The Blessing Stone (63 page)
The wives in the wagon train, simple farm folk or village women who had never heard such radical ideas before or read a book titled
A Vindication on the Rights of Women
by Mary Shelley, thought Emmeline was either too young to know her own mind, or perhaps touched in the head (although some secretly envied her spirited independence and wished her luck). But Matthew had encountered women like Miss Fitzsimmons in Boston, who called themselves feminists and who had made him uneasy. How he longed for his quiet, pale, frail Honoria who barely spoke and who certainly didn’t have a political thought in her head! Every night, when the camp was asleep and he was alone and tried to consult the Blessing Stone to see the Guiding Spirit his mother had seen (but somehow failing), he also took out the daguerreotype of Honoria, so thin and hollow-eyed that she was almost ghostly. She hardly ever ate so that gowns hung on her. Her wrists were as delicate as bird bones, her cheeks so sunken they gave her an ethereal look: the beautiful, emaciated Ligeia of Edgar Allen Poe.
“What do you think of anesthesia?” Emmeline said now, changing the subject so abruptly that she caught him off guard. “Chloroform, ether!” she said before he could respond. “It is going to revolutionize surgery. My father attended the removal of a breast tumor. The woman was asleep the whole time! And the next revolution will be allowing women to become doctors. There is too much prejudice in the east. Things will be different in the west.”
She paused and said, “Dr. Lively, you need to smile more.”
He silently thought,
And you need to talk less.
When they entered Pawnee Indian country, the men kept rifles and sidearms ready, flintlocks, and percussion-cap guns loaded and half-cocked. But the Indians merely came by out of curiosity and hoping for handouts.
As the heat and dust increased, and patience began to wear thin, it became increasingly difficult to maintain civilized and genteel ways, but the women were determined. Many continued to wear corsets, although some quietly packed the restricting garments away. Flowered hats were stored in trunks in favor of the more practical calico bonnets. And although table cloths were now dispensed with and the good china (such as had made it across the many perilous river crossings) was safely stowed away, still the children and men were made to wash before meals and to say grace before they wolfed down their food. And when a man was found hanging from a cottonwood tree—dead three days or so, which meant he had been a member of the wagon train ahead—with a sign about his neck that read, “Cheeted at cards,” they paused to build a coffin and give him a decent burial.
As they stopped to make camp on the Little Blue River, Victoria Correll went into labor with her first child. Albertina Hopkins, self-appointed midwife, dominated the event despite the efforts of two other wives who offered to help. Her voice could be heard through the wagon canvas as she admonished the screaming Mrs. Correll to stop acting like a child. “Hush now. What a silly thing you are being! Doesn’t the Bible tell us that God made women to bring forth children in sorrow and pain? All this carrying on is an offense to the Almighty’s ears.”
When Albertina left the wagon to visit the latrine that had been constructed for the women in a poplar grove, Emmeline slipped into the wagon and, uncapping a bottle she had brought with her, said to the poor laboring Victoria, “God might have given us pain, but he also gave us the resources to alleviate it. This is an herbal elixir my father always gave to birthing mothers. It will ease your labor and help make the passage of your baby into this world an easier one.”
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 Mr. 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.
