Robert laughed, took my elbow. “Foot soldiers are the heart of an army.” He directed the liveryman to pick up my three trunks. He frowned as the third one was hoisted onto the wagon, but he didn’t say anything, continued instead to praise foot soldiers. “They go before the rest of us and that’s exactly what we’re doing, Dell. We are leading the way for those stalwart souls to come marching forth to tame the land. And make the railroad rich. And maybe us too.”
“Is that thunder?” I scanned the sky.
“Indeed. Let’s hurry to Angie’s.”
We arrived at the boardinghouse, unloaded, and had just come downstairs into the parlor when the storm struck. Hail the size of prize onions crashed through the window, tore open a cane chair, struck the oak floor beneath, and bounced back up to make yet another hole in the chair seat. I thought of what we’d have looked like if such a storm had hit us while we were beneath a mere canvas tent out on the prairie. I shivered.
An engineer at heart, Robert took out his measuring device. “Seven inches in diameter. Now that’s hail.”
“Quick, quick.” Our landlady handed us baskets and urged her boarders to follow her out once the storm had ceased. The air was crisp and cool. I soon had a basket full of hailstones, wondering what on earth she intended. “I’ll make us a batch of iced cream and we’ll have a hailstone party,” she announced. And she set to it.
“That’s the spirit.” Robert cheered her. These Wyoming souls were enterprising and, yes, pioneering.
While we waited for our first assignment, I sought out a church choir. I always did better while waiting for the unknown if I could sing hymns or arias. I loved to solo, but I also had no difficulty stepping back into the choral line, being simply one of the voices raised to the rafters. It was where I found my greatest peace, being both out in front and blending in. I was discovering that those qualities were exactly what my marriage required.
After a few days of careful listening to Angie, our landlady, the wives of some of Robert’s UP colleagues living in Cheyenne, and the Territorial Secretary’s wife, I found a Congregational church. I asked the choirmaster if he was interested in another voice, auditioned, and then began singing. It was what I needed while Robert met with dignitaries and railroad folk to arrange our itinerary. And so I whiled away my days singing in Cheyenne.
“They’ve issued our passes,” Robert told me before Christmas. He didn’t make eye contact with me. “Uh, we aren’t always—we aren’t always on the same rail lines and we might have to meet up along the way now and then.”
“We won’t travel together? Aren’t we going back to Illinois for Christmas?”
“Yes, yes, we are. But we’ll head home from there at different times. I need to make a quick trip to Salt Lake City after the new year.”
“I could come with you.”
“Your pass is for Cheyenne to Chicago, then a return to Denver.”
“Denver?”
“It’ll be fine. Pack up everything when we leave from here. We won’t be coming back to Cheyenne.” He lifted my chin with his warm hands, looked me in the eye. “I need a few more details for To the Rockies and Beyond. The rail agents will take good care of you.” I could have helped him with the final edits of his latest, but I didn’t suggest it now. He’d made up his mind. I would simply obey.
I kept the knowledge of this separate travel from my family while we enjoyed the holidays with taffy pulls and hot cider, soothing scents drifting over the greens on the mantel and lifting the already sinking pine boughs to rise yet one more day until freed of their ornaments and candles.
On New Year’s Day we all celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday. Robert gave me a gold necklace with a tiny cross. He clicked the clasp around my neck, kissed me in front of my family. “This woman is the light of my life, the gold of my heart, her presence the balm of love and wisdom that soothes my soul. Thank you all for allowing this woman to be my beloved wife.”
My family burst into applause. I felt myself blush and blinked back tears.
Hattie said, “Such beautiful sentiments. You have a way with words, Robert. No wonder your book is doing so well.”
“I have a good editor in Dell,” Robert said. He tapped my nose, something he did in affection.
I never told Hattie that I’d written those words in a card to Robert on his birthday last May. I took it as a compliment that he chose to edit them and give them back, but a little part of me felt cheated too. They were my words, but my family would always know them as his. Sunshine out of shadows.
During those holidays, I thoroughly engaged myself with Christina, my niece, fifteen months old and bright as an evening star. There is something about the lack of all guile in a loved and happy child that brings tears to my eyes. I treasured the smell of her after her bath, the giggle that grew from her belly, the words she put together as she pointed her dainty finger at the dog.
“No baby news?” Mary watched me make faces just to hear my niece laugh.
“Not yet, though not for lack of trying.” I felt myself blush with my frankness.
Mary laughed. “He is a handsome man, no doubt about that. And attentive. A new job, too, in addition to another book contract so soon. That speaks well of him.”
I nodded. “They’ll publish fifty thousand copies and the Union Pacific is giving them away for free, to promote the West and reduce the fear and anxiety for those considering heading in that direction.”
“This one’s about the Rockies?”
“And the flora and fauna and valleys and ridges and the nature of the soil, of course. Farmers always want to know about that. And the rainfall. Timber projections. All a little . . . technical, but I’ve urged him to put a bit of flower into his words, make the dream of new beginnings more vivid.”
“He appears to have flowers in his words to those he loves. You have a way with words too. Mama reads your letters out loud to us.” She lifted Christina from my lap, as the child had reached out to her mother. “These books he writes, they’re establishing a new kind of genre?”
“In part. They’re a bit of history, geology, science, business, agronomy, and inspiration too. Pioneering of a sort. Emigration is an important issue these days, and Robert’s words speak to those looking for something better, hoping they’ll find it in the West.”
She held Christina close, patted her back, then looked at that angel face. “Time for a lunch and then a nap?” Christina nodded. “That’s one of the advantages of motherhood.” She turned to me. “The pleasure of nursing, then putting your baby down for a nap and taking one with her.”
“I look forward to such blessings.” And I did.
White flakes began blanketing the ground as Robert prepared to leave ahead of me. Prognosticators predicted more snow to fall, but Robert was packed and out the door. I waved.
“He’s going without you?” Hattie grabbed my elbow.
“We’ll meet up in Denver. I’ll leave in four days. It’s fine. I know how to do this, Hattie. And I get extra days with you this way.”
In truth, I didn’t know for sure how to “do this.” I’d never traveled so far without a companion of some sort, my sisters or parents. Carrie, my friend when we were in college, and now deceased, shared transport back and forth to Michigan. An entire choir with chaperones joined together when we toured Italy. On this journey, I’d be alone.
“So much for marriage bliss,” Hattie teased.
“We’re perfectly happy doing what we need to do: he needs to be in Salt Lake and I don’t need to be there. We’ll meet in Denver where we both need to be.” I made it sound like my idea.
“I’m sort of envious that you get to travel by yourself. You can be anything you want if someone asks who you are.” She paused. “Aren’t you worried about your safety?”
“I’m Mrs. Robert Strahorn and I’m sure no one will harass a Union Pacific employee’s wife.”
“Is that status written on your forehead?”
I rolled my eyes and changed the subject t
o what she’d mentioned on Christmas Eve, that she was going to go to medical school. I’m good at distraction.
That evening I turned out the gaslight in my old room, marveling at my little sister becoming a doctor. Taking after our father’s profession was a good thing. She’d be doing worthy work, as was Mary as a mother and wife. And what was I about? Being a pioneer.
From Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage, vol. 1, by Carrie Adell Strahorn (page 14)
In all my girlhood, the one thing I wanted to avoid in my life was to be a pioneer. So often had I listened to tales of my elders of “’49 and the spring of ’50,” etc., that it had made me say many times that I would never be a pioneer and be called the oldest settler in a town or country, or one of the early ones in any State history. Yet, there I was at the very threshold of a new land where I was to be the first woman in many then unexploited regions, and the title of “old settler” was to be indelibly and forever attached to me and mine.
4
Obstinate or Resilient
This will be a short entry. I’m on the train but wishing I wasn’t. That must be the definition of suffering, wishing for something one doesn’t have or hoping to be somewhere that they aren’t. I am suffering the elements made worse by my foolishness in insisting that I continue on despite the blizzard. I hope I’ll be alive to write more later. For now, I need to blow on my gloved hands to keep them from freezing brittle as a stick.
January 5, 1878
I could have enjoyed lingering over waffles and beefsteak with my sisters, watching cardinals visit the feeders, bright red against white snow. Perhaps I could have spent some hours posing in my wedding dress if the photographer was available. Such exposures made even a year after the wedding were common practice among my social set, a way of celebrating the bride more than the wedding itself. Besides, I’d never wear the dress again, and it deserved to be taken from its tissue a last time. Maybe my daughter would wear it. But Robert had set up my transit and I was nothing if not obedient to his wishes. So four days after he set out, so did I.
Truth is, I was ready to leave, though I love my family, I do. But I didn’t want to have to explain anymore about what it was we’d be doing and how that was going to work, because frankly, I didn’t know myself and I didn’t like not having answers and I didn’t like looking at their eyes that I thought held pity.
I kissed Christina, hugged my parents and sisters, wiped a tear from my father’s cheek, and waved my goodbyes wearing a smile born of determination, then boarded a short line whose name I shall not mention but it wasn’t the UP. Once at the station, one of the old conductors insisted I wait a week, what with the snows also having fallen over most of the western territories as well. “Trains are delayed, Missus. It’s dangerous for a woman.”
I might have let his experience and my family’s worry override my persistence, but when he added “for a woman,” I was determined then to show him wrong. If men were getting on the train to Denver, then so would I. How could I let a little weather hold me back? What kind of a pioneering soul was that? It wasn’t the last time my insistence overruled my good judgment.
The conductor relented and let me on, but the Chicago cars were a blight, well used up with holes in the floors showcasing the tracks beneath. It was nothing like those I was accustomed to traveling in. I wondered if the good cars were caught in snow or if that railroad line was protecting its better ones. I stepped up and we headed out, engine steam rolling back like fog in the cold air. I was the sole woman on a very long train.
It took us twenty-four hours to go sixty-five miles and the cowcatcher pushed snowdrifts all the way. The lunch of ham sandwiches I ate turned out to be all I would have until the following day. I had thought there’d be a depot with food available. But storms have a way of unsettling everything, the whistles sounding forlorn as we chugged past trees whose limbs broke from the weight of the heavy snowfall. Often I couldn’t tell if it was still snowing or if the engine and cars swirled up the mounds of fluff. We were in a world of white framed by the wooden windows we stared through. The small stove inside the car hoarded its heat. At least there were entire seats empty and I sat with my back to the window, my booted feet up, my cape and hood keeping me as warm as they could. I didn’t disturb anyone else while I made the effort to sleep. The weather was so ominous that the other passengers kept to themselves, perhaps praying as I was that we wouldn’t be stalled, run out of coal for the engine nor our little stove, the whole affair requiring search parties sent to find our frozen bodies.
At some point, I wrote a quick note to my sisters making light of my plight, thinking I’d send it from Denver. I entered a sentence or two in my journal. Even as my fingers numbed, I wondered why I had insisted I take this train. Why didn’t I wait? Was I fearful Robert would think me weak or not part of the game? Did I want to somehow “stand out” in my family, prove to them how brave and adventurous I really was? Why couldn’t I change my mind, incorporating the wisdom of others?
The third morning out, the cold lessened and the snow turned to rain. We were delayed yet another six hours because of a freight wreck ahead and then all passengers were transferred to another train brought in. We had to walk past the wreckage, and I was doubly relieved that I’d purchased rubber boots in Marengo before we left, as the slush and sludge beside the tracks proved more than ankle deep and my wool socks felt barely dry from laying them on the train’s little stove after trudging through snow. This happened two more times—being moved to another train—with each car being worse than the first, until I was bunched like a handful of carrots with other stalwarts onto the only passenger car on the line, all the rest bearing freight. We were a motley mix, cranky and worn. I didn’t even try to cheer the men up, nor did I lament their total lack of interest in my well-being by not even asking how I was doing. They probably thought me daft for being there and may have resented my presence preventing them from swearing as they might have to express their frustration with this travel.
At Omaha where I switched lines, I was at last on a UP car. I leaned back, grateful that we were aligned with a more reputable company than those I’d experienced so far. Still, they had gotten us all where we hoped to be, if not when. And even the UP couldn’t halt the weather-related damages . . . being held up two more days waiting while more than 1,000 feet of track torn out by floodwaters was replaced. The station at Ogallala, Nebraska, wasn’t meant to hold delayed passengers, but UP did its best to bring us food and keep the station warm.
At least during this wait there were children to watch and distract to help their tired mothers and fathers. Children’s presence, even those tearful or sad, always brought me from my self-pity.
Cowboys shot up the town outside our station and I held no small amount of trepidation hoping the outlaw gangs said to be in those hills wouldn’t burst through the door. Rumors spread that such thieves often tried to rob trains down the tracks. The UP’s security forces roamed the station, offering their confidence, and a few rode on the trains themselves. Mary’s words about being safe dribbled into my consciousness. I swept them aside. No sense worrying about the future.
Robert’s need to be in Salt Lake City without me began to wear on me like a bit of sand in my shoes, though. Then as if nothing more could go wrong, my monthlies began in that station. I hadn’t expected to be out and about when this occurred, so I had only a towel and no belt, but for once I was grateful for thicker thighs to hold the towel in place, and I didn’t hope to be walking much at all. But it saddened me. I had not yet conceived.
My disposition made no good gains and I longed for my sheep’s wool. I made a note to always travel with readiness in the future and to perhaps have a few words with Pard in Denver about this whole business of traveling alone.
But my longing to have words with him had to wait, as Pard wasn’t in Denver when I finally got there after a week on the tracks. Instead, I had a telegram from him urging me to Laramie, where I headed the next morning, arriving to onc
e again wait. He wasn’t there. But at least I was warm, in a nice hotel, with bubble water for a good, sound bathing, my monthly unmentionables secured, and later ate hot food in the dining space.
I people-watched, a favorite pastime of mine. It made eating alone less troubling. After a day or two, the waiters knew who I was and kept good care of me, which lifted my melancholy. It had been a tough week of travel and that was all by train. What would it be like once we began our sojourn by stage to more primitive places? I liked the idea of slipping into clean sheets and laying my head on my hand-packed pillowcase. Would it get tiring, traveling from here to there, following Robert around?
This lack of routine would only continue until we started our family, I decided. Until then, I would focus on Robert, listening to his sound advice, being where he arranged for me to be and taking in what sights I could in between. Maybe one day I’d write about them. Yes, this whole living in the unknown uncertainty was research for a life I’d write about. I’d mine these experiences like a gold rusher, seeking the ore of insights that yielded treasured meaning. I resolved to make notes—but to tell the truth in them to better recall what was really happening in my heart and soul.
With my new resolve, I headed up the stairs to my room. To my amazement, this hotel in Laramie had electric lights, not gas. They were bright with fewer shadows cast as I washed my face in the basin, put a little lard on the dry spots of my cheeks where they were snow- and wind-whipped pink, if not frostbitten. Then the long pull on my frizzed hair thick as sheep’s wool. My toilet finished, I looked around.
I didn’t know how to turn the electric lights off!
There was a bell line to the clerk that I located, but the idea of calling for help for such a simple thing seemed beneath me. I, who had traveled through blizzards and waited out floods and sloshed through ankle-deep misery changing trains, I surely could figure out an electric light. After a search I found the little button on the single lamp. I held my breath and touched it, not sure if I’d be shocked or thrust into dark. I faced the dark with absolute delight, switching it off and on at will. I got up from my bed and wrote a note to Hattie, telling her that in the middle of the wilds of Wyoming I’d discovered electricity and wasn’t that grand when most of Illinois and the East still settled for gas. Wyoming led in more than women’s suffrage. I slept contented in that progressive place.