Robert completed all six pamphlets, all six hundred pages within the timeline, but at great personal cost. My Pard was on the verge of collapse when he finished, the high Denver altitude not good for his TB-affected lungs. He shook, kept to his bed, had night sweats though no fever. I couldn’t get him to drink even water. I called for the hotel doctor, then spoke with my father about Robert’s condition after the hotel doctor said his heart was impaired and that he was fading away.
“Fading away, Daddy. That’s what they said. He’s dying.” I sobbed into the phone.
“Shush, now, that won’t help, Carrie. Even Argos is upset by your upset.” He could hear Argos whining in the background. “Get him to the sea. New Orleans. Mississippi. Somewhere that his heart doesn’t have to work so hard. Can he make the trip? We’ll come out and help you.”
“No. No. I’ll get us there.”
“Maybe one of your friends can assist?”
We had friends to call on, didn’t we? Our Caldwell pals?
No, all our friends were business connected and I didn’t feel I could ask Jay Gould of the UP. I thought of Carrie Blatchley, of Hester Brown, my Presbyterian women, and wished we were still in Caldwell. I wondered if I ought to find a place for Argos to stay. Caring for dear Robert and managing Argos could be a strain while traveling; but the dog gave me moments of joy that I found nowhere else. And I didn’t want to rely on my sisters. Again. “I’ll be alright. We’ll go south. Good idea. That’ll help.”
And it did, though by the time the next months were over and I’d nursed Pard back to good health in Mississippi, I was exhausted. “I need a respite, Robert. Could you see your way to looking after me for a week or two?” We were in yet another hotel on the delta. My fan barely cooled my face.
“Send for your sister. She can bring Christina.” He straightened his red cravat. The color brought out his dark eyes. “You can have a girls’ week or two before your niece gets married.” He packed his bag while I curled in a ball on the bed.
“You couldn’t fix me tea, plump my pillow?”
He sat on the side of the bed then, patted my shoulder. “I’ve got a job, Dell. I’ve lost a lot of time being ill. I’m going to Washington on railroad business.”
“I thought the railroads overextended.”
“Union Pacific is in bankruptcy, yes. And a few others. But not the Great Northern. Take a few weeks, a month or more. Then join me.”
“Will you miss me?” I didn’t want to complain. Life is too short to whine. He didn’t answer. Perhaps he didn’t hear me.
We three “girls” took a vacation on the Clatsop Beach in Oregon while Pard headed to Bellingham Bay in Washington where he anticipated getting another railroad—this time The Great Northern—to make a hopeful town a potential terminus site, an area called Fairhaven. James J. Hill of Minneapolis was at the helm, a truly self-made railroad man who took no free land from the government, owed no banks. A different type of tycoon, Robert called him.
Pard did what he always did there, I learned later: borrowed money, formed a company, sold property, invested to build up the area with no guarantee that Hill would bring the railroad there. But his interest and his reputation got others to invest in Fairhaven. Even a few of our Wood River friends from Caldwell put money into the projects.
“He’s always going to go up and down,” my sister Mary said as we dug for clams on the beach. I shared Pard’s letters with her. “It disturbs me that you’re always there for him, but he finds a way to be somewhere else when you need a little tender loving care.”
“You give great tender loving care.” Argos chased after foam, barking his delight. He trotted over to us. Why do dogs always shake themselves of the wet nearest their masters? A subtle effort at control?
“And I’m happy to come take care of you, Carrie, but—”
“Oh, please don’t not love him because I complain.” I brushed off Argos’s shower. “I need for you to be a safe person who I can grouse to about my spouse without fear that you’ll love him less.”
“How a couple lives their lives is no business of others.”
“That’s right. And I won’t think less of your Willie even though he thinks if you put food in the cold fridge in a glass jar that it will keep for three weeks and still be good. It won’t.”
“And I won’t think badly of your Pard that, though he is a man of science, he believes that adding beans to any food makes it a complete meal. It doesn’t.”
We laughed. “This is what you have to look forward to when you and your Quinard marry,” Mary told her daughter.
“Strange challenges to science and botulism?” My niece laughed and we joined her.
I let the seagulls serenade us, added a clam to the bucket, and pulled my gloves off, shaking them of sand. A wind gust threatened to take my straw hat, but I rescued it. “It’s that we’re wrapped up in the railroad and they are corporations. Railroads can do good things and they can dump you in a moment. I worry that we’re back in their clutches.”
“Maybe Robert’s next book will be a bestseller and you can find a place to settle in and stay. Where would that be, Aunt Carrie?”
I thought of all the spots where we’d put our slippers beneath a bed. Walla Walla? Santa Fe? Bend? Astoria?
“Spokane Falls.” I surprised myself with that. “I love the climate, the landscape, the mix of people. It’s the most European of any city I know in the West. Grand yet friendly, not full of itself as Denver can be. Or San Francisco.”
“Something to seek then.” My sister hugged me with one arm. We swung the bucket and decided we had enough clams and headed back to our rooms.
We lolled at our Single Occupancy Hotel, read books, visited the salt works supposedly established by Lewis and Clark. I wrote letters and we even took a trip to San Francisco. But I missed my Pard and I suspect Argos did too, though he’d loved bounding at the beach, chasing waves. I put Mary and Christina on the train back to Chicago, said goodbye to family, and I headed north to our new venture, Fairhaven, where Pard had written that he had an idea for a new book and if I felt better, to please join him.
It was a fine reunion in that mild climate off Bellingham Bay. “You look well, Dell. I’ve missed you.” He pecked me on my cheek, a big smile on his face. He needed a haircut.
“I imagine you have, though the hotel’s chef must be to your liking. It’s good to see a little weight on you.” It wasn’t much weight and he looked pale, but I didn’t want to mention that. Only staying in my happy tracks.
“I eat mostly at the tavern. The hotel dining room isn’t quite finished, but it will be soon.”
Robert had been welcomed in that region, and as he’d done in Idaho, he began building up Fairhaven, getting a hotel constructed, investing in the electric plant, urging city fathers to agree to give a piece of prime property to the railroad if they built its depot and terminus there. He met the Larrabees, founders of Fairhaven. I spent pleasant afternoons with Frances in her lovely home while we watched the fog lift.
“It would be the perfect climate without the fog,” Frances said once.
“Yes, but then there’d be less reason to build a fire in the fireplace. I always love a fireplace,” I said.
“Oh, me too. We only have five in this house. When the railroad comes, Charles has promised me a mansion.” She smiled. “But if it doesn’t, this will do.” It was a marvelous place to dream of a metropolis, with tall timber, mining, honeybees, and lush green growth right up to the beautiful deep harbor on Puget Sound. A perfect place for a railroad terminus. It even boasted of less winter rainfall than areas farther south. And the Larrabees were people who could weather a storm if the railroad didn’t come. After all, he owned the bank.
Pard had been buying property he hoped to sell to the railroad when it came through, but meanwhile said he needed it for electric and water rights-of-way for his generating company. He planned to later sell those rights for a tidy profit to the railroad. Frances had told me that
Pard and her husband and other investors had instituted condemnation proceedings on land that people didn’t want to sell just to get those electric and water lines.
“We pay them,” Pard defended when I brought up the issue.
“But they don’t want to leave their homes,” I said. “That’s reasonable.”
“Stands in the way of progress. They’ll get over it.”
I didn’t like his crass view. “People put down roots and forcing them to dig them up is like—” I tried to think of the words. “It’s like an amputation. They’re cut off and have to leave a part of themselves there and progress runs right over them.”
“It’s what has to happen for the railroad to come.”
“But if it doesn’t come. Then all that disruption—”
“It’s part of commerce, yes, it’s part of commerce.”
“Is the railroad going to come here? I notice other little towns are sprucing up too. They’re cutting trees, those beautiful trees. Are they hoping they’ll be the terminus for the Great Northern?” We were in the Fairhaven hotel and Pard was finishing up that book he’d been buried in when he wasn’t co-opting property. He’d gotten use of a “literary den,” as I called it, a room where he kept his notes and statistics and typewriter. That way, our hotel rooms proved less a worksite than a suite where we could entertain guests, all railroad or commerce related, I’m sad to say.
“They’re looking at a number of areas, as they always do. Hill’s a little harder to read than Gould. But this bay has much to commend it.”
“People think because we’re here that the railroad will come here.”
“That’s what the railroad wants. Get that interest up and commerce takes over and is bustling before the tracks arrive. And we’ll make a killing when they have to buy what we own to make their tracks go where they need to.”
“They’ll be terribly disappointed if the tracks go elsewhere, like the Boise people were. And Weizer, when we started New Weizer just a mile away.” If people had been forced to sell, receiving less-than-desired compensation, and the railroad didn’t come . . . well, I could imagine the disappointments. And the outrage, not to mention our personal losses if the railroad went another way.
“It’s a part of life, Dell. Investment, disappointment. And recovery.”
He didn’t look at me while we talked; he was always busy with his writing.
“Look, let’s take breakfast out of our rooms, celebrate,” I said. “You’re almost finished with the book, aren’t you?”
“Checking footnotes.”
“If you become ill again . . . I’ll beat you with a stick. We need to celebrate being together. And your book. Celebration means to fill up, to give fuel for the next book, the next project. You didn’t pace yourself with those six, and this time, you must, Robert. I’m not sure I could nurse you back to health by myself again.”
He ran his hands through his hair, the light hitting tiny hints of gray at the temples. “Why don’t you order something in for us?”
“No. You’ve worked all night. We’re going out, taking a short walk, and then we’ll have breakfast at your tavern. Come on. Argos is tired of me holding the leash. He needs to feel your hand on it.” The dog lifted his head at the sound of his name, sat and scratched his ear.
Robert stared. How can what he loves to do take so much from him? Argos trotted over to him. He patted the dog’s head. “All right.” He put the manuscript on the floor, what he always did when he finished and before I took the pages to the printer. Stacks of statistics, notes, graphs, and maps looked like detritus on his desk. He always seemed to know where a certain note about the climate or number of board feet of timber in a Wyoming stand could be grabbed from the stacks of paper. At least now he used a typewriter, which made editing easier.
We dressed and Argos hopped around in happiness that all of us were heading out. The air felt damp from the morning fog. I confess, I did not like the fog. We heard hammering, dogs barking, children’s patting on the boardwalk near the wharf as they headed to school. The clunk of a boat hitting a dock caused my head to turn. It was a pretty town when the fog stayed away.
We dropped Argos back in our hotel room before heading for Joe Morell’s little tavern on the wharf where he refused to serve baked potatoes because he said people used too much butter on them that he couldn’t afford. We chatted like old friends, Pard and I, over a hot breakfast of pancakes with a poached egg on top, served on heavy white plates, with our coffee delivered in big mugs. I inhaled the steam.
“You were right, Dell. This is good to be here. I guess I get engrossed in the work and can’t let it go, even for a little refreshment.”
I took his hand across the wooden table marked by the nicks of steins and forks. “You’re a true writer, Robert. Losing sight of time and rations. We’ll get through this. Just don’t become ill over it. Argos and I need you.”
He smiled, squeezed my fingers. We walked slowly back to our hotel, my arm through his, and watched while a boat docked and unloaded baskets of fish that men hoisted onto their shoulders. It was that little delay, I suppose, that allowed for the disaster.
We reached the room, heard Argos whining on the other side of the door that Robert opened. Everything looked fine. The maid had been in and tidied up the bed. Then Robert went to his literary den.
I heard his wail from the end of the hall.
“The manuscript! It’s gone! Everything, it’s gone.” The maid had been there too.
“No, surely not.” That sinking feeling clutched at my stomach. “It’s got to be here. She wouldn’t have thrown it out.”
Robert groaned. “It was trash to her.” The room was picked clean except for the typewriter. That detritus on the desk was neatly stacked.
“I’ll check with the manager. The manuscript must be in the garbage. We’ll get it back. It might have eggs and bacon on it, but it’ll be alright. You look around here while I check with the desk.”
I raced down the stairs, pounded the little bell that brought the manager out. “What is it, Mrs. Strahorn? What’s wrong?”
“We think the maid tossed out Robert’s book by mistake. Can you find her, see what she did with it?”
“Our maids are very reliable.”
“I know. Yes. How long ago did she clean our room?”
He looked at a page, ran his finger down a list. “First thing. You’re usually there in the room, I believe. She might have taken extra time with the dog and you out.”
“She’s never cleaned Robert’s writing room.”
“She’s new.” He didn’t look at me. “She would only toss what was on that floor.”
I swallowed. “What would she do with the trash?”
“Oh, that goes immediately to the incinerator in the furnace room. And that floor has been . . .” He looked at the clock. “Completed fifteen minutes ago.”
“Can you take me to the furnace room? Please.”
“I can’t leave my post. But it’s down those steps.” He pointed. “You can check with the custodian to see if there’s anything left to burn. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s wasteful to burn so many papers when one could write on the back side of the discard.” The furnace man carried chastisement in his voice. I had a moment of hope until he added that it was policy to not take anything from the hotel that guests might leave behind, so in it went. The manuscript was ash.
To his credit, Pard did not blame me nor the maid. He blamed himself, which was worse. It deepened his moroseness as he tried to recapture what he’d written, a hopeless effort as any writer who has lost a manuscript will tell you. What’s lost is always better than the recovery.
He never did attempt to write of Fairhaven again.
Pard woke me in the dead of night. “We have to leave. Now. Quietly.”
“What—?”
“I’ll explain later.”
I only had time to grab a bag and Argos and my chunk of ore as a reminder of what I could overcome
if I had to.
From Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage, vol. 2, by Carrie Adell Strahorn (pages 157, 179)
Leaving the town of Caldwell in 1888 was a most pathetic incident in our frontier lives. The friends who had struggled for the upbuilding of the town and the opening of the College of Idaho had woven themselves into our affections as only people do who suffer and endure the hardships of pioneering together. . . . [T]o record the heartaches and discouragements threading through the pioneer days would deprive these pages of the romance of the experience, and the reader might lose sight of the marrow of joy that always accompanies a life of useful work. . . . I am not prone to linger on the dark side of life, for I love the sunshine and gladness, and keep myself in it whenever possible.
30
Bonds
Leaving. Always leaving. The idea of a stagecoach and railroad life had held the promise of adventure, discovering the new. But every new turns into old and must be left, it seems. At least that is my life now. I can hardly write of leaving Bellingham Bay. I might not. It hurts too much—the leaving and what followed.
October 22, 1890
We left Bellingham Bay in the dark of dawn after Pard received word of where James J. Hill would take his railroad. It wasn’t Fairhaven. It was Tacoma. At least they had the courtesy to tell Pard by telegram before the news broke region-wide. We tiptoed past the hotel manager’s desk and scurried to the wharf where, with what little cash we had, we hired a wooden boat and oar man to row us across the sound, catching the morning tide. The thump of oars in the rings and the swish of the water against the boat couldn’t drown out my soft cries. On shore, Pard borrowed money from a tavern owner who had yet to get the bad news—and who figured Pard would be good for it. “Left my wallet at the hotel,” he said. It wasn’t a lie. He had left it . . . but there was nothing in it anyway.
“Maybe if I’d gotten that Fairhaven book published, they would have chosen it,” Pard said. He leaned his head back against the leather padding of the stage as the morning fog settled around us and we escaped the town.