From This Day Forward (23 page)

Keturah busily went about making clothes for the family to last for a year. “Have cut out four muslin shirts for George and two suits for the little boy, with what he has that will last him (if he lives) until he will want a different pattern.” Poor woman, she'd buried three children and has every expectation of losing her fourth as she prepares to leave everything she knows behind, yet again. The neighbors helped pull her through, pitching in with the sewing, and her husband kept her company. Traveling in a covered wagon meant the women had to make the cover; Keturah spun the flax for a huge piece of linen, which her mother-in-law and a friend wove into cloth. With Keturah spinning away, George read to her. Finally, the months of preparation were finished and in April 1848 they were ready to set out for the edge of the continent. Keturah couldn't face going to church the last Sunday, after they had already made their farewells, “so George stays with me and will take a rest, for tomorrow will be a busy day.”

The big day came and “Father Belknap's voice was heard with that well known sound: ‘Wife, wife, rise and flutter.'” As Keturah took her place in the wagon, the preacher came by and “told me to keep up good courage and said, ‘don't fret, whatever happens don't fret and cry. Courage will do more for you than anything else.'” That could be the motto of the pioneers, something to embroider on the wagon covers. Keturah kept a detailed journal of life on the trail, including this entry twelve days into the trip: “We all started but had only gone about five miles when a little boy was run over by the wagon and instantly killed. We then stopped and buried the child. We were near a settlement so he was not left there alone.” In addition to the sad observations, Keturah noted the funny ones. After four weeks of traveling, they hit Pawnee Indian territory and thought it wise to join a larger company for defense. With so many people, some rules needed to be established and leaders selected, not easy tasks,
according to Keturah: “They have quite a time with the election of officers—every man wants an office.”

 

A posse of men rode into the camp from the west, warning about attacks, and some in the party started agitating to go back home. “In the next wagon behind ours a man and wife are quarreling. She wants to turn back and he won't, so she says she will go and leave him—that these men will furnish her a horse and she will leave him with the children and he will have a good time with that crying baby. Then he used some very bad words and said he would put it out of the way. Just then I heard a muffled cry and a heavy thud as though something was thrown against the wagon box and she said, ‘Oh, you've killed it' and he swore some more and told her to keep her mouth shut or he would give her some of the same.” Just then the man was summoned to take his turn keeping guard, “so he and his wife were parted for the night. The baby was not killed. I write this to show how easy we can be deceived.”

As they journeyed on, Keturah's diary petered out. “For want of space, I must cut these notes down and will pass over some interesting things. Watts and the sheep pulled out and fell behind…. The old mother Watts said after they got through, ‘Yes, George Belknap's wife is a little woman but she wore the pants on that train.' So I came into notoriety before I knew it.” Her last entry from the trail is about her boy, Jesse, who was very sick with “mountain fever”: “I have held the little boy in my lap on a pillow and tended him as best I could. I thought in the night we would have to leave him here and I thought if we did, I would be likely to stay with him. But at day light we seemed to get fresh courage.”

The Belknaps reached Oregon and the men set off for the California gold mines. In April 1849, Keturah, once again keeping a journal, wrote, “We women folks began to realize
that we were the providers for our families…we had to rustle for our families and also for the church.” When the men returned with little to show for their adventure, they started serious farming. But George Belknap couldn't stay put. Though Keturah was a respected personage in the settlement, acting as nurse and midwife to the immigrants, and friend to the Indians, he uprooted the family again, moving in Oregon, and then, in 1879, to Washington. Ten years later, they celebrated in style their golden wedding anniversary, but still they weren't settled. They lost the farm in 1895 and moved in with their children. George died in 1897, but Keturah lived until 1913. Her grandfather had fought in the Revolutionary War, her parents had been some of the early settlers of the first frontier, then she and her husband moved with the nation ever west. She buried six children in the course of her journeys; five others survived her. Their children understood that their grandmother's primitive and hastily written journal told the story of what it took to extend the country from coast to coast.

Elkanah and Mary Richardson Walker: Talk to Me

Mary Richardson might have been born female at a time in history when a girl could not expect to have goals of her own, but she had ambition—she wanted to be a missionary. To fulfill her mission one thing was necessary: she had to be married. Born in Maine in 1811, Mary was known for her scientific interests and her wit, and she was ready to share her feelings, at least with her diary. She started keeping it when she was a twenty-two-year-old not particularly interested in marriage: “I see very few men that are perfect enough to please me.” A couple of years later, however, her tune began to change: “my attention has been called of late to the subject of matrimony.” But Mary was not at all happy with the man who was making her an offer: “Ought I to bid adieu to all of
my cherished hopes and unite my destiny with that of a mere farmer, with little education and no refinement?…In a word, shall I, to escape the horrors of perpetual celibacy, settle down with the vulgar? I cannot do it.” Pretty risqué stuff for an aspiring missionary in 1836! She didn't settle down, petitioning instead to the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions for an assignment, but was told she must be married. A mutual friend introduced her to Elkanah Walker, who also wanted to do missionary work.

The first impression wasn't very promising: “I saw nothing particularly interesting or disagreeable in the man, though I pretty much made up my mind that he was not a missionary, but rather an ordinary kind of unaspiring man who was anxious to be looking up a settlement.” But then she read the letter he brought her, and it was clear they had the same goals in mind, which presented her with a quandary. “The hand of Providence appeared so plain that I could not but feel that there was something like duty about it, and yet how to go to work to feel satisfied and love him, I hardly know.” Soon, though, he grew on her: “I have no more doubts as to being able to love him.” There were times after that when she did have doubts, but they stayed married, and eventually happily married for many years to come. But it was a rocky road along the way, both literally and figuratively.

The other suitor stayed after her, telling her that “people did not think I was cutting a great cheese” with Elkanah. The competitor for her affections succeeded in raising her doubts: “Can it be that I have been mistaken?” Then, when Elkanah sent protestations of desire—“I love you, therefore I want you,” he wrote to her; “to fold you in my arms, hear from your faithful lips that I am still your dearest one would be sweet, sweet indeed”—she melted. “Oh, Elkanah what a desolate being should I be if you should forsake.” She at least believed herself to be head over heels in love. In December 1837, word came from the missionary board that they should
expect to leave in April to go “beyond the Rocky Mountains.” They set a wedding date for March, but even as they prepared to be married, tensions between them cropped up. In January, she received a letter from him which “contained such severe criticism as I almost feel as if I could not bear it…. I will however retaliate a little by just letting him know that I have noticed a thing or two in him as well.” Shades of Abigail! This was not going to be an easy match. He might have gotten some sense of that when the bride wore black to the wedding, to show the grief she felt in leaving her family, even though she had always wanted to go to the missions. A week after she was married, Mary wrote, “Nothing gives me such a solitary feeling as to be called Mrs. Walker…. My father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters all answer to the name Richardson. The name W. seems to imply to me a severed branch.”

Soon she was truly severed. Mary and Elkanah, along with two other couples, left Missouri, the “gateway to the West,” in April of 1838. Mary was already pregnant, and seemed at sixes and sevens about how to behave. “Should feel much better if Mr. W. would only treat me with more cordiality. It is so hard to please him I almost despair of ever being able. If I stir, it is forwardness, if I am still, it is inactivity.” Here were these newlyweds, crammed together with two other couples in close quarters, traveling difficult terrain and trying to get to know each other all at the same time. A few days later she recounts, “Had a long bawl. Husband spoke so cross I could scarcely bear it, but he seemed to pity me a little when he found how bad I felt. Today has been very kind.” That didn't last long, however; a couple of weeks later she was fretting again: “Husband sick. In a big worry lest he does not feel as well satisfied with me as he ought.” She, too, was sick, so much so that she was bled as a treatment; she doesn't tell us by whom. But by June she was feeling better, and reflecting on her husband: “I can but believe he loves me. I, however, experience some anxiety on this account. But I think I am
gaining ground.” She wanted desperately to please him; still, she had trouble staying cheerful, never feeling really well, wanting to cry, fearful of danger: “A long journey before me, going I know not whither, without mother or sister to attend me, can I expect to survive it all?” The group did follow a strenuous course. One day in July they rode thirty-five miles without stopping, and she was four and a half months pregnant. Emotionally, though, things were getting better: “Becoming every day more fondly attached to my husband. Indeed he seems every day to become increasingly kind and I am more and more confident of my ability to please him and make him happy.” Making
her
happy turned out to be another matter altogether.

Finally, on August 29, 1838, after 129 days, Mary and Elkanah reached Oregon, where fellow missionaries feted them with melons and salt salmon and pumpkin pies. It was a great celebration, joined by a few dozen Indians. Then came reality—nine adults and two children in one house over the winter, while Walker and one of the men who traveled with them searched out their ideal spot for a mission. Mary truly missed him: “I can hardly refrain from tears every time I think of him…. I have so good a husband…. I have enjoyed his society so much.” When he returned in October, she was much relieved: “Was glad once more to see my husband and he appears glad to see me and I suppose he really was for he has no faculty of making believe. Could not sleep all night for joy.” Over the fall Mary wrote a good deal about how much she loved her husband, and worried he might not love her as much. He could completely undo her with a word: “Slept little last night. Mostly in consequence of something husband said to me.” Her chief complaints, though, had to do with the other women. Mary thought they let her work too hard establishing their household, considering her pregnancy. Soon she was grateful for their company.

Mary woke early in the morning on December 7 and re
alized she was in labor. The ladies came to her aid, but they knew she had a while to go before the baby. After about four hours, “felt as if I almost wished I had never been married. But there was no retreating, meet it I must.” A couple of hours later a baby boy arrived, and when Elkanah returned from his travels that evening, it was with “plenty of kisses for me and my boy.” Mary had a hard time nursing and she missed everyone at home; maybe this missionary life wasn't such a good idea. She was filled with self-doubt: “I have desired to become a missionary and why? Perhaps only to avoid duties at home.” She now had a new home, a log cabin they moved to in January, and new worries about her husband. She still didn't seem to be able to please him, and she wanted to fervently. Romance was her goal: “I can never with all my care make myself what he would like me to be. I never intended to be the wife of a man that did not love and respect me from his heart and not from a stern sense of duty…. I am tempted to exclaim, woe is me that I am a wife. Better to have lived and died a miserable old maid and with none to share and thereby aggravate my misfortune. But it is too late.” Later that night, Mary told her husband how bad she felt and he apologized, assuring her he loved her: “So I think I will try to feel better.” Still, her entries continue to complain of his harsh words, of her upset at his unhappiness with her. Meanwhile, Mary was beginning to fulfill the mission she had so long sought, to teach the Indians; she was also pregnant with another child, and trying to cope with frontier life. A wall of the house fell down one day; another day, after doing the milking, Mary “found it necessary to call my husband.” He arrived, and quickly called a doctor, and on May 24, 1840, a baby girl was born. Mary had now settled into her life well enough that she was able to take up the household chores—ironing, baking, washing, milking—within a few weeks after the baby's birth, and her missionary work soon after
that. By the end of July, she tells us excitedly about her teaching: “think I succeeded pretty well as the children seemed pleased…. I gave them a lesson in geography on an egg shell which I had painted for a globe.” Soon, she voiced the cry of all busy women: “It is all I can do to get along, do my work and take care of my children. How I can answer a single letter I do not know.”

With two children, and finally performing her missionary work, Mary started casting a critical eye toward Elkanah, instead of just worrying what he thought of her: “Have felt the past week several times as if I could no longer endure certain things that I find in my husband…. What grieves me most is that the only being on earth with whom I can have much opportunity for intercourse manifests uniformly an unwillingness to engage me in social reading or conversation.” He wouldn't talk to her! Who knows why not, we don't have his side of the story, but he was driving her crazy. At home she would have been able to visit with her mother and sisters, to share secrets with female friends, but on the frontier she had only her husband. She wished she could make up for his lack of conversation by “improving my mind” but she had too much to do, she needed his company. Mary became increasingly introspective: “My husband and children seem to engross my heart and I fear they will be taken from me.” But her fretfulness did not get in the way of her work; she made such notations as, “Cast wicks and dipped nineteen dozen candles.” Occasionally there are notes about news from home—which she refers to as “the United States”—like this one in May 1841: “I am not pleased with the course my brothers are pursuing in regard to certain young ladies.” Over the months, Mary seemed to get into a rhythm of housework and teaching, if her diary is to be believed, and then in March 1842: “Rose about 5 o'clock…got my housework done up about 9. Baked six more loaves of bread…. Nine o'clock pm was delivered of a son.”