The Blessing Stone

by Barbara Wood

  Albertina was outraged, but after that women came to Emmeline with female problems, for Emmeline carried a supply of medicines to ease pains, nerves, and general malaise.

  When they reached the eastern edge of Cheyenne territory, the company came upon a swollen river with a dangerous undertow. They would have normally camped until the river went down, but the men were nervous about being so close to unfriendly Indians, so they voted to attempt a crossing. Albertina Hopkins’s protests that it was Sunday and they had no business engaging in such work on the Sabbath fell on deaf ears, so that when, midway into the afternoon, the Corrells’ wagon overturned, throwing Mrs. Correll and her newborn baby to watery deaths, Albertina’s triumphant look said, I told you so.

  Emmeline and Florine Benbow took care of the corpses, dressing them, arranging Mrs. Correll’s hair and swaddling the baby in the prettiest blanket that could be found, and Silas Winslow took their picture, free of charge, a keepsake for Mr. Correll, who sorrowfully accepted a horse from the Schumann brothers and headed back to Missouri, never to be seen again.

  The wagon train moved on.

  Silas Winslow, in his wagon that rattled with copper plates and bottles of chemicals, continued to ply a lucrative trade in daguerreotype keepsakes of the dead as more mishaps overtook the company: pneumonia, dysentery, children falling from wagons and getting killed beneath the wheels. No one faulted Dr. Matthew Lively for not being able to save any of them. Everyone knew that there wasn’t much a doctor could do against devastating illness and extreme injury. But he helped build the coffins and filled out death certificates for the families to carry with them on to Oregon—another keepsake.

  On June ninth they reached the Platte, a broad and shallow river three hundred miles by trail from Independence, which meant the emigrants had completed the first stage of the journey. From now on they would be traveling through a new kind of country, a land of short grass, sagebrush, cactus, and of ever increasing aridity. Here the company encountered a strange form of communication for the first time: bleached buffalo skulls on the side of the trail with messages written on them by members of wagon trains up ahead. One such skull alerted those who followed that there was trouble with the Pawnee up ahead, and much mud on the trail.

  The traveling grew difficult. The heat of the summer was oppressive and brought sickness. Wagon breakdowns increased due to shrinkage of the wheels and splintering of the wood. Trees and vegetation were sparse and so they had to gather buffalo dung for their campfires. When dung wasn’t available, they trudged in clouds of dust behind the wagons to collect weeds for burning. The women gathered wild berries and managed to roll dough on wagon seats and bake pies on hot rocks to lend variety to meals that consisted mainly of beans and coffee. Occasionally the men went hunting and brought back elk, but often they came back with nothing and so wound up having to trade shirts with the Indians for salmon and dried buffalo meat. The emigrants encountered more fresh graves along the way but remained undaunted, and when Blind Billy, the night scout (who could hardly see in the daytime but who had better night vision than any man alive and so it was his job to watch the herds while everyone else slept), was found dead one morning with an arrow in his back and his horse missing, the emigrants didn’t panic but merely left a message on a buffalo skull for the trains following behind.

  Between wagons breaking down and oxen bolting, food poisoning and dog bites, snakes and measles, dysentery and fever, death in childbirth and death by angry knife, gradually Matthew’s supply of bandages and sutures diminished. Emmeline likewise found herself busy at her profession, for many of the women had grown to dislike Albertina Hopkins and requested Miss Fitzsimmons’s help when their labor pains began. As Florine Benbow had predicted, the “medical couple” were proving to be indispensable.

  And, despite themselves, Emmeline and Matthew were starting to become a couple in other ways as well.

  Most folks retired early at night, but some stayed up, mainly the younger ones. Matthew liked to use the quiet time in the camp to read by lantern, poetry mostly, sometimes the Bible. Emmeline liked to stare at the stars. “How do we know we’re going the right direction?” she asked one night.

  He laid his book down and pointed to the night sky. “Do you know the Big Dipper? Those stars there, that form a giant saucepan? See the two stars at the end of the handle? They point to the North Star, and the North Star is always within one degree of true north.”

  Emmeline settled admiring eyes upon him and said, “I declare, Dr. Lively, you are an educated man.”

  Two nights later, Matthew was trying to sew a button on his shirt using a curved suture needle and silk surgical thread. He was hopeless at it. When he looked up to see Emmeline watching him, he thought she was going to laugh. But she didn’t. Instead, to his surprise, she came over with a small sewing box, took the shirt and, sitting next to him, said tactfully, “I myself am all thumbs when it comes to mending, but perhaps I’ve had a little more experience.” She did a perfect job.

  Over the miles, through days plagued with heat and dust and flies, and nights filled with the howls of wolves and mournful winds, Matthew altered his assessment of Miss Fitzsimmons, who never once complained about having to do a man’s work. When creeks were swollen and wagons got stuck, Emmeline plunged into the water without thought for herself, her skirts billowing out about her as she pushed with all her might to free the wheels from the mud. She “heehawed” the oxen along with the men, she labored over laundry and broken axels, skinned buffalo and stitched canvas like any experienced hand. As the days went by, Matthew began to feel a budding admiration for her. Less and less did he look at the daguerreotype of the frail Honoria, and when he did he wondered how long she would have lasted on this trail. Certainly she would have been a burden instead of a help.

  Matthew was undergoing changes in other ways as well. He found muscles growing beneath his shirtsleeves, saw his face grow increasingly tanned in the mirror. The paleness of dark parlors had been vanquished by a vigorous climate of sun, heat, dust, and storms. Calluses grew on his hands as he worked side by side with Emmeline Fitzsimmons.

  And then came the night when Sean Flaherty’s coon dog, Daisy, stole one of Rebecca O’Ross’s meat pies. The sight of the dog racing around the camp with a big pie in his mouth and diminutive Mrs. O’Ross chasing him with a rolling pin, put everyone in hysterics. As Matthew joined in the laughter, he looked over at Emmeline and saw that she was laughing so hard tears ran down her cheeks. And it struck him that passion ran deep in every aspect of her character, not only in the way she ate, or voiced her opinion on women’s rights. Emmeline Fitzsimmons welcomed and embraced and experienced life with all the exuberance God had given her. And in the next instant an unbidden notion flashed in his mind: that she must also be passionate in love.

  He felt his cheeks burn, and the breath caught momentarily in his chest. When she suddenly looked his way and their eyes met, he felt his heart skip a beat.

  On June twenty-sixth the wagon train camped near Ft. Laramie beneath warm, clear skies. Bands of Sioux Indians, preparing for war with the neighboring Crow, visited the encampment where they shared the emigrants’ breakfast of bread and meat in exchange for beads and feathers. Everyone parted in a friendly spirit and a little of the Americans’ fear of the natives diminished. But when a French trapper named Jean Baptiste joined the train for a day and told them of possible early snows in the mountains, new fears sprang up (everyone had heard tales of earlier emigrants getting trapped in winter-bound mountains and dying of starvation) so Amos Tice informed the company that it would be wise if they picked up their pace.

  On July fourth the emigrants celebrated the nation’s seventy-second birthday with ale and fireworks, patriotic speeches and prayers. Two thousand Sioux warriors, resplendent in buffalo skins decorated with beads and feathers and riding like an army to meet their enemies the Crow in battle, paused to watch the curious celebrations of the white strangers. Matthew Lively, accepting a glass of M
r. Hopkins’s brandy, which the quiet man had been saving for just this occasion, turned with the rest of the company to gaze eastward and remember friends and loved ones left behind. Matthew thought of his mother and her séances, while Emmeline Fitzsimmons, standing at his side and holding a cup of Charlie Benbow’s wine (from a cask that had survived a river crossing), thought of her parents in their twin graves on the farm she had inherited and sold. Sean Flaherty raised his glass to Ireland; Tim O’Ross was thinking of a redhead in New York; the Schumanns recalled family in Bavaria. Together they all saluted the home they had left, then they turned to face the west and drank to the new home to come.

  July seventeenth found them camped on the summit of South Pass, the broad passage through the Rocky Mountains, backbone of the continent. This was a time to do fixing and mending, to repair and shore up, and to ponder the momentousness of this point of no return, for South Pass was the halfway point: on the eastward side of the great divide, rivers ran to the Mississippi, on the other they ran westward to the Pacific. Checkerboards and decks of cards were produced, a harmonica and a fiddle played a spirited tune. Mr. Hopkins quietly drank whiskey while his imperious wife held her usual court and let their children run wild through the camp.

  Emmeline was mending her skirt by the light of a lantern when the Hopkins’s eldest daughter came shyly up. She was the child of Mr. Hopkins’s first wife; Albertina was her stepmother, and the girl was terrified of her. Therefore she brought her secret fears to Emmeline, the midwife. After hearing the first halting words of the shamed confession, Emmeline quickly grasped the situation—the girl had been spending time alone with one of the teamsters and the inevitable was bound to happen. “I’m afraid it might be true,” she said quietly, patting the frightened girl’s hand. “That’s the first sign that a baby is coming, when your monthly show does not happen.” As the girl began to weep, mostly out of fear from her stepmother’s wrath, Emmeline grew practical. “I heard tell of a preacher in the wagon train just up ahead. I shall ask Dr. Lively to ride up there and bring him back. You’ll be married and no one will be the wiser.”

  The preacher, who had been presiding over more graves than he ever thought possible, was only too happy to retrace the miles to conduct matrimonial services in the Tice Party, and in fact a few families came with him, for the diversion and the need for celebration. After the Hopkins daughter and the teamster spoke their vows, presided over by a queenly Albertina who was none the wiser of her stepdaughter’s secret, a merry party broke out, with fiddle music and dancing under a starry sky, and Silas Winslow took the happy couple’s picture.

  During the festivities, as they ate unfrosted cake and drank warm cider, Emmeline looked at Matthew in the light of the campfire and thought, He has gained confidence. Not the nervous young man of three months ago. And the sunburn suits him.

  She went on to analyze exactly what it was about Dr. Lively that made him seem special to her out of a company of so many men, most of them stronger and more rugged than Matthew. And she thought, It is his kindness. Because no matter what the circumstances, how dire or stressful a situation, Matthew could be counted on to help out without having been asked; he willingly shared his food and his wagon, frequently giving rides to exhausted women when their own husbands were oblivious to their needs; and inquiring after everyone’s health and comfort when others were too weary to give a damn.

  In that same moment, as Emmeline was thinking of Dr. Lively and starting to allow that he wasn’t so bad looking after all, and maybe even handsome, Matthew was also thinking about Emmeline Fitzsimmons. But his thoughts weren’t so broad or encompassing as hers. His mental focus was very singular: now that he thought about it, Miss Fitzsimmons’s curvaceous figure was rather fetching after all.

  Ft. Bridger, so named by its founder, Jim Bridger, had served as a trading post for the past five years—a settlement of crude log buildings, Indians in buckskins, trappers, woodsmen, and emigrants heading west. As they neared the fort, the Tice Party encountered a wagon train heading east, the dispirited emigrants having given up and decided to return home. For the most part, it was severe loss of life that had broken their dream, and the party of twenty wagons consisted mostly of women and children and a few old men. The Tice Party itself was lighter by twelve wagons and thirty-two souls, and after nearly three months on the trail, they were a more ragged bunch than when they had left Independence, despite efforts to maintain certain standards of civilized behavior. The children were barefoot and in shameful disarray, men sported long unkempt beards, clothes were soiled and torn. Even Silas Winslow, dandy and photographer, sported stains on his fancy checkered waistcoat and smears of axle grease on his once expensive clothes that no amount of soda and ash could remove. Nor were they in the merry spirits that had once regarded this trek as a lark, for jealousies and hatreds, arguments and feuds, resentments and bitter rivalries had erupted along the trail so that many once-friends were now enemies. But they were happy to have arrived at what they saw as the jumping-off place for the final leg of the journey: from here they would turn north toward Oregon.

  And here, too, some would make a decision that would turn out to be their death warrants.

  Passing through the fort was a mountain man who had made it all the way west and was now headed back east, a man who was warning anyone who would listen that they might hear tell of a new shortcut and they should avoid it at all costs. “Take the regular wagon track and never leave it,” he advised Amos Tice and other wagon masters. “Taking the shortcut could be fatal.”

  But Tice countered: “If there is a shorter route, then taking the roundabout one is foolish.” He spoke as if he were thinking of the well-being of his emigrants, but something had happened to Amos Tice in the last miles before reaching Ft. Bridger—he had undergone a complete change of heart, although none of his fellow travelers knew it. Jean Baptiste, the French trapper who had visited the wagon train for a day, had been traveling with more than furs from the Sierras, he had also been carrying a poster that he had brought with him from a place in California called Sutter’s Sawmill. To keep the Frenchman from showing the poster to any of the other members of his wagon train, or the members of trains that were coming behind, Amos Tice paid Baptiste handsomely for it. This was because at heart Amos Tice was an intensely greedy man. His sole reason for leading folks to Oregon had been to claim as much free land for himself as possible, and to make a profit on emigrants’ hopes and dreams. But all that changed when he saw the poster the French trapper carried, for it announced the discovery of gold in California.

  Tice bought the poster, the Frenchman rode on, and Amos kept the news to himself. He had been mulling the problem over the last few miles to Ft. Bridger, wondering how to get to California. To abandon the wagon train would mean he would have to travel alone, a highly dangerous proposition. There was safety in numbers, it was why wagon companies had been formed in the first place. Getting his people to go with him to California was therefore Tice’s secret objective. Once there, he would abandon them and set about the business of getting extremely rich on gold. But how to convince his party to agree to change the route? The blessed solution had come ironically from the mountain man who was warning everyone against listening to rumors of a shortcut to Oregon.

  Tice fanned the flames of the rumor, saying that he had heard the alternate trail was not only shorter, it was a more pleasant route and that Oregon-bound emigrants needn’t suffer the hazards and hardships of their predecessors. Next, Tice invented a map. It looked authentic—he labored over it a day and a night in secret, making sure it looked used, well worn, and reliable. He also made sure that the trail they took steered well clear of Mormons who had settled just the year before near an area they would be crossing. Amos Tice had been among the militiamen who had arrested and jailed (and then murdered, although Tice himself was not the executioner) Joseph Smith just three years prior, and so no love was lost between Tice and the Latter-day Saints. Then he presented his new plan and th
e “genuine” map to the gathered company in their camp outside Ft. Bridger. The enthusiasm and excitement in his voice wasn’t fake, for his mind was filled with visions of streams running thick with gold nuggets.

  “It’s as plain as day,” he said, spreading the map out for all to see. “The Oregon Trail goes up this way across perilous mountains and then there’s a long and hazardous river journey on rafts where many folks have already perished. I propose this here route. Look, it’s straight across nice open flatland, then a hike through a mountain pass. In California we turn north and follow the flattest, most pleasant route cooled by sea breezes, where there’s fruit trees as far as the eye can see.”

  “But isn’t it longer?” asked Charlie Benbow.

  “In miles, yes, but the other route is longer in time and misery and danger. Remember South Pass through the Rockies? How easy and pleasant it was? Well, the Sierras ain’t even nothing like the Rockies. Crossin’ them will be like a stroll in the park!”

  They believed him.

  However, they wanted to think it over. After all, this was the last outpost, and beyond was untracked wilderness. So while Tice’s people mulled over his proposition to take the shortcut, they used the few days of rest to make further repairs to wagons and harnesses, to rest and feed horses and cattle, and to make up food for the trail ahead. Their mood was optimistic. Paradise lay just over the next ridge of mountains, the California Sierras. Tice’s group could almost feel the soft breezes of the Pacific against their faces.