Robert’s rendering of landscapes, of mountains and deep valleys still marked on maps as “unexplored regions,” created paths for those seeking to leave behind the eastern crush and move to open spaces and yet find a way to survive. Or better, thrive, which Robert did in those wilderness places. He was more at home beneath tall timber, riding through buckbrush and fording streams on horseback, than he ever was in the parlors of the powerful, and yet, those parlors would become our future—now and then—and Robert would master them.
I remember an evening a few months into our marriage. We were in Omaha with General Crook and his wife, and the men discussed former battles in Indian country. The general’s eyes shined with the memories of leading good men toward a common mission and how Robert, though not commissioned (he was a journalist covering the conflict), had served his country above and beyond, not only as a reporter, but as one of the “soldiers” who fought as needed. They didn’t go into details—those who experience conflict rarely do, I’ve found, leaving the talk of glory to the others. But the comradery, Robert included, was highly praised by the general.
I wondered if the general sometimes woke with a start in the night, breathing hard and fast and shouting with sweat pouring off his chest, as though he’d run a hard race to save his life. Robert did. His nightmares scared me to death, I can tell you. I didn’t know whether to wake him.
Listening to General Crook, I discovered my husband through the eyes of others and by reading what he wrote and what brought light to his eyes, hoping that my presence did so, as much as geological formations or chatting with an old friend did.
It turned out, Omaha was a wind-filled place where a three-story courthouse towered over the town like a medieval city without the wall. I missed my hometown. But then, I often longed for where I’d been and where I wasn’t. It was a lesson of living I hadn’t yet learned about, finding the blessings of each moment.
Small houses dotted the prairie that at first looked flat but proved to be rolling, its formation camouflaged by tall grasses turning brown as we arrived that September. One of those houses was to be ours. And then it wasn’t.
I had unpacked the boxes of wedding gifts and linens and such, seeking an armoire of some size for our clothing. We hadn’t brought furniture with us, and there was nothing to be found in Omaha. I ordered in oak and located a craftsman who could deliver what I needed, while putting through a request for items from Illinois that would arrive by train, now that I knew what would fit. I was certain that not a single house in Omaha had a closet. Merely hooks on the wall. None we’d looked at had linen, changing nor bathing rooms either. Those would come in time, Robert assured me, when we could build our own estate, if the book sold well and if he could write another.
That first fall, Robert took the train to Cheyenne to finish up an article he’d been commissioned by the UP (Union Pacific) to write, then returned to me with a light in his eyes that came from a story rather than the homemaking advances I had to show him.
“They want me to head up a new publicity office for the Union Pacific. I’ll write books and pamphlets that will bring people west. What an offer, Dell.”
“That’s wonderful.” I kissed his cheek, then turned my gaze to the table I’d had built. Too large for the space, I could see that now.
“It’ll mean travel though, and a lot of it. They want people to move into unknown places, new sites where the railroad will one day come.” He was following me around the table, stopping when I did to check a potential ding in the edge. He bumped into me. I stopped. He turned my shoulder so I looked at him, saw the passion in his eyes for this new role he’d been asked to play. “I’m to be the lead man, identifying, describing, whipping up that pioneering desire. A blend of wide vistas and words. Dell, it’s a dream job.”
“Yes, it is.” I was happy for him, I was. “Tell me again about the traveling part.”
“The thing is, it means going into unknown wilds identifying terrain suitable for towns, for railroad termini, spur lines. The new law gives railroads free access to entire sections of government land on either side of the tracks they lay. That land can be resold to settlers who arrive by the very same train. Railroads have to lay tracks or repay the treasury. It’s a license to make money for them, expand our country’s hold on vast vistas between the Pacific and the States, and give people meaningful work. It taps everything I’ve ever loved—adventure, engineering, the great outdoors, the writing of it.”
“You’ll operate out of Omaha or where?”
“Sometimes here, Cheyenne perhaps, then wherever UP chooses to bump up interest. But mostly, I’ll be on the road. Helping to make the railroad in advance.” He took my hand and walked me into the living room. “I know this is a change of plans for you, making your way with me gone most of the time. You can visit your family as often as you might like, bring them out here even.”
As he spoke, I could feel my shoulders tighten up like a rope pulled around them and my chest. We’d come all this way to where I knew few people and I’d do what without a husband beside me?
“I know you wanted a home of our own, and this way I’ll be able to afford a place worthy of you, where we can entertain when I’m home and you can learn to fix blood soup or something.” There were many Polish immigrants in Omaha known for their fine foods like blood soup, though baking and cooking weren’t strengths of mine. I wasn’t sure what my strengths were. I’d certainly ordered too large of a table for the dining area.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“What I’d like is to have a life with my husband. Maybe—” I hesitated here to speak of such intimate things, but it had to be said—“maybe start our family. That’ll be a bit hard to do with half of the equation riding into the sunset alone.” I’d smiled, a little embarrassed to be championing procreation so boldly.
He looked as though he saw me for the first time. There’d certainly been no lack of interest in our marriage bed, so why he looked astounded by my mention of a family, I didn’t know.
He held me then, his suit-coated arms a comfort. “I’m such an idiot. Of course, that’s what you want: a home, family.” He stroked my hair, the back of my neck.
“You close by, maybe even helping you with your writing now and then. Editing. I do have skills in that area, Robert. I earned A’s in composition at Michigan.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” He released me, kept hold of my hand. “Let’s think about this. Let’s think about this.” He often repeated himself when he was nervous. “A cup of tea? I’ll fix it.”
He headed to the kitchen and blew on the cookstove coals to heighten the flame beneath the teapot. I joined him and pulled out pastries I’d purchased that morning from an Italian baker.
As though he was out on the prairie over a campfire, Robert whistled as the water heated, and he put the loose-leaf tea into the porcelain pot my sister Hattie had given us as a wedding present. He did it as he did all things, it seemed, with such ease. I watched, wary of where this conversation of family planning might be going and wary too of the tightness in my chest.
“Sit.” I did, at our new dining room set. He handed me the tea.
“I could go with you.” My enthusiasm overflowed.
“That makes no sense.” Our having a family? “Too many hardships.” He ran his hand through his hair. “There’s almost nothing out there, no people.”
“You’ll need someone to look after you.”
“The UP would never go along with that.”
My world was swinging like an unhinged gate. I wanted a home, settled, a family like my sister Mary had, like women of my station did. And yet, I had already chosen a different route, following my husband west where women were few but hardy.
Thunder rolled in the distance and I noticed the wind had begun to pick up too, rattling dust against the windowpanes. “It could work, Robert. Once we had a family coming, well, of course I could come back here. Or Cheyenne, if that’s where your home base would be.
Or Denver. It wouldn’t matter. But until then, what keeps me from coming along?”
“It . . . the danger. Indian country much of it. Wild outlaws and miners, those we’re likely to encounter. Stage stops peopled by strangers and a wide range of proprietors whose cleanliness will vary as the wind. Lack of, uh, bathing arrangements. And then there are the elements themselves. Storms. Blizzards. Temperatures hot enough to blister your skin in the shade. No safe place really in scrappy clapboard boarding houses, if we’re lucky. Or unlucky.”
“I can manage bedbugs.”
He laughed. “The least of our worries, I suspect. Privacy might be unheard of.”
“Not all the time, surely. With such wide-open spaces—” I let the image linger.
He sipped his tea. Stared at me. “Gould will never agree.” Jay Gould was the head of the UP.
“You’ll have to persuade him, then. That’s what you do, isn’t it?” A thought occurred to me. “My presence could add to the aura, Robert. You’re out there looking at townsites, at land acquisition where engineers can ply their trade to lay tracks, while I bring along the sense of civilization. If a society woman can endure those hardships with spirit and spunk, then surely the hardy pioneers with their half-dozen children behind them will find the same possibility you want for your farmers and entrepreneurs to pull them west. I’ll represent home and family and churches and schools, what it takes to make a town the railroad wants to dot the West. It’ll be the women and children who settle this land, Pard.” I emphasized my name for him, reminding him that we were partners in all things. “Every happy woman has a true Pard and will follow him anywhere if she thinks they’re on the same team. Women do have choices, you know. Not many, I admit, but women in Wyoming can vote, so they figured something out. And didn’t you say you’d ‘obey’?”
Robert laughed out loud. “Are you ordering me to obey you, Mrs. Strahorn?”
“If that’s what it takes, yes.”
“Oh, Carrie.”
He sighed but didn’t look at me and I didn’t know if he was bringing forth the image of his first love or if he forgot for a moment and saw me as I was.
But who was I? I’d proposed a future of hardships on horseback or stages and occasionally trains taking us to the end of their tracks. I’d agreed to look after him, as that was how he’d described my strength, being his “Pard,” but I’d thought it would be welcoming him home as my mother had my father, at the end of a weary day, children flocked around. Proximity was necessary for reproduction, that was certain, but he’d been evasive about family, hadn’t he? And yet that was one thing for certain I did know: I wanted a family, and should I conceive, it might very well be a challenge to carry the infant to term if I was jostled about on a stagecoach. I’d bridge those notes when I knew the music better.
Corporations tended to make their decisions on what was best for their shareholders and not their employees. I hoped I’d given Robert a good argument for allowing me to be his “partner” in this endeavor. “I’ll go with you to see Gould.”
“Not a chance. But you’ll be there in spirit. And I think you’ve just given me the best argument I could make about the influence of women in advancing the cause of the West. I couldn’t have said it better.”
From Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage, vol. 1, by Carrie Adell Strahorn (page 11)
But if there is ever a time in a woman’s life when she will endure hardships and make sunshine out of shadows it is when she first leaves the home nest to follow the man of her choice.
3
Pioneering without Protest
Today, Robert meets with Jay Gould, and I find out if I’m to be the first woman to go hither and yon into wild places with my Pard. I have been first before: I was the first to solo in Italy and France when our choir toured. I admire women who take the initiative, like Francis Case and Mary Robinson, the first women to summit Mt. Hood in Oregon. But the idea of a pioneer, that “dust-laden dress of the weary,” bothers me. They seem beaten down and I don’t want to ever be that. And I don’t like people in their aging years looking back as though what had gone before was the highlight of their lives. I want to be talking about amazing things happening now and ahead, even as I grow older. I want to anticipate the possible, always. If I write a memoir, I’ll look back, of course—that’s what a memoir is, a reflection of a life or a time period or an adventure sprinkled with epiphanies of wisdom to give others insights without making mistakes. But one can be a pioneer without letting the past hold one hostage. Pioneer means “foot soldier,” the one who goes before. So that’s what I need to consider: if all goes well with our proposal to the UP, I will indeed be a pioneer but one who goes before and looks forward, not back.
October 30, 1877
I used your words about a society lady demonstrating the partnerships of pioneers. Gould was wary about a woman going out west and he didn’t like the additional costs involved for two instead of one traveler. But he went for it.”
“Oh, Robert, I’m so pleased.”
He kissed me soundly. I might have lingered on that kiss, but he was all into his success and paced the room.
“I told him I wouldn’t do it unless you came with me.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. They’d already convinced themselves that they wanted a book like Wyoming Handbook written for every territory or state, anywhere the tracks might lead, so they weren’t going to let me go, now were they?”
“Awfully risky to test it, though.”
“Wait, don’t you want this?” He stopped his pacing and touched my shoulder, his white shirtsleeve peeking from his tweed jacket.
“Of course I do. When do we start?” I gulped with getting what I wished for.
“We move to Cheyenne first, to a boardinghouse. It’ll be our base. We’ll be on the road so much there’s no need to buy a house and try to keep it up.”
“Oh.” Visions of entertaining in between our stints hither and yon faded like an often-washed dress. “What should I do with—” I spread my hand around our rented house stuffed now with furniture from back east or craftsman-made in Omaha.
“Sell everything. Or we can box it up and ship it back to your parents’ home. Put big items into storage with the railroad perhaps. Yes, a warehouse would hold all this if you wanted, though by the time we settle down, these might be outmoded fashion.” He picked up one of the brass candlesticks. “I suppose brass never goes out of style. I’ll ask for a drayage to come help you pack and load.”
“Won’t you be here?”
He shook his head. “You’ll join me in a week in Cheyenne. I’ll try to meet you at the station, but if you don’t see me, hire a livery and head to the Tin Restaurant. I’ll have secured a boardinghouse or maybe a Single Room Occupancy hotel and gotten my marching orders by then. I’ll meet you there for dinner. We’ll eat steak on their tin plates. Oh, and I got passes for both of us on all conveyances, including stage lines and ferries and trains, of course, even if they aren’t UP’s. We can go anywhere we want!”
Now, that was a delight to this travel adventurer.
I spent the next few days sending my beloved furniture to a warehouse, putting linens in trunks and shipping them back home to Illinois. I wrote to my mother about “storing things,” deciding I wanted a little more time to describe exactly what I’d be doing for the next few months. I thought it would be months. I didn’t imagine pioneering my entire life.
I did decide to keep one small trunk for bedsheets I could pull out at a less-than-clean stage stop and to store my unmentionables. I added a few silk gowns for those receptions I hoped to hostess. Then it seemed that certain wedding gifts should travel with us—wool blankets, pillowcases with lace edging, Hattie’s teapot. One can always get a good night’s sleep with a cup of tea and a special pillowcase. I threw in the down-filled pillows Mary had insisted I take wherever I went.
Perhaps I’d conceive before long and wouldn’t need the worry of managing my monthlies, thou
gh that would mean a significant change. Robert surely wouldn’t allow me to continue once I was with child. But western women rode horses, tended sheep, did all sorts of things while carrying a child. I so wanted a family . . . but I also wanted to be with my husband not only until but throughout.
Cheyenne was a madhouse in the shadow of snow-capped mountains. Wagons, horses, mule teams; men with wild gold-pursuing eyes bought up every shovel, pan, dish, and Nobel’s dynamite, followed by black powder, cheese, and canned milk that was available in that mountain town. Dogs barked while stagecoaches were loaded with mounds of supplies—sluice boxes, wire, gun powder boxes, sides of pork—and men hanging on to stages wherever they could, all heading to the Black Hills for this new gold rush amidst cooling October mornings. They headed east while we’d be mining the possibilities of the west.
I stepped down from the train, looking for Robert’s black hat to bob above the rest of the mostly men gathered. A wind gust pushed against my straw hat and I jammed it against my head. At least there was no humidity here to frizz up my hair. Not finding my Pard, I headed to the livery. Then I spied him and fast-walked toward him. He swooped me into a bear hug, and for the one hundredth time I wished I was fine boned like Hattie instead of laden with curves and hips that filled out a dress like a thick blanket of snow over hills and valleys. Perhaps all this travel I’d be engaging in would change my terrain.
“My little pioneer woman,” Robert said as he kissed me discreetly on the cheek.
I struck him on the arm but laughed. “You know I never ever wanted to be a pioneer.” Wind whipped my skirts around my legs. “Pioneer means foot soldier and gives me images of aproned women with their hair in tendrils sweating over open fires while children chase chickens and tend a log house in the background. A man with a mule plows his field without an ounce of energy left to sing a merry song or attend a cake walk to raise money for the new church piano.”