I counted days by sunrises, noting their distinctive spread of dark to light, the way the pink gave way to ivory clouds against the morning blue. Each noon, Christian read from Lansford Hastings’s The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California until we’d all heard every word written by this man through Christian’s booming voice. He halted on occasion, translating from the author’s English into the German we all spoke. Adam suggested we should hear the words in English to accustom ourselves to the language of the land we now lived in. The others nodded agreement. No one looked to me.
The writer of this guide blended his enthusiasm with details about river crossings and camping suggestions. But listening, even in the English I still struggled with, it gave me a sense of belonging, of hearing what they all heard at the same time even if some of the subject matter prickled. I hoped I’d find some small piece of information that I could later draw on that might save the day, that would please Christian, make him grateful I’d come along for more than someone to warm his bed. I didn’t want to be a burden; truly I didn’t. I wanted to belong and not stand out because of trouble, but from what I could offer. I wanted to be as reliable as sunrise, yet as singular.
Christian finished reading the Hastings book the day before we reached St. Joseph, where we hoped to catch a ferry. Hastings had recommended this Missouri River crossing and the road that would take us west, following the Platte River. He related details of what each wagon should contain and what routes were wise and what to be wary of at various watering places.
More than once in the few days we’d been on our way, I wished we had a wagon hauling items such as kegs of water and stores of food and extra clothing more easily reached than that tied up in the bedroll knots. I had only one change of clothes—a woolen dress, another wrapper, and my ruffled petticoat—and before the second day passed, as I watched women doing laundry along the way, I realized I’d probably adjust to the smell of my own perspiration rather than endure the effort of scrubbing and pounding at rocks near streams along the trail. Doing my wash and Christian’s would be work enough. For a moment I longed for the large group of women who scrubbed their laundry together at Bethel. I pitched that thought. No sense hanging on to what will not be.
Most of all, I wished a wagon for the privacy it would have provided when I tended to my hygiene; in the shade of it, if not inside. But a wagon would have slowed us, the men agreed, so during our ten-minute respites for the animals, I found a tree or shrub and hoped such sentinels of sanitation would continue to dot the landscape as we crossed the continent. I imagined discovering shrubs with new kinds of berries I could squat behind, increasing my understanding of botany while managing bloat.
Hastings’s book for emigrants did not promise such extensive trees or shrubs once we reached the prairie country. His little book ignored most of a woman’s needs, so I hoped he might have misunderstood the importance of mentioning such facts. Instead, Hastings wrote words that encouraged early starts with longer rests at noon to manage the daytime heat, or identifying prudent encampments and explaining how to avoid “noxious airs” found near muddy waters. The author of Christian’s noontime read spoke little of diseases and had written his book back in 1845, after the first cholera epidemic, but before this most recent scare that still plagued travelers’ westward journeys. After reading the section about “muddy waters” and “noxious airs,” Christian urged greater caution at watering sites. “We’ll boil all drinking water not from springs,” he said, so that we might all arrive healthy and well.
“We’ll ask about illness on the wagons we encounter,” he told John Stauffer, who patted his horse’s neck as they spoke. “They’ll have sent scouts ahead and may know of places we should avoid.”
“Scouts sending out scouts,” Hans Stauffer said. He removed his hat to scratch at his head where an early receding hairline made his hair look like a brown peninsula with white sandy beaches on either side. He scratched that spot so often that a callus formed on the right side.
“How I felt about you sometimes,” Adam Knight told his brother, Joe. “When you’d run off as a Dummkopf and I’d have to catch you before Mama found out you’d left the yard or were so lost you whizzed your pants in fear.”
“At least I explored a place or two over the years,” Joe Knight said. A pink flush formed on his cheeks. “While you were busy chasing skirts.”
“Joe!” Adam chastised. He nodded toward me.
“Oh, sorry, Frau Giesy. I forget you were here.”
“I suppose that should be a compliment,” I told him, curtsying as I handed him a refilled cup of corn juice. “I don’t want to be a bother.”
“No bother,” Joe replied. He raised a single finger to the air, one of his habits when he spoke.
“I didn’t wish you along, Frau Giesy,” Adam said. “But you weren’t no trouble this past week, and you even helped some.”
“That might make a fine epitaph,” I said. “She weren’t no trouble and she even helped some.”
“Let’s not think morbid thoughts,” Christian said. “Indeed, you’ll help even more before long, become a true member of this scouting party.” His words lifted my spirits.
“Ja? How will I do this?” Were they going to let me cook then at last?
“You’ll be in charge of washing our clothes,” Christian told me.
Unintended, my lower lip pouted out.
I confess, the excitement of wagons and horses and mules and oxen and people with accents closer to mine—are they Swiss or maybe from Bavaria?—intrigued me when we reached St. Joseph, Missouri, where Christian had said we would cross the great river. I heard French and what I assumed to be Spanish intermixed with English, and within an hour my ears hurt with the barrage, and my head ached from deciphering. What were all these people doing here? Where were they going? How would they know when they got there? I began to appreciate that we scouts had criteria, we knew what we needed to find and why we were seeking. Wilhelm held all of us together even in his absence, his words of life and death reminding us of the little time we had in the former and the encroaching hot breath of the latter. Did these others traveling west trust only Hastings’s words? Or perhaps the leaders of their wagon groupings? I began to think about leadership and what it meant to the success of our task.
We had all we needed for our survival, were secure in our journey west.
We staked the horses above the ferry, awaiting passage while Christian and Adam Schuele, who understood English the best, prepared to venture forth to find out how long the wait for the ferry crossing would be. Adam headed south.
Christian asked, “Would you like to come along?” I beamed. “You’ll need to watch where you walk to avoid horse apples and garbage plaguing the streets,” he told me. I didn’t mind. I could enter a world I’d never known. I’d love the confusion of people.
“I thank you for the gift,” I said. “You were asleep when I found it. I didn’t want to wake you.”
Christian nodded. “You’ll have need of it, mending our clothes.”
“My mother sent her sewing kit with me. But this”—I patted the chatelaine hanging beneath my bodice—“the designs on the chatelaine make it more than just a tool. It’s … art. Beauty for its own sake.”
Christian’s ear turned the color of tomatoes, and he seemed relieved when tent store hawkers offered meat on sticks and wild-eyed mountain men announced “essentials” for sale for the journey west. Christian’s height caused people to step aside for us, though he never pushed or shoved his way. He tipped his hat to women and children, and I wondered what it would be like to understand all their English phrases as easily as Christian did.
A buxom woman with a painted face must have heard me talking to him in German, for she stepped out from the shade of her tent and smiled, boldly placing painted fingernails on his forearm. She said to me in German as she gazed up at Christian, “Your papa here is a handsome man, maybe in need of someone to look after his kind.”
I frowned. “I’m not his kind.” I added in English, “I’m his wife, not his child.” Were these the kind of women that Willie and my brother spoke about in whispers after they’d come back from Hannibal?
She stepped closer to Christian and patted the lapel of his jacket as she inhaled his scent. The drift of her perfume rose over the garbage smells from piles around her. “Ach, my foul luck,” she said, slapping Christian’s lapel now in good humor.
I put my arm through Christian’s, something I’d never have done in a crowd back in Bethel, where I’d have walked a pace or two behind.
She stepped away but kept eyeing him as though he were a good horse. “I always have an eye for the unavailable.”
“Do you have an eye for the time of the crossing?” Christian asked her. “I suspect you’ve seen these lines before and know how long it’ll take.”
She stretched her neck to look at the rows of wagons and cattle, people and dogs, that crowded toward the narrow docking area. “Days, I’d say. By wagon?” she asked. “You go west by wagon?” Christian shook his head no. “Moving fast then. Someone on your tail.” She leered at me.
I gripped Christian’s arm. “Ach, you are a—”
“Our marriage is blessed,” Christian said, “and our journey, too.” She lowered her eyes just a moment, and Christian spoke into that interlude. “You could have such assurances too, Fräulein. There is someone always available, someone who would care for you as a parent loves a child. A whole community exists of people who love each other, who serve and demonstrate God’s grace on this earth. No needs go unmet. It is a place of Eden.”
“An Eden on earth,” she snorted, then looked down, stuffed a handkerchief into the cleavage exposed at her breast. “There are always snakes in gardens.”
“All the better then to enter all gardens with others.”
“One day, perhaps.” Her words softened. “If it were me, I’d go north to Harney’s Landing. Takes you sooner to the Platte. It’s about thirty miles south of Nebraska City, what they’re calling it now. Used to be Old Fort Kearny. Ferry’s good there, I’m told. Not so long a wait.”
“I thank you for your help, Fräulein.” He tipped his hat to her again, as though she were a regal lady. “In a year or so, a larger colony will come this way, and you’d be welcome to join us. We’re Bethelites. Mostly German, in service to each other as we’re commanded.”
“If they’re as handsome as you, I might join up,” she laughed.
“Not the best reason to come along, but God can use even that,” he said.
“Danke,” she said. “I’ll consider it if my fortunes don’t pick up.” Then she ducked back under her tent awning.
So this was how Christian won people over, not only with his smile and dazzling eyes but with his tenderness, his ability to see through the thick perfume, look past the sagging cleavage. He listened to what she didn’t say and treated her with a dignity I hadn’t thought she deserved, not with her suggestion that I was too young for Christian or that our marriage couldn’t be real. He stepped over those things.
“What did you think of that woman?” I asked as we walked away.
“It doesn’t matter what I thought,” Christian said. “Like you, she is a child of God and therefore my sister. So I love her just the same.”
The same as me? I felt a rush of some emotion I couldn’t even name.
Christian and Adam Schuele compared notes upon our return to where the horses grazed. We’d made camp a good two miles out of town, as already the grass had been ripped clean by earlier wagons passing through with their stock. We agreed we’d head north, but Adam suggested we take the steamer Mandan up the Missouri River instead of going by land.
“We can afford this?” Hans asked John Genger.
John Genger frowned. I’d become aware of the separation of duties of the men. Hans Stauffer handled the stock. The Knights did the packing and cooking and determined when we needed to stop to check packs and ropes and seek supplies. The Stauffers were skilled at finding agreeable sites for our stock and for us to camp and seemed to have a unique understanding of landscape and weather. Adam Schuele and Christian did the negotiating with people along the way and brought into the open any issues needing decisions. George Link hunted and handled the weapons and ammunition. John Genger, the quiet one, kept the money and the records of expenditures.
Back in Bethel, I’d never even heard John Genger talk, and Mary Giesy once told me she thought he might be Jewish. At least one Jewish family lived within the colony, my father had told me, but he never would say who they were.
The unsavory task of laundry became my expertise, but fortunately, these were tidy men more interested in speed than in sanitizing often. Like me, they were anxious to enter land they’d never encountered before, land beyond the Missouri.
“I think we should not spend the money this way,” John Genger answered.
“It’ll save us time to go by steamer,” John Stauffer said. “Our goal is to get west as fast as we can, find the site, and send some of us back to bring the main colony forward. The sooner we do this, the better, ja?”
“The steamer would rest the stock,” Adam Knight said, nodding in agreement.
“We must save all the money we can in case we need to buy our land rather than get free Oregon Territory land,” John Genger said. “This is not wise to spend so freely when we are only out a few weeks.” He wore a small-brimmed hat that couldn’t possibly shade his eyes from the sun, and he squinted as he spoke.
“You’re the banker, John, and we value your advice,” Christian said. “We’ll pray about this tonight, and we will all decide in the morning.”
We will all decide. I wondered if that meant my view would also be considered. If so, I’d vote with John, not because of the cost but because of the steamer. It was worrisome enough to think of crossing a swollen river, but to be on a larger body of water, well, the thought of that made my mouth dry. I hated the lurch of boats and their uncertainty, the need to place trust in the captains and pilots. I had to watch the weather more whenever we went somewhere by boat. I had to grip the sides and never rested, not once. I secretly thanked my parents, who preferred carriages over canoes.
But no one asked my opinion, and so I didn’t have to disagree with my husband in front of the others.
In the morning, it was decided. Each man awoke to some assurance that taking the steamer north would be the wisest course. Even John Genger concurred. This surprised me. I hoped for a rousing debate with John taking my side, since my voice wasn’t invited into the fray. But no, it appeared all were satisfied with the choice to spend the money and rest the stock. This consensus Christian labeled “God’s will.”
“Why are so many heading westward?” I asked Christian as we waited to board the steamer, my heart pounding, seeking diversions. The line for the steamer wasn’t nearly so long as that of the ferry. “Were they all so unhappy where they were?”
“We didn’t leave from unhappiness,” he said. “We left because we were sent, for the good of those left behind. We have a privilege to prepare for the decisions that matter most in life, not just how to live, but where we go when we die. We listen to our leader and follow his advice. He leads us by his passion for keeping us from eternal damnation. I don’t know whose advice all these other people follow.”
“Aren’t you frightened, even a little?” I asked.
He frowned. “Fear does not come from the Lord, Liebchen. I am cautious. We must be careful, ja, but not fearful.” I rubbed my thumb and forefingers together. He held my hands in his. “Something bothers you? Your fingers tell me their story,”
I rolled my fingers into my palms, and shook my head no. “I feel a little ill. The water makes me dizzy, that’s all. It will pass.”
He pulled me to him, tucked me under his arm as a mother hen does her chicks. He patted my shoulder. I looked around to see if others frowned at this public display of affection. No one appeared to care. Worldly ways had merit.
“Perfect love casteth out fear,” he said. “Perfect, as in complete. We have nothing to worry about.”
Now was not the time to tell Christian that his wife objected to watercraft. I’d probably never be forced to take a steamer ever again. The prayers of the men had been answered, not mine. They had a more direct voice, I imagined, than a woman. That was a thought Helena Giesy might have. So this must be God’s will, that they all agreed. Mine was a singular fear, one I’d have to swallow.
We were told to come back in the morning.
As we led our animals through the dust back to our camp, I decided it would be difficult to be a part of this jumble of wagons and horses and people and cows without knowing why we were leaving, or if we weren’t well led. I had assurance to both of those questions, or so I thought. Such assurance should help me overcome my fears.
That’s what I told myself as I took a deep breath and boarded the steamer the next morning.