“Oh, yes, blame yourself—or worse, assume you’re that influential over the railroad’s inconsistencies.” The stage rolled us on the seats as we faced each other. “They chose where they thought they could get the most gain. Tacoma has greater potential than the bay area. And Tacoma’s not as far from Portland as Bellingham is.” I patted the seat next to me and Argos hopped up onto it. “B-flat.” I hugged him to me. We were the only passengers that morning and I was grateful I didn’t have to be cheery to preening women or loathsome men. “Don’t even think that you didn’t do enough to raise Fairhaven to the heights of Tacoma. Or that you haven’t done enough to serve railroads in all these years.”
I didn’t want to mention those people who had sold their property or remind him of the days the sheriff had taken condemnation notices to hardy pioneers who were left with a pittance and for what? What Pard had done wasn’t illegal, but ethically? My stomach hurt thinking of it. Yet I defended him.
“Railroads have been our greatest source of income through the years, not to mention our world of adventures.” He closed his eyes. “Remember Cuba?”
“Yes, we almost died of food poisoning.”
“And British Columbia.”
“Five hundred miles of canoeing.” I was crabby.
“We’ve had an astonishing life because of the railroad, Dell. You even got to go to Alaska while I headed back to DC that time, remember?”
“I recovered in Clatsop Beach with my sister after taking care of you when you nearly died writing those pamphlets. Truly, Robert, let me be annoyed and outraged at those people for a little while before you begin singing their praises. I’ll get there. Just give me pause.” I didn’t add that I needed time to lessen my outrage at him.
“Take all the time you need.”
“If I might ask, where are we going?”
“I was going to talk with you about that.” He removed his hat, placed it on the seat next to him, crown down. “We’re about to go into an economic depression.” I snorted. “I mean all of us. The West has been in it already with the collapse of the silver market in ’88. Currency is tight out here. People aren’t paying their taxes, so cities are struggling.”
“I wasn’t aware.”
“Not many are. But banks have started lending warrants and bonds to tax entities who agree to pay it back with interest—lucrative interest rates. Six to ten percent.”
“I’m not sure I know what that means, Robert.” My poor brain could barely manage this talk of finances in the early morning as we made our escape.
He leaned forward, forearms on his thighs. “It means that a good banker can buy up those warrants at a discount and resell them. The buyer will—in time—get paid when things pick up again. These are tax entities who will collect the money eventually, if only by selling property for nonpayment of back taxes. And meanwhile, those who hold the warrants can resell them at a profit and do quite nicely. One heads to places where there is still money available for investment purposes. I’ll get money, then buy up warrants and resell them.”
“And how will you get the money? We had to borrow stage fare.”
“New England. Boston, to be exact. Pretty city, I’m told. Mellon says it’s a banking mecca and cultural realm. You’ll like it. A great place to begin the new decade. I had an out for us, Dell. If needed.”
An out. One filled with shame and regret.
We caught the train, rode through Spokane Falls again. On Hill’s Great Northern we used our passes, stopping in Billings when Pard became ill and I thought I’d lose him again. We were there weeks during a flu epidemic. I stayed strong as a horse. I eventually wrote and asked my parents for money, though. I told them something like, “We left before the bank opened, silly us,” or some such thing. My mother sent us cash. Except for paying for our rooms, meals, and medicine, I hung onto those dollars, made them go as far as I could. From Billings, when Pard recovered, we pressed our passes onto the ticket masters’ hands, then headed to Minneapolis, home of James J. Hill, head of the Great Northern Railroad, the titan who had forced our escape from Fairhaven.
Minneapolis. The city was hot and humid like Marengo in the summer.
“Why are we stopping here? Do you think you can get Hill to change his mind about Tacoma?”
“I just want to make personal contact with him, let him know there are no hard feelings and I’d be happy to advance for him again.”
“No hard feelings? Really, Robert.” I wondered if my dear Pard was demented.
The Single Occupancy Room we had in the Minneapolis hotel stretched our final dollars, and I told Robert that we simply had to find a way to make ends meet. “I’ll sing for my supper if I have to. Remember when Mama said that I could always do that, when we got married?”
“I’ll write articles. That’ll help. Yes, it’ll help.”
I auditioned for paid solo work and Pard wrote an article for the Omaha paper while Hill declined to invest in warrants nor to hire Pard to advance anywhere else. Finally, we went home to Marengo where my dear father wasn’t looking so well himself.
“What’ll you do now?” my mother asked. She brewed tea for my father.
“Oh, we’ll be up for new adventure,” I chirped. “Don’t you like seeing Argos as a mature dog? Did you imagine he’d get so tall when you shipped him west?”
I am so good at diversion. The worry, of course, was that I was diverting myself from facing the pain of all the losses and disappointments and entering an era of yet more risk in the relationship with my husband.
“Your father did the choosing and the shipping.”
“I love that dog.”
“Will he go with you to wherever it is you’re going?”
“Pard has secured rooms for us in Boston.”
“Boston. Oh, my heavens!”
“I’ve never been there. I’m looking forward to it.”
But of course, I wasn’t. Is it a greater sin to lie to your mother than to anyone else? We diverted to New York, where Pard conferred again with Jay Gould of the Union Pacific, and they discussed the warrants and bonds and I think he got a loan from Gould. I never knew.
But it was in my nature to make the best of things and learn something in the process.
We arrived in Boston, to a modest . . . no, it was a dump of a hotel. But there we stayed, strangers to Boston and in ways to each other.
People in New England don’t know how to deal with strangers. Bostonians, especially, come from long lines of ancestors and webs of relatives. Everyone knows everyone in those circles and what lineage they’ve descended from. Old money speaks the loudest. Strangers are anomalies. It was alright with me that they didn’t know how to deal with a westerner, as I didn’t want to spend time with most of them anyway. I heard pity in their voices with the limited image many held of the West. “Do you have stoves to heat your tents?” “Do you haul water from the river?” I had chatty comments to these and more that made people laugh and, frankly, kept any real questions of life in the West—my life in the West—at a distance.
What I had was a purpose: to bind the wounds of humiliation. If I write my memoir, I won’t be too specific about anything in Boston. A good story always has a little mystery. But I wanted to know about business, about how things worked in the financial world, build a defense against the humiliation of our late-night departure, leaving friends holding worthless deeds. I wanted us to have a life together that was not infused with railroad talk or its torture. Yes, torture. But I didn’t let go of my pass.
I was bitter in Boston. Bitter about the losses we’d sustained in Caldwell and Hailey and Fairhaven. Bitter about the betrayals within the partnerships we’d had. And honestly? I was bitter about those twins I hadn’t been allowed to mother. Pard had his passion, his way of recovering from a fall; me, I propped him up. I didn’t have anyone but our Lord lifting me, and sometimes I couldn’t feel his arms.
When Gould of the UP died and Robert’s golden goose was no longer laying eggs, I
said to him, “I’d like to know about the financial transactions we’re undertaking.” We stood in his office he’d rented in the Massachusetts First National Bank building in Boston. He can afford this, how?
“Let me handle this, Dell. I was already buying up warrants before the Fairhaven decision was made. Both Mellon and Gould, too, saw the merit. We’re on good ground here. You find projects in between when I need you to charm those buyers with your dinner conversation and entertaining wit. We’re pardners, remember?” He patted his knee and Argos left me for his side.
I suppose I could have insisted he tell me more, but the truth is, I didn’t really understand all this business about warrants and bonds and interest and silver markets. Reading about it flummoxed my mind. I never did have confidence knowing enough to make suggestions and perhaps I lacked the courage to offer advice—even if I did understand decimals and dollar signs. And Robert could be vague. It was easier, before long, to hide behind the Victorian woman who simply depended on her husband and didn’t bother her pretty little brain with finance.
I still held images of those families who came west at our “partnership” writings, though, urging them to leave lush and productive only to find alkali dust and desert. I felt badly for our Wood River friends stuck with worthless land in Fairhaven, but I wasn’t sure that if I’d known about economics, I’d have had the courage to disagree with Robert.
So, while Pard was banking and buying and schmoozing investors, I made small commitments, found small purposes. I located a voice instructor and took lessons. I made no new friends, only acquaintances: the butcher down the street who saved cheap cuts of meat for me and bones for Argos; the organist at Old South Presbyterian Church with the bell made by Paul Revere. I didn’t want to befriend anyone whom Robert might involve in his financial schemes. At Robert’s request, I planned dinner gatherings for his clients, hand-designed the invitations, bought candles by the dozens to give that luxury feeling while keeping the dank corners of our rooms in the dark. I took Chautauqua courses and attended lectures, alone. I auditioned for the choir, grateful to be accepted and to lose myself in choral therapy. I found a stable and rode, forgetting for a moment the pain of loss while I inhaled the equine scent and rubbed the velvet nose of my mount. A few suffrage meetings drew me in, but I didn’t let myself engage in public marches; Robert’s associates might not approve. Above all, it was my job to charm potential investors, tell bracing stories of the West, be a one-woman performer wearing silk instead of homespun.
In my happy lane, I noted that it was easier to visit my family in Marengo. We attended my niece Christina’s wedding. I joined my sisters to celebrate my mother’s birthday, my parents’ anniversary. As Robert’s fortunes began to improve, I indulged my nieces and nephews, setting aside small portions of my allowance for gifts. When my father became ill in ’93, I used my pass to head to Marengo and was there for his dying. Argos rode the train with me. Robert remained behind, tied up with business.
I was grateful my father did not live to see the Panic of ’93, as investors called it. Banks called in notes; closed. Several railroads went bankrupt. The steel workers labor action against Carnegie and a Pullman strike in Chicago left unemployment in those places as high as 25 percent. Those next years, our little rooms in Boston looked prosperous compared to people living on the streets.
In the New York Herald of 1896, I read of a Norwegian emigrant mother and daughter who were leaving from Spokane—it no longer had Falls attached to the name. The women were walking, yes, walking, from that western city, earning their way across the country to arrive in New York that fall. They were doing it to show how strong women were, to advertise new, looser clothing worn without corsets. And if they made it, they would earn a sum of money to help pay family debts. I applauded their boldness in showing how the economy affected families and what women were willing to do to help. It was an extraordinary adventure, inspiring really, for what a woman’s body was capable of. I thought too of how grand it would be to spend months with one’s daughter, sharing experiences, building a bond of family. The women’s route, it was said, would take them across the Dale Creek Canyon where Pard and I had crossed on that cowcatcher.
Their journey spoke of desperation, women finding ways to support and save their families, and I wondered if another depression was on its way while we still struggled with the repercussions of the Panic of ’93. I often felt hollowed out those Boston years, like a Ponderosa pine toppled by the western winds.
In 1898, Robert sold all his bonds and warrants and closed his business. We were wealthier, financially, than we’d ever been, Robert told me. “We rival the bankers and maybe even the railroad barons. At least a few of the short line owners.” I suspected he exaggerated. He let me look at the accounts, but I confess, I didn’t understand them. He said another economic depression was coming but that we were cushioned, whatever that meant. I believed him.
Wealth didn’t make me deliriously happy. We’d been here before. I was a Victorian lady, “at home” as the census-taker noted. Being “taken care of.” There was no grand calling like those Norwegian women had who walked across a continent.
“Where do you want to go?” Robert asked me after giving me diamond earrings at Thanksgiving.
The two of us occupied our rooms. I’d done my best to live frugally those Boston years, but I do love diamonds. Does that make me a bad person? “We should be saving, not be extravagant.”
“Come on, Dell. Looking wealthy attracts wealth. And you deserve diamonds.”
He didn’t really understand what I longed for.
“Don’t spend any more for Christmas or my birthday. Save it for the West. I want to go west again.”
“Of course, but where? Denver? Omaha, San Francisco?”
I thought of places that had drawn me. “Walla Walla.”
“Too small.”
I wanted to say, Don’t ask me without giving me parameters. “Where do you want to go?”
“Spokane.”
I had liked the beautiful falls and the cosmopolitan feel, all the different languages spoken on the streets. It was the town I’d named when my niece had asked years ago.
“My thoughts exactly.” I clapped my hands and Argos barked. The dog wore a red ribbon around his neck for the holidays. He was already eleven. I didn’t want to think about him growing older. “Is it the climate of Spokane that’s such a draw for you?” I didn’t look at Pard as I put the posts of my new earrings through my pierced ears, twisted my head in the mirror. They sparkled like starlight.
“It could be the biggest railroad terminus in the West, Dell. The Northern Pacific, Great Northern, and Union Pacific should all be vying for that inland market. Those Palouse wheat field harvests need transport out, tracks’ll bring immigrants in. I want to build the North Coast Railroad, Dell. Link Spokane and Walla Walla to Portland and Seattle.”
“You want to build a railroad?” I swallowed. “But that’s thousands and thousands of dollars. And you said railroads have overextended and many short lines have gone under. Why would you risk it?”
“Why not? What’s money for if not to invest and make more?”
There was the crux of the matter: what I wanted in my life wasn’t available through money. I wanted to feel useful. I wanted to do something good for children whom I could call my own. I wanted to put down roots.
“I think my family hoped we’d settle in Chicago when we leave Boston.”
“You love the West, don’t you, Dell?”
I nodded. It was a landscape that fed my soul.
“It’s better for my own health too.”
“It’ll be twenty below in Spokane this time of year.”
He laughed. “You’re right. After New Year’s we’ll take on Spokane. Hawaii first, then head to Washington in the spring.”
I agreed and made myself get into that happy lane of looking forward.
We took the train to Marengo, loaded with presents for my family. My earrings
sparkled and I heard music in the train wheels clicking on the tracks.
But the mood turned somber when my mother developed a chest cough Christmas morning. Wheezing and then pneumonia came on quickly. She died eleven days after my forty-fifth birthday. My confidant, my correspondent, my letter-listener, was gone. That bond of mother and child, severed from this earth. I sang at her funeral. I stopped writing letters after that—and singing—for a very long time.
I remained in Marengo to help handle my mother’s estate while Robert went back to Boston to close things up. We traveled back and forth but managing my parents’ affairs took longer than I’d thought, and Robert was engaged in his newfound wealth-making plans. For the first time I considered how it was good to not have children in our lives; taking them from schools, moving about, living in hotels would have been a strain on them. Perhaps I was being nostalgic spending so much time in my childhood home where I’d felt loved, safe, and had a platform of hopefulness that never wavered. I knew Pard loved me as he could, but Boston and all that got us there had burned me. I had yet to heal the inner wounds of disappointment.
From Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage, vol. 2, by Carrie Adell Strahorn (page 297)
My own heart was more bitterly sealed against intrusion when we went to Boston than was possible for anyone there to emulate. I left all who were dear to me in the West, and I did not want to make new friends. I went there for a purpose and as a stranger I could throw my whole energy into its accomplishment.
31
Spokane Splash
We are in Hawaii, not exactly the West of my lumbering stagecoaches, though they have them here with fine horses and seats of worked leather. But even in this tropical land I discovered sturdy cowboys moving large herds of cattle against the backdrop of volcanoes and of course the quiet sandy beaches. It feels like a honeymoon, so much better than the trip from Illinois to Omaha all those years before. Maybe we’ll truly have a new start when we head to Spokane. Or will Pard surprise me and keep me in the tropics?