Corn Creek, Utah
August 1857
60 days to California
Whoever said that little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice never met girls.
Not mine, anyway.
Over the past four months, they’d turned fully feral.
Six-year-old Nancy had been dragging a dead snake through the wagon ruts for the last three miles, insisting her daddy would earn a good price for the “rattler” when we traded for supplies next. I couldn’t argue that the demand for rattlesnake tails—and their supposed medicinal properties—was surprisingly high. But Nancy’s seventeen-year-old sister Mary knew full well it was a gopher snake.
If I had to guess, this was Mary’s way of keeping her brothers away for the afternoon. Both of my snips-and-snails-and-puppy-dogs’-tails boys were terrified of anything that slithered.
I sighed and slowed my pace to avoid the worst of the dust our wagon wheels churned up a few yards ahead. I could only imagine how tightly my mother would have clutched her pearls to see my girls wearing nothing but loose-fitting nightshirts and dust-caked bloomers, their hair in raggedy braids, playing with a dead snake. When we’d left Arkansas in the spring, I would have joined her in giving the girls a lecture about young ladies and unseemly behavior.
Even my mother would have taken off her corset by now, though.
Over the past four months, we had walked nearly a thousand miles.
Peter and I had forced our four children to drink the putrid, grassy contents of a heifer’s stomach when we ran out of water outside Nebraska Territory.
I’d seen one of our family’s wagons and two of our oxen burn when a prairie fire swept across the sunbaked grass, racing us to the rocky pass.
And I’d watched the Haydons, our neighbors back in Arkansas, lose two of their children when a wagon tipped, crushing the boys.
There would be time to tame my children again when we reached our destination in California.
For now, I focused on the fact that Mary’s cough—the one that sometimes turned the sleeve of her dress red when she covered her mouth—was getting better day by day in the arid desert. Just like we’d hoped. Most of the members of our sprawling wagon train had packed their bags with dreams of fertile soil and orchards that gave twice what they did in Arkansas. But Peter and I had been content with our modest peach harvest and our cocoon of family who visited for Sunday dinner every week. That was until the rattle in Mary’s lungs got so bad she could barely get out of bed. Dr. Jarrel finally put it like this: The tuberculosis loves the humidity. It isn’t going anywhere unless you leave it behind. And you’d better do it soon.
“Ba da, da, dah, and joy be to you all!” Nancy’s strong, clear baby voice rose above the sound of the lumbering wagon. She flicked the bedraggled snake side to side with each word.
I smiled in spite of the sweat dripping down my back and the ache in my feet. It was the song her father, Peter, sang while he unyoked the oxen at night, insisting it calmed the animals. That line was Nancy’s favorite, and the lyrics tumbled out of her mouth at random most days.
At least she hadn’t pestered me to ride in the wagon today. I hated to tell her no when she asked, but forcing the exhausted oxen to pull any extra weight was out of the question. The animals had started the trip fat and sassy, but were shriveling into lean, weary versions of their former selves; a mirror image of the land around us as it withered. The dry, sagebrush-choked Utah Territory we had now reached seemed to get hotter by the day. There was hardly any grass. And the last so-called creek we’d crossed had been so dried up, it was mostly mud.
“Mary, can you see Uncle Uri and Aunt Louisa’s wagon?” I called, squinting through the dry silt suspended in air. “Are you doing all right in this dust?” We’d spread out farther than usual today, to avoid the worst of the dust. It had driven Louisa to wrap her eighteen-month-old baby in blankets from head to toe, despite the heat.
Mary flashed me a smile. “I’m all right, Mama. Just a few little coughs.” Then she turned her head and pointed at the back of our wagon. “I can hardly see anything ahead. James probably can, though.” James was my fourteen-year-old son.
Mary wrinkled up her nose and laughed. “Did I tell you? Baby Triphena said ‘papa’ this morning. But she was looking at James when she did it. Not Uncle Uri.”
I smiled. “I bet Uri lost his mind.” Peter’s brother was the proudest papa I’d ever seen. I was thrilled when he and Louisa decided to come along to California. They were one more bit of home to hold onto. I still told myself maybe my parents would make the journey when the railroad finally spanned east to west.
James held the reins in the driver’s seat in the wagon ahead. He always drove the oxen when Peter was helping the cattle hands wrangle the steers. I should have been the one driving, but I still balked at the idea of sitting on that tiny wooden bench above the enormous four-legged creatures who had the power to tip us if they wanted.
Bang.
A gunshot cracked in the distance and I jumped.
I should have been used to the sound by now, but my insides seized up anyway. I scolded myself for startling over nothing.
“It’s okay, Mama!” Nancy called to me, dragging the snake past a cow pie in her path.
Even the milk cow, lumbering behind the wagon, barely flinched. She’d been as nervous as I was at the start of the journey, bawling all day and tugging at her rope. Now she just sighed.
We’re safe.
We’re together.
We’re nearly there.
I’d been repeating those sentences to myself since we left Arkansas for California.
I hated nearly everything about the trail west.
But as long as those three things stayed true, I could last one more day.