East to the Dawn (5 page)

Even as Atchison was the center of power in Kansas, and her family at the center of Atchison, so in her own way was Amy, the eldest daughter, the star in her own world. In later years she loved to tell her own children about her triumphs—how she and her best friend Constance Ingalls “were the undisputed leaders of the young social set, going to balls at Fort Leavenworth and cotillions at St. Joseph, often by specially chartered steamer.” But the stories she told to amuse her daughters were too glowing—Amelia Earhart at least would later detect the fairy-tale quality in them, writing, “Among the best stories my mother told were those of her own girlhood. My sister [Muriel] and I always spoke of that mysterious and far away period as ‘thousands of years ago when Mother was little.' ” Amy glossed over the bad times. She survived two life-threatening diseases. At sixteen she was stricken with typhoid fever, which took her a long time to get over. Her practical grandmother, Maria, who was taking care of her, decided that her long hair was absorbing her strength, and so it was cut off. “Sheep shearing,” her kid brother Carl, four years old at the time, called it. Four years later a diphtheria epidemic hit Atchison, and Amy contracted the dreaded, highly contagious disease then without cure that would in later years kill two of her brothers. Maria, then ninety-one, saved her life. The usual cause of death was asphyxiation caused by the growth of a false membrane that slowly but inexorably closed off the throat, making breathing impossible. Maria brought Amy into her own bedroom, isolated her from the rest of the family, nursed her night and day, and recognized the moment when Amy was reaching the characteristic breathing climax caused by the growth of the false membrane. She had the presence of mind and the knowledge to have a doctor present at that moment; he inserted a tube into Amy's throat and sucked out the material clogging the passage. The
crisis past, Amy slowly, with her grandmother's continuing care, beat back the disease.

Amy couldn't face unpleasantness. In her well-meaning way, she always put the best face on everything, whether it was true or not. She told her children that she would have gone to Vassar the fall of 1889 if she hadn't been recovering from diphtheria. That was the reason she gave for leading the traditional life of the unmarried upper-class young woman of her day. She was convalescing those years in Atchison, she said, keeping herself busy by organizing a Dickens Club, presenting “literary tableaux,” teaching Sunday school, and helping her father by copying his legal opinions. But it wasn't true.

The real reason was that as far as Alfred was concerned, it was out of the question to send either of his daughters to college. Her younger sister Margaret, a born healer like Maria and a more serious candidate for college, wasn't allowed to go either. As a teenager, Margaret with Amy's help tried to adopt a tubercular child; she wasn't allowed to, but she did contribute part of her allowance and persuaded her parents to make a serious enough commitment to fund the child's stay in a sanitarium. When Margaret finished school, she spent her days poring over medical books in their doctor's office—preparing herself to be a medical student at Cornell—but the Judge put his foot down and “that was the end of it,” she told her daughter, Nancy Balis Morse. “My mother had wanted to be a doctor so badly that she bribed the Otis family doctor until he allowed her to sit in his office and read his medical books but she told me her father wouldn't hear of it. He [Alfred] didn't believe in education for women. As for Aunt Amy, I doubt she ever applied.”

Amy embroidered the history of the family as well. Alone of the Harres descendants' accounts in the Family Tree, she claimed that the ancestral Harres home in Philadelphia was on Chestnut Street when it was actually on prosperous but less elegant Northwest Tenth and Catherine.

She even fibbed about her slight deafness, claiming it was the result of her bout with typhoid fever, but typhoid fever is an infectious disease that causes inflammation and ulceration of the intestines, and as serious as it was in the nineteenth century, it would be stretching the imagination to blame it for a hearing impairment.

The truth was that deafness ran in the family. Maria Harres was slightly deaf, and Margaret was even more so. Margaret's problem would later be diagnosed as otosclerosis, a hereditary condition in which one of the three small bones in the middle ear thickens so that it does not vibrate, causing deafness; Margaret became one of the early users of a hearing aid. Amy, in contrast, simply endured her bad hearing.

Tradition as established by Alfred simply did not admit the existence of flaws. Amy's denial mirrors Amelia and Alfred's denial that one of their children, Theodore, was retarded.

The summer of 1890 was an eventful and happy time for Amy because it was the summer of her coming-out party, a tale she told well and evidently often—Amelia and Muriel loved to hear her talk about it. The ball, “the way she told it,” according to Muriel, was a very grand party, held on an evening in mid-June when “everything would be lovely and yet it would not be too hot.” Seven musicians imported from St. Joseph sat on the front porch playing the popular waltzes and reels of the day. A wooden dance floor had been laid out on the lawn around a big wrought-iron stag, too heavy to move, that Amy had garlanded with scarlet roses. As the dancers whirled around the dance floor, they whirled around the stag. At nine o‘clock, just as the last light of day faded, Charlie Parks lit the candles inside the Japanese lanterns that were strung every ten feet throughout the garden and up to the porch. The almost-still night air on the bluff smelled of syringa and heliotrope. And that night Amy and Edwin Earhart met, for Amy's brother Mark in time-honored fashion had brought his eligible college friend home for his sister's coming-out party. Amy told her children about it this way: “I was standing by the porch steps with Grandmother and Grandfather greeting all our guests when up came your Uncle Mark bringing a young man with him. He said: ‘This is Edwin Earhart, the law student who has pulled me through this year's examinations!'”

Edwin was mesmerized by the slender, plucky, pretty girl with the beautiful thick chestnut hair whirling skillfully around the dance floor. She seemed like a princess to him, not just for her social graces but for her social standing and wealth. Most of the important families in the state would have been there; it was the grandest party Edwin had ever attended—and Amy was the center of it all.

Amy, in turn, was fascinated by the tall, handsome young man. He was so obviously intelligent; so charmingly articulate; so incredibly well read. And best of all, he was studying to be a lawyer, just like her father.

They fell in love, and Edwin proposed.

Alfred was less than pleased.

Edwin Earhart's ancestors were God-fearing, German-speaking Lutheran farmers who had also come to America when it was still a colony. The progenitor was Johann Earhardt, a Prussian who had served in the guard of Frederick the Great and emigrated to York County, Pennsylvania, sometime before the Revolution. Joining the Tenth Pennsylvania Regiment of
the Line, he fought with his regiment at Brandywine, Germantown, and Bull's Ferry, and in the Christmas Eve attack at Trenton; he wintered with George Washington at Valley Forge.

The chronicle of his descendants is a chronicle of bare subsistence, of God-fearing clannish farmers fiercely protecting their Lutheran heritage and German customs, wresting farms out of the virgin forests of western Pennsylvania for several generations, intermarrying with other like-minded, German-speaking Lutheran families, working hard yet barely having enough to clothe and feed themselves. David, Amelia's grandfather, one of twelve children of Catherine Altman Earhart and David Earhart, grew up working with his siblings at the backbreaking chores involved in turning the raw, timbered land of western Pennsylvania into productive farmland. He was born February 28, 1818, on a farm located between Johnstown and Pittsburgh on the Conemaugh River. Besides doing his share of farm chores, young David helped his father run his boat, the Liberty, between the two towns.

In 1838 David's father sold the farm at a great profit and bought timbered land ten miles north in Indiana County, and all the children, including two older brothers who had moved away, returned to help the family move and settle and then clear the property. At one point in David's generation, too, food became short, and there was only cornmeal mush and milk to eat, but the bad time passed. After six years David's father sold this farm too, which had been conquered from the wilderness at such great cost, again at a profit, built a raft upon which he loaded family, possessions, and furniture, and joining the many other ambitious, restless souls of his day, moved farther west. He floated down the Conemaugh and the Allegheny, then on down the Ohio to the Mississippi, ending up in Davenport, Iowa, where he commenced farming again. By the time he died, he was farming two hundred acres, owned extensive livestock, and was rich enough to leave Catherine and all their children adequately provided for; David's share would be $150.

David stayed east, however, attended an academy in Indiana where he studied “some English branches,” Latin, Greek, and mathematics, and became a Lutheran minister. He married Mary Wells Patton of nearby Somerset, Pennsylvania, who was a descendant of Colonel James Wells, of English extraction and Revolutionary War fame, granddaughter of an Irishman from Londonderry who edited a weekly newspaper and operated a bookbindery in Somerset. Mary would have twelve children, nine of whom grew to maturity. The youngest, Edwin, would be Amelia Earhart's father.

David settled with Mary in Pennsylvania near where he had been
raised. He was a grim man, consumed with a sense of mission and possessed of an enormous amount of energy. Taking note of his proselytizing nature, his zeal, determination, and willingness to travel, the Lutheran Synod sent him out to organize the Kansas Territory. He arrived in June 1857, traveling up the Mississippi a few months after Mary Ann and William Challiss, bound for Sumner, three miles to the south of Atchison. There he succeeded in building the second Lutheran church in Kansas. He toiled there with only a small degree of success in attracting worshippers, but he must have thought the future of Lutheranism in eastern Kansas looked at least promising because he returned east to fetch Mary and their three girls and four boys, returning in the spring of 1860.

He picked a disastrous year. A severe drought caused most of the crops to fail, then winds reaching hurricane force destroyed what was left. The situation became so desperate and life threatening that, even with the Civil War pressing in upon them, the neighboring states sent in aid—in all, eight million pounds of provisions, seeds, and clothes—to the starving Kansans. Sumner became a ghost town; his parish failed. In the ensuing years the county was ravaged by plagues of grasshoppers.

Nor was that all. In those years the country around the beleaguered minister was in turmoil—because of the border war between Kansas and Missouri, which would claim 27,000 civilian lives by the end of the Civil War. To this man of God, however, this grimly determined preacher, such outside maelstroms were of interest only to the extent they got in his way. He doggedly pressed on, undeterred that more of his ministries failed than flourished, encouraged by the fact that he was highly regarded by his parishioners and was considered important enough to be appointed a regent of the State Agricultural College, in which capacity he served for many years. The unstinting nature of the Reverend Earhart's labors on behalf of the Church (he thought nothing of traveling fifty miles by horse and carriage to conduct a service) would become legendary. But legendary also would be the meager results, as would be described by the Kansas Evangelical Lutheran Synod: “None labored so long as he in this pioneer work, and none endured such trials, hardships and privations, none sacrificed as freely in time and physical labor, and none left such permanent results in the Kansas Territory of his labors as he—yet it was eleven years before there were enough congregations to effect the organization of the Kansas Synod in 1868.”

For his family it was a life of hardship and sacrifice. They survived only with help—$100 from a Lutheran minister in 1860 and $150 in 1861 and 1862 from the Home Missionary Society.

On March 28, 1867, the last child, Edwin Stanton Earhart, was
born. In these early years of Edwin's childhood, nothing had changed for the better; the Earharts were as usual utterly destitute. A family anecdote gives us a glimpse of the Reverend's single-minded vision and his youngest child's first efforts to enjoy life. On a Sunday when Edwin was six and there was nothing in the larder except johnnycake (a form of cornbread) and turnips, the hungry boy sneaked off to go fishing. He brought home six fish, but fishing on Sunday was a desecration, and it was only after the anguished Mary Earhart pleaded that her children were hungry that their father allowed the fish to be eaten. Later that year Reverend Earhart finally gave up on Kansas and, with his wife and the five youngest children, settled again in western Pennsylvania, having secured a pastorate in Somerset County.