing wagon wheels and women were supervising the loading of furniture, trunks, and bedding. When Emmeline came upon a newly arrived family, the wife in an advanced state of pregnancy trying to deal with children, chickens, and a wagon, she approached the harried woman and introduced herself in as cheerful a manner as her mood could conjure. “I am a trained midwife and will be most helpful when your time comes, which most assuredly will be on the trail.”

  The woman said her name was Ida Threadgood and that she’d be thankful of the help. “You’d be God’s blessing if you traveled with us, Miss Fitzsimmons. A blessing indeed. Just as that man,” Ida said bitterly as she turned a stormy expression toward her husband who was yoking the oxen, “is a curse.”

  On the clear spring morning of May 12, 1848, everyone was dressed in their Sunday best, the ladies tightly corseted and wearing flowery hats with parasols, gloves, and fans, the men clean-shaven with hair slicked down, suspenders and belt buckles all new and shiny. The bathhouses of Independence had been hopping the night before, as all emigrants had their one final good wash before hitting the trail. A band played “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star Spangled Banner” while fireworks went off and Mr. Silas Winslow took group pictures of those who had the money to pay for them. Family and friends waved and wiped tears off their cheeks as they said good-bye to loved ones heading off into a great unknown.

  And then, placing one foot in front of the other, the emigrants began their walk. It was to be a journey across two thousand miles at a speed of two miles per hour. They set off with sleek, canvas-topped, ox-drawn wagons nicknamed prairie schooners, because when they moved through the tall grasses they resembled ships under full sail gliding across a green sea. The company consisted of seventy-two wagons, one hundred thirty-six men, sixty-five women, one hundred twenty-five children and seven hundred head of cattle and horses. Each wagon was loaded with personal possessions and furniture, plus provisions purchased at Independence: two hundred pounds of flour, one hundred pounds of bacon, ten pounds of coffee
, twenty of sugar, ten of salt. Additional supplies included rice, tea, beans, dried fruit, vinegar, pickles, and mustard. The emigrants also carried goods for trading: bolts of cotton for Indians they would meet along the way; lace and silk for Spaniards; books and tools for Yankees already settled in the west. Women brought tablecloths, china, and the family Bible. Men brought guns, plows, and shovels. They were accompanied by an assortment of dogs, chickens, and geese.

  The trail went west from Independence, through Shawnee country, following the Kansas River, where they got help from local Indians ferrying the wagons across (the Indians charged seventy-five cents per wagon, which the emigrants called highway robbery). While men rode horseback, most of the women walked alongside the wagons, as did the teamsters driving the oxen, with only old folks and children riding. At the end of the first day, the mass of wagons, oxen, horses, mules, and cattle came to a noisy halt to camp for the night, make dinner, sleep, graze the animals, and then pick up stakes the next morning to resume the trek. This was to continue for the next four months, like a great moving village. They met folks along the way who were headed for California, now that it had been annexed to the United States and was no longer at war with Mexico. But the Oregon-bound emigrants saw no point in going to California, which had been described as a “worthless wilderness with nothing but Mexicans and Indians.” One fellow, in a hurry on a single horse, said something about gold having been found, but everyone laughed and chalked him up for a gullible fool.

  The prairie stretched before them, flat and grassy and boggy in places where it had rained. The emigrants kept their eyes on the horizon as they walked alongside their wagons and oxen, each family doggedly following the one in front, and leading the one behind: Tim and Rebecca O’Ross and their combined children from previous marriages; Charlie Benbow and his wife Florine, the chicken farmers; Sean Flaherty, the singing Irishman, and his friendly black coon dog, Daisy; the four Schumann brothers from Germany whose wagon was filled with cast-iron plows and other farming equipment (the Schumanns spoke very little English and for a long time thought the word for “mule” was “goddamnit”).

  The emigrants began as strangers to one another but soon made acquaintances. Because Capt. Amos Tice never inquired into a man’s personal business, caring only that he paid the price of traveling with the company and agreed to pitch in and help with chores, hunting, and defense against Indians, it was up to the travelers themselves to get to know one another. In this way did they learn who was from Ohio or Illinois or New York; who was of what profession; who had been widowed and remarried and how many times. One afternoon a Kentucky teamster named Jeb approached Matthew Lively and said, “Mrs. Threadgood said Miss Fitzsimmons told her you’re a doc. Can you pull a tooth?” Jeb was rubbing a swollen jaw and looking a little green. But Matthew said he did not practice dentistry but had heard that Osgood Aahrens in the last wagon was a barber.

  Ida and Barnabas Threadgood, like most of the married couples in the wagon train, were on their third and fourth marriages, both widowed twice and three times, and had a passel of kids between them. Ida was thankful for the assistance of Miss Emmeline who helped with the cooking and washing and minding the children in return for a bed in the wagon and the protection of a family (for it was quickly noticed among the men that a single lady was in the company and they began to buzz around her like bees). This fact did not escape the notice of Albertina Hopkins who declared, “That girl will stir restlessness among the unmarried men. You mark my word, Miss Emmeline Fitzsimmons will be the cause of fights.” The other women agreed, for they were suspicious of a young woman traveling on her own, especially a young woman who seemed to make no apologies for her single state. Miss Fitzsimmons wasn’t a bit shy or ladylike and bantered with the men a little too freely for the ladies’ comfort. As Albertina turned the bacon in her frying pan, she said loud enough for anyone, even Emmeline, to hear: “No decent woman would go about with her head bare like that, letting her hair fly free. We all know what happened to Jezebel in the Bible.”

  Albertina was opinionated on other topics as well. When they came upon a Negro family on the trail, trying to make it west on their own with but three wagons, a vote was taken in response to their request to join the Tice Party. Although Emmeline, Silas Winslow, Matthew Lively, Ida and her husband voted to allow the blacks to join them, everyone else rejected the idea. So Amos Tice had to explain to the former slaves from Alabama that they would be better off going to California where black people were welcome. “Oregon isn’t admitting Negroes,” he said, which was true.

  As they left the three shabby wagons, six oxen, two horses, one cow, and a family of five adults and seven children behind on the open prairie, Albertina Hopkins declared, “If the colored want to go west, that’s fine with me. I have nothing against those people. I just think they would want to travel with their own kind. And why anybody would go where they’re not wanted is beyond me.”

  Albertina was a hefty woman with a bulldog face and a voice as loud as she was large. She was as equally vocal about her Christianity as she was about the dubious morals of Miss Emmeline Fitzsimmons, and had even named her children for the two Aramaic phrases in the Bible—the girl, Talitha Cumi, which meant, “Arise, little girl,” and the boy, Maranatha, which meant “The Lord is coming.” Albertina, always talking about her good works—perhaps because no one else did—believed she was being called west to bring the Lord and civilization to the heathens (although just who the heathens were in Oregon she was never clear on).

  Mr. Hopkins, on the other hand, was a quiet man, pleasant and agreeable. As both were widowed, he had brought another set of children to the marriage, by his first wife, and Albertina likewise had brought three children, plus they had two young ones of their own. The whole mob were brats in the eyes of the rest of the company, running free, grabbing food, tormenting the animals. But Albertina turned a blind eye to her children and loudly declared what angels they were. Every man in the company felt sorry for the quiet Mr. Hopkins and wondered at the source of his suffering patience until one night a few days out of Ft. Laramie the Schumann brothers found him sitting behind a cottonwood tree, secretly sipping jug whiskey.

  During the fourth night at camp, Albertina said over her hot biscuits, “That Emmeline Fitzsimmons told me she was twenty-five years old. Can you imagine that?” Albertina went on to use phrases like “passed over” and “left on the shelf.” “I consider it most improper that an unmarried girl should attend childbirth. I don’t care what schooling she has had in midwifery. A girl who is still a maiden has no understanding of these matters.” She added with a sigh, “Poor Ida Threadgood,” and the others agreed.

  Matthew Lively couldn’t help overhearing, Albertina’s voice carrying the way it did. He had a strong feeling that Mrs. Hopkins was wrong about Miss Fitzsimmons being passed over. In these first few days on the trail he’d had plenty of opportunity to observe the young woman with the wild ginger hair, the Threadgood wagon being just three up the line from his own, and he had a suspicion that Miss Fitzsimmons didn’t let men choose her but did the choosing herself. And if she was a spinster, it wasn’t because she hadn’t been asked.

  He didn’t know why Miss Fitzsimmons should catch his attention so. He didn’t particularly like her. She seemed too unladylike, and when he watched her eat with such manlike gusto, it repelled him. His beloved Honoria had barely let food pass her lips. She was so thin her cheekbones and collarbones were painfully prominent. And she was so weak she could barely lift a fan to cool herself. It was no wonder half the young men in Boston were desperately in love with her. But there was something compelling about Miss Fitzsimmons all the same, and he suspected it was because her motives for going west were the same as his—to find a place where her skills were needed.

  As the wagon train moved relentlessly forward across the flat Kansas plain, Ida Threadgood pressed her hands to her swollen abdomen and said to Emmeline, “Thank God you’re along. This wasn’t my idea. That
brainless fool husband of mine up and sold the farm without so much as telling me. There I was, uprooted with five young ’uns and one on the way.”

  Emmeline tried to hide her shock. She had never heard a woman speak so disrespectfully of her husband before, but she was learning very quickly that Ida wasn’t the only one with such sentiments. Many of the women in the wagon train were there against their will, following a husband or father out west because they had no other choice. They quietly grumbled their grievances over cook fires and laundry tubs, out of the hearing of men. It was all an adventure for the menfolk, to go journeying like this. But women needed roots, a permanent place, especially once the babies started coming. Since there was nothing else they could do, they comforted themselves with the belief that the better life of tomorrow would be earned by the hard work of today.

  A hundred and sixteen miles out of Independence, when the company had traveled twelve days, Mrs. Biggs went into labor. When Emmeline went to assist, Albertina Hopkins shoved past her, nearly knocking Emmeline off her feet and blocking the way into the wagon. Emmeline, wanting to go at the self-righteous Albertina tooth and nail, held herself in check out of consideration for the poor laboring Mrs. Biggs.

  The next day a massive storm appeared on the horizon and as it rapidly approached, the company drew the wagons into an enormous circle, fencing in cattle and horses, then sat shivering beneath flapping canvas as thunder broke over them and lightning forked down. Having gotten caught in a sudden downpour as she was helping to unyoke the Threadgoods’ oxen, Emmeline dashed for cover under the nearest wagon, which happened to belong to Matthew Lively. They huddled close together in awed silence as nature menaced the livestock and threatened to overturn wagons, causing women to shriek and children to cry. And then just as quickly as it had come, the storm rolled on across the plain, leaving behind the most spectacular rainbow anyone had ever seen. Albertina Hopkins, descending from her wagon and shooing her unruly brood to play in the mud, faced the break in the clouds and said, “Ah, the sun’s out,” exuding a kind of pride as if she had engineered the phenomenon herself.