Brides of Grasshopper Creek Read online

"I don't know."

  Mama let out a long sigh. It was a sound I had heard many times in my life, particularly when I had yet again done something that frustrated her. It was a familiar sound, and one that I had fully expected to hear when I started this conversation, but not necessarily one that I had hoped to hear while my family was decorating for Christmas.

  "You are not making any sense, Emily. You say that you have plans for marriage that keep you from wanting to even consider seeing Edmond again, but you do not know who this man you might be courting sometime soon even is?"

  At that moment, the front door to the house opened and I heard my father come in, stomp the snow off of his boots, and start down the hallway. I was both upset and relieved to have him arrive at that moment. As much as I dreaded his reaction to me telling him about my decision, I was also relieved that I would not have to make the revelation twice.

  "Is something wrong?" he said as he stepped into the room.

  His arms held several packages and I could smell peppermint wafting from the brown bag he gripped in one hand. I knew that that bag held the cheerful red and white peppermint sticks that I had loved since I was just a little girl and that Papa always made sure that I had each Christmas.

  "Emily seems to have something that she needs to tell us."

  I didn't know which of my parents that I should look at. Not being able to settle on either, I chose instead to focus on stringing the cranberries as I had promised Lily I would do for her.

  "I have made a decision," I told them, knowing that if I was going to get it out, I was just going to have to go right into it rather than trying to be cautious. "I am going to marry a man in the Frontier."

  "What?" my mother gasped.

  "Oh, Emily," Papa said, his gruff voice low as he tried to sound gentle, "why would you even consider that? You have plenty of gentlemen here that would be interested in marrying you. There's no need for you to lower yourself to that."

  "I wouldn't be lowering myself, Papa. This is not about the men that are available. This is about me. I want to be a teacher, and I know that there are children in the Frontier who are in desperate need of an education. Sarah wrote to me just last month to tell me that the town where she settled with her husband does not even have a school and that there are at least twenty children who are either old enough to be taught or will be very soon."

  "We've talked about this," Papa said, starting to sound more upset than cajoling, "Being a teacher is not what we had in mind for you. Now I have indulged you by providing far more education than the other young ladies we know because you seem to enjoy it so much, but that is where I draw the line. There is much more for you than to go out to a dreadful frontier town and marry an uneducated coal miner or some-such."

  "Why is it dreadful, Papa? Haven't you heard of Manifest Destiny? And there are more men out there than coal miners, but the children are most certainly uneducated, which is why I need to go."

  "There is more for you," Papa repeated, slowing his speech as if that would help me to better understand what he was saying to me.

  "What more, Papa? What is there here for me? Most of the men my age have left for the War, and those who haven't are fussy and vain, and so wrapped up in themselves that they could never be the type of husband I would want. I could never be happy being a wife that sat around the house and had the other wives over for tea." Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mother tense and her cheeks flush again. I hadn't meant to offend her, but there was really no other way to express myself. "I know that this isn't what you planned for me, and that the man who I choose will likely not be the type of man who you thought of as the husband I would one day have, but this is something that I have to do. Please understand."

  Chapter 3

  December 1862

  Dear Diary,

  My parents still have not spoken to me since I told them of my intention to go out west. I suppose their reaction has been no different than I expected it would be. It seems silly and naïve now, but part of me, deep down inside, hoped that they would be excited for me. Their reaction, however, has made me wonder how much of their upset is because they want more for me, and how much of it is because they do not want their friends and the other members of society to look down on them because their daughter decided to leave home and teach.

  I have seen the way the women talk behind their handkerchiefs when they are gossiping about the girls who became brides to the men of the Frontier. They pretend that they are not judging them, but that is exactly what they are doing. It is no secret that the daughters of the society families who have chosen this path did it out of desperation, not out of choice. These are the girls whose fathers, fiancés, or even husbands have been killed in battle and whose families have been left destitute, not women who have a choice in who their husbands are.

  It is times like this that I find myself wishing that I had not been born into a family with such privilege. The families that are not considered as "important" or "influential" as we are seem to have so much more freedom. I know that they have their own struggles, but I can only imagine how much less stressful it is to be able to live your life for yourself rather than always having to live up to someone's expectation of you, or to fit in with some societal vision of what is right and acceptable. I wish that I could live for myself.

  It makes me seem so ungrateful to even admit that to you, Diary, but I do not mean to be. I am so very thankful for all of the blessings my family has enjoyed, and that I even have the gift of being educated enough to entertain the thought of teaching. I know there are plenty of women who have been told they could never learn anything simply because they are women. I am fortunate that my father does not share that view.

  That is not to say that he completely understands a woman who wants as much education as a man, or that he thinks that I should be more concerned about learning and finding ways to use that knowledge than I am with fulfilling my role as a wife and mother, but he has indulged my desire to learn and my love of books throughout my life, and it is only for that that I have had the ability to dream of being a teacher.

  I do hope I am doing the right thing. I feel in my heart that I am, but now that I write about my father and all he has done for me, I am feeling more reluctant to hurt him by leaving home and dashing the dreams he has held for me.

  No. I cannot allow myself to think that way. I cannot stay here any longer. If I do, I will waste away to nothingness. My life is waiting for me in the Frontier, and I must go pursue it. The new year will be here in just a matter of days, and with it will come my future.

  Emily

  Chapter 4

  "Tell me about him again," my mother said, reaching into the bowl of dough set on the hearth to test its proofing.

  It was the one day of the week when our cook was off, which meant that my mother spent the day being in a fuss about preparing meals. She was one of those wives that I had always watched with a small sense of fascination. Lovely and more than intelligent enough to handle day-to-day tasks such as preparing meals or doing laundry, she chose instead to have someone else do it for her and then accept the compliments from those who admired her clothing or enjoyed the cookies when she entertained for tea.

  It was another reason I knew that I would never be able to be the type of wife that she had always planned for me to be. I became frustrated waiting for someone else to do things for me. I would rather do them myself, which was why I had insisted on learning how to cook and do the wash and other little tasks throughout the home at the knee of the housekeeper who had been with my parents since they married. It had always been more a source of entertainment to me than anything, but now that I was planning on marrying I knew my ability to do these things could actually be useful.

  "I have told you about him three times now, Mama," I said, scooping the bowl off the hearth and bringing it over to the table so that I could shape the bread loaves, "Nothing I have said is going to change no matter how many times you ask."

  To my
mother's merit, she smiled at that, and sat down by the table to watch me knead the dough. It was the middle of February now and she and Papa had finally started talking to me normally again. Now that I had written to a man whose advertisement I had chosen from the newspaper and received a letter in return, it was as though the situation had become more real to them and they realized that ignoring me was not going to keep me in place.

  "I know. Just tell me again."

  "His name is Chad Gaines and he owns a grocery store in a town called Bannack, Montana. It is a very new town, but from what he tells me, it is growing quite quickly. Several women have already come, but there are many more men, including him, that are still looking for brides. He says that it will seem much more like a home rather than a camp when there are more women and families around."

  "And you are going to marry him?"

  "Well, I don't know that yet. He hasn't asked me. I would assume so, though. That is how these things work. It's not like a traditional courtship, Mama. There's no mystery to this. He advertised for a wife, and I answered him. I think that it is just a matter of time."

  "How are you going to get to Montana?" she asked.

  She said it as though she were talking about a foreign country that she had never heard of, though to be honest, she might as well have been considering how far away Montana seemed.

  "I will have to take a wagon. It would be quite a hassle to take a train out there considering I would have to take a wagon from the last town to Bannack anyway, and I would not be able to bring along enough of my belongings."

  "But they do not allow single women on the wagon trains."

  "I know. That is something that I will have to figure out."

  "And you will not reconsider?"

  I stopped kneading the dough to look at my mother. There was a strange blend of emotion in her eyes that made me uncomfortable looking at them. There was not as much of the sadness that I would have expected of a mother whose oldest daughter was planning to leave home. Instead, there was more disappointment and confusion, as if she still could not possibly understand why I would want to do something like this, and that she was waiting for me to change my mind.

  "No," I said simply, "I have made my decision. You have been telling me for a year now that I am old enough to marry, and if that is the case, then I am also old enough to decide who to marry."

  Chapter 5

  Dear Emily,

  I am delighted to hear that you will be traveling to Bannack soon. I wonder if this letter will arrive to you before you leave on your journey, and I hope that it does so that I may have the opportunity to wish you well and send my prayers for your safety and easy passage.

  I know that it has been only weeks since we began our correspondence, but I feel that I have known you for so much longer. I very much look forward to finally meeting you in person and getting to know you better here in Bannack. I think that you will like it as much as I have come to, and that together we will make a wonderful home of this new and exciting world.

  If you can, please try to write to me during your trip. I know that it can be difficult to find a place to mail letters, but if you have the opportunity, I would very much like to hear that you are doing well and to be able to better track your progress to Montana.

  Until we meet,

  Chad

  Chapter 6

  I do not think that I had ever thanked God so many times for my ability to read and write as I did during the first two months of my journey across the country toward Bannack. If it had not been for the few books that I had brought along and my diary, I might have gone mad from the sheer tedium of the journey. Every day was the same, and without the benefit of traveling with my family or even people who I knew well, I spent many hours walking alone along the edge of the trail.

  My solace came when a few of the mothers began to ask me if I would be willing to work with their children. They told me that they worried all of the time that they had to spend on the trail would keep them from learning properly, and that if they were starting a new life in the west, they wanted to make sure that their children had everything that they needed to be able to live that new life, too.

  Of course, I was delighted to help. Not only did it give me the opportunity to talk with some of the other people on the train and do something a little different each day, it also gave me a chance to practice teaching so that when I arrived in Bannack, I would be better prepared to work to get the school up and running.

  I was sitting with the children, helping them draw the letters of the alphabet in the dirt of the camp, when Charlotte came up to me with a smile. A friendly, if quiet, woman, Charlotte came from a town right next to my hometown. Some mutual friends of our families had heard that we were both planning to go to Bannack to meet our future husbands, and had connected us. I was so thankful when she and the brother she was traveling with agreed that I could go along with them. It solved my worry that I would not be able to get to Bannack because I was not permitted to travel alone, and gave me hope that I would have at least one friendly face on the journey.

  Though Charlotte and her brother Victor had not yet turned into the friends I had hoped they would be, they were kind enough and I felt like a connection was beginning to form. Charlotte was slightly older than me and seemed to have come from a family that was far more sheltered, which made her nervous and quiet. Even though I knew that the trail was rough and uncomfortable, Charlotte spent much of the day riding in the back of the wagon rather than walking with the rest of the women, and when I asked her why, she told me that she was too worried that the other women would not like her and that she just wouldn't have been able to get through the rest of the trip if she had heard that.

  I didn't quite know what to think about that. I could understand not wanting to feel awkward about being surrounded by people who didn't like you, but how could she possibly know that was the case if she refused to even try to get to know them?

  "You sure do seem to have a way with the little ones," Charlotte said, looking down at the children.

  "Thank you," I said, smiling at the way their little faces scrunched up with concentration as they worked so hard to form the letters the way I had taught them, "I hope that my students in Bannack are as receptive as these children."

  "I admire your courage," she said softly.

  I looked over at her quizzically.

  "My courage?"

  "There isn't even a school there, but you are so sure that you will be able to get one started and teach the children. You are extremely courageous for trying something like that. I could never do that."

  "You are going out to Bannack, aren't you?" I asked.

  She nodded.

  "But only to marry, and I am traveling with my brother."

  "Only to marry? I am far more nervous about meeting my future husband than I am to try to start a school," I told her with a smile. "You are going to a place where you have never been, to meet a man who you have never met, and to create his home for him. You are transforming a man who knows nothing but living on his own into a husband. That is quite a feat. You are doing something very, very brave, and you should not forget that."

  Charlotte smiled at me and I noticed just how pretty she was. It was a girlish, innocent type of pretty that made her seem younger than her years. I knew that after that moment we were going to be friends. Bannack was finally seeming closer and the rest of the journey did not seem as long anymore.

  Chapter 7

  "Hello?"

  I stood in the lobby of a beautiful hotel, gazing around at opulence that likely would have surprised my parents who had sent me off on my journey with warnings that I would be miserable in the coarse, dirty surroundings of the "untamed west."

  "Yes?"

  A lovely woman with a bright smile and a dress that told me that she, too, had come from the east swept out of a dining room to one side and came up to me.

  "Hello," I said again, "My name is Emily Barlow. I just arrived in town
and the man who met me at the wagon said that Mr. Gaines made arrangements for me to spend the night here."

  "Oh, yes! Miss Barlow. We have been expecting you for a couple of weeks now."

  I took a long breath and nodded.

  "Yes. There were some delays. I was getting worried that we were not going to make it before all the grass dried up."

  The woman nodded as if she completely understood my concern.

  "I remember how that felt. You are here, now, though, and I am very glad to see that you fared the journey. Can I show you to your room?"

  "Thank you, and please call me Emily."

  "Hello, Emily. My name is Hannah."

  Hannah talked pleasantly as she helped me carry my bags up the stairs to the third floor of the hotel. She assured me that one of the men would carry my trunks up later.

  "Is that your husband who will carry up my trunks?" I asked as she crossed the room to open one of the windows.

  She paused and I saw a flicker of something faintly sad across her face before she forced her smile back in place and shook her head.

  "No. We are not married."

  There was no more explanation than that and I didn't push her. If there was one thing that I had learned from my parents and had not disagreed with is that there were some things you simply did not discuss with strangers and new acquaintances. This seemed to be one of those things, and I was not going to threaten the opportunity to make a friend despite my curiosity.

  Hannah gave me another smile and then left me alone to settle into my room. When the door closed behind her, I went to my bag and pulled out the letters from Chad. I sat near the open window, hoping to catch a cool breeze in the hot room, and read through the letters again.

  His voice was so sweet through the words and I found myself feeling a little flutter of attraction to the man who I had never met. I appreciated that he had made arrangements for me to stay at the hotel, both so that I had my own space until we married and so that I could start to get over the journey that I had just endured.