The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb (36 page)

She didn’t take offense; indeed, she kept beaming at me as if I were a precocious child.

“This is Mrs. Charles Stratton,” Mr. Bleeker informed her. “She is on her way to tour the West.”

“Oh, I knew her right away—I said to my Fred”—she poked the man next to her with her elbow; he grunted and turned away—“I said, ‘Fred, that’s that little Mrs. Tom Thumb, I just know it!’ She looks just like her little picture, yes, she does!” Still the woman beamed, even as she continued to talk above me, as if I wasn’t there. Smiling frostily, I bowed and continued down the aisle, shaking off Mr. Bleeker’s steadying hand upon my shoulder.

I climbed up into my seat next to Minnie; Mrs. Bleeker had already placed a cushion there for me, so that I might see out the window. As New York fell away, I wondered how many days it would be until we reached Omaha. There, we would board the new Union Pacific railroad, some of the first passengers to do so.

I doubted that vile woman was traveling any farther than Albany; certainly she wasn’t going to be shaking the hand of the Emperor of Japan!

Yet for a moment, I couldn’t prevent myself from imagining how it would be to travel—even if it was just to Albany—by myself, to climb upon a train unassisted, to carry my own luggage, to take whichever seat I wanted, no cushion or stool necessary.

I imagined what it would be like to be able to walk around freely, anonymously, nothing about me remarkable in any way. Would I like it? Would I trade my fame if it meant that I never had to suffer fools hugging me to them ever again?

I honestly did not know. And I was more than a little relieved that it was a moot point, after all.

T
HIS BOOK IS NOT INTENDED TO BE A MERE TRAVELOGUE; MY DEAR
Mr. Bleeker wrote a very fine account of our journey in
General Tom Thumb’s Three Years Tour Around the World
, which I am sure you
have read previously, as it was a very popular book and made quite a lot of money.

I cannot pass over this time in my life, however, without wanting to share some of my impressions. Naturally I am proud of what we accomplished, especially in such primitive circumstances compared to the comforts of today. Our planned route involved an average travel of one hundred and ten miles every day, as well as the giving of two entertainments! To those who are used to more modern ways of travel and hospitality, this may not seem much of a feat. However, the last spike had just been driven in the Union Pacific railroad only a little over a month before we embarked upon it. The West was newly open, raw and unforgiving. Cities which today conjure up images of cultured civility—Salt Lake City, Omaha, Reno—were little more than canvas camps at the time, sprouting up along the newly built railway like prairie flowers. Many more of these temporary cities—hotels, restaurants, post offices, even, made of dirty canvas flaps draped over wobbly wooden frames—have now faded from memory, vanished in the dust of the trains that roared on ahead, once the tracks were laid.

We confidently expected to see Indians, and indeed, even as the train was pulling out of Omaha, nervous passengers were looking out the windows for the red man. Mr. Bleeker packed a pistol; so, too, did Charles, although it was a ridiculously tiny one given to him by Queen Victoria, with custom bullets so small they could scarcely hurt a prairie dog, let alone an Indian on a pony. Yet he strutted about, stroking his beard with one hand, patting his breast pocket with the other, just as he saw the other men doing—acting as if he had enough firepower to take out an entire band of ferocious savages.

While sleeper cars were now in use on eastern trains—a platform could be raised to join two facing seats into one bed, while above, a bunk was lowered from the arched roof of the car—those
first trains to go west from Omaha were not outfitted in this way. Hence, on extended legs—our longest was twenty-six hours of continuous travel—we had to sleep, to use the word loosely, upright upon the hard seats. Even though they were upholstered in horsehair—an improvement over those hard wooden seats from my first train trip to Cincinnati back in the fifties—they made for very uncomfortable sleeping, indeed. Although for once, we little folk had the advantage of our companions, as we could curl up easier than they could!

As always, it was impossible to keep oneself clean and tidy; even with the windows pushed up, the dust from the prairie and the cinders and grit from the tracks managed to seep inside the cars. Not to mention that it was very hot, as we left Omaha in July of 1869. While there was a dining car on the train, the food was not well prepared or even fresh, and there was never any ice for water. In the primitive water closets, where I had to lug my steps with me so that I could reach the basin, the water in it was already so gray with other people’s grime that I never wanted to splash it upon my face. And the smell in that hot, stuffy little cell was intolerable.

But the scenery, as we sped across the great prairie, was always interesting, always majestic; I’d never seen a sky so big, not even upon the sea. The tall, waving grasses, undulating in the wind, were as hypnotic as any ocean waves. Prairie dogs popped up and down like children’s toys, and herds of antelope raced along the train, as did immense herds of buffalo. We could see them from a distance; at first, they resembled a swarm of flies moving now away, now toward, the tracks; as we got closer, we could actually feel the thundering of their hooves through the floor of the train. At the first sighting, more than a few passengers decided to use them as target practice; with cries and whoops, men pulled out their pistols or rifles and thrust them through the
windows, the ringing from the shots practically piercing my eardrums.

We reached Cheyenne, our first stop, almost exactly twenty-four hours after leaving Omaha and without having seen a single Indian, much to my disappointment. The manager of the theater there met us at the train and helped us load our belongings—trunks of costumes, trinkets and
cartes de visites
that we would sell, scenery and props—into a waiting Wells Fargo wagon; Charles and I climbed into our miniature carriage, while Rodney Nutt harnessed our two little ponies, who were restless from being cooped up, prancing mischievously against the bit. We hadn’t a chance to freshen up; my traveling dress was dirty and wrinkled beyond measure, and I felt as wilted as the feather in my bonnet. But straight to the theater we went, Charles and I waving to the townspeople who spied our carriage and followed out of curiosity; Minnie and Nutt accompanying the Bleekers in the wagon. As soon as we reached the theater—really a barn, barely swept, with rows of crude benches and hay bales upon which the audience sat—we tidied ourselves as best we could. Mr. Bleeker and our agent hastily set up their concession and box office, and soon we were onstage in front of an eager audience of prairie folk. We repeated our performance later in the evening, then collapsed in a canvas tent that served as the town’s hotel, before getting back on the train the next day.

This became our routine, then. Many of the hotels were merely tents. Other times we stayed in houses, usually the mayor’s own, or one of his relatives’. We never ordered a meal to our own choosing; we ate what was given to us in the hotel, boardinghouse, or private dining room. Privacy was at a premium; oftentimes the men were separated from the ladies by only a thin canvas flap.

Charles and I, and Mr. and Mrs. Bleeker, as the two married couples, were sometimes accorded some privacy, but I always
made sure that Minnie was with Charles and me, as she was the only other female. I knew she was very homesick on this trip, much more than she had been in Europe when she had the various infants to occupy her time.

“Vinnie, what do you think Mama and Papa are doing right now?” she would ask me several times a day, and it became almost a game; often I would answer nonsense, just to make her laugh.

“I expect Papa is baking a cake right now, wearing Mama’s best apron, and Mama is sitting by the fire smoking a pipe,” I might say, casually—and be grateful for Minnie’s helpless giggles at the notion.

Or—

“It’s five o’clock; wouldn’t Papa be bringing in the cows from the pasture right now?” Minnie would muse, peeking out the canvas flap of our latest “theater,” as if she could see all the way back to Massachusetts.

“No, he’s just taking them out now; they like to spend the night outside, not in the barn, don’t you remember? So they can look at the stars and wish upon them!”

Minnie laughed at this notion; her dimple deepened, and her merry eyes sparkled under her dark, suspicious brows. She flung her arms around me and whispered, “I’m so glad I’m here with you—I’m so glad that you’re not lonely!”

“Lonely?” I laughed, holding her at arm’s length, looking into her sweet, sympathetic face. “What do you mean? I wouldn’t be lonely—I wouldn’t have the time!”

Minnie merely smiled and hugged me again; then she walked away with such a knowing, understanding look, a sudden, sharp blade of guilt knifed itself through my heart. Was it wicked to keep her with me just because I needed her? Just because I was afraid of being left too much alone with my husband?

And did she truly understand that she was the necessary glue
that kept Charles and me together, that she alone made us a family? We both clung to her, in different ways. Charles loved her dearly, as she loved him; the two of them played together, lavishing affection upon every stray dog, cat, or even the occasional chicken that wandered into our hotel or theater. Or they made up games of their own device, games that they would not teach anyone else, acting exactly like two school chums who wanted to appear clannish.

With Minnie, the three of us together at table could always find something to chatter about; she loved to listen to Charles’s tales, and he was a wonderful storyteller when he had an eager audience, which I must admit I was not. On the rare occasions when it was just Charles and me, we exhausted conversation before the soup was gone.

“We’ll be in Utah in the morning. I’m anxious to see how the polygamists live, aren’t you? It seems more barbaric than the Indians,” I said one evening as we dined alone in our hotel room—a corner of a canvas structure; the proprietor had proudly offered Charles and me “a romantic dinner for two,” apart from the communal table set up in the middle of the tent. He had found a small table and two camp stools, and hung up a thin curtain to shield us from the others. Yet we were taunted by the merry dinner talk, the convivial clinking of glasses, on the other side of the curtain.

“Charles? Did you hear me?” I spoke louder, trying to drown out the guffaws accompanying Rodney Nutt as he told a story about a man who once raced a horse the wrong way around a track. “About the polygamists?”

“Oh, I’m—of course, of course, polygamists! Dreadful insects, aren’t they—always buzzing around your ears! My dear, did I ever tell you about the time that I swallowed a bug? I was onstage during a sweltering heat, and a fly was buzzing about, and just as I opened my mouth to sing ‘Yankee Doodle,’ that creature
flew into it and down my windpipe! I tell you, I couldn’t sing a word after that! I coughed and coughed until …”

Smiling tightly, I nodded at Charles as he continued his story, and allowed my mind to wander elsewhere—along railroad tracks, over mountains, across oceans.
Dear God, please don’t ever let the world stop expanding, stop sprouting new cities and railroads and passageways for me to visit, for me to dream about
—I almost prayed it out loud.

It was in Ogden, Utah, that I had the opportunity to correct Charles’s impression about polygamy. For it was here that I first saw it in practice. Ogden was a town of about two thousand people; compared to the other communities along the Union Pacific, it was a model of cleanliness and order, and we could not help but attribute this to the fact that the Mormon bishop controlled the town. Neat clapboard buildings lined clean streets; there were none of the usual saloons and houses of ill repute that had followed the progression of the railroad in other villages.

The bishop offered us the use of their Tabernacle for our entertainment; I thought this very good of him, indeed, and quite surprising. I could not imagine any Baptist church doing the same! So my initial impression of the Mormons was quite favorable.

He asked that the first two rows be reserved for his family. Over fifty seats in all, and I was amused, thinking, logically, that there were far more seats than could be filled by one brood. Yet in a flash the bishop returned with his brother, followed by seven adult females and forty-two children varying in ages from three to fourteen years; then came three more females and twenty-two children, whom the bishop referred to, casually, as “my family”!

It may have been amusing at first, as we peered out from behind the curtain, sure that at any minute the endless parade of children would stop, but soon I ceased to find it so. During our entertainments, Mr. Bleeker always invited a dozen children, from
the ages of three to ten, to stand with Minnie onstage to compare their height to hers. When the invitation was extended on this night, Bishop West immediately turned to his family and beckoned the requisite number to the platform. Mr. Bleeker placed the smallest of them nearest to Minnie and then requested the parents to give their ages. Pointing to the first child, Mr. Bleeker inquired, “What is this child’s age?”

“Four years,” replied the Bishop with a satisfied smile.

“And this?” Mr. Bleeker pointed to the next.

“Four years,” the Bishop answered placidly.

“They’re both your children?” Mr. Bleeker could not help himself from asking.

The Bishop nodded. A faint blush mottled his cheeks.

“How old is this one?” Mr. Bleeker pointed to the next largest.

“Four,” the Bishop said, his voice becoming a bit strangled.

“Yours, as well?”

The Bishop nodded.

“And this one?”

“Four.”

“Yours?”

“Yes.”

“And this—?”

“Stop!”
I could not help myself; I raced forward to Mr. Bleeker, tugging at the bottom of his coat, imploring him to cease this disgraceful display. Startled, that poor man could do nothing but signal to me to keep quite, and indeed, I did not know what more I could say—I only felt such embarrassment for the children, for the wives, for us all. It was
barbaric
, that’s what it was, barbaric that all these children of the same age could be sired by one father in these modern times. I did not want to be here any longer; I could not wait to leave. Yet even when we returned to our hotel, I could not prevent myself from inquiring into the marital status
of the proprietor, and nearly screamed when I was told that he had ten wives!