1846 Pessimistic or defeatist letters home written by emigrants to North America are extremely rare. Most are full of the New World’s promise – the natural bounty or the low prices, the political freedom, the absence of taxes. That’s because people are more likely to write if they make it, and their families at home more likely to keep their letters as proof of their relatives’ success.
But just occasionally an expression of despair or cry for help survives this filtering. Rebecca Butterworth and her husband had emigrated from Rochdale, Lancashire to a country settlement in Arkansas sometime before 1843. Being city folk, they found it hard to cope in the country, and by 1846 things hadn’t got much better. ‘What little corn we had the cattle [h]as jumped the fence and eaten it’, she wrote. ‘John can milk one cow which makes us a little butter, but the other won’t let him.’
As city people too they placed their faith in doctors rather than self-dosing with botanic remedies. So when Rebecca fell ill with ‘bilious intermittent fever’, she was treated with mustard plasters, ‘steamed bricks’ and ‘60 grains of calomel’ (mercurous chloride, used as a powerful ‘anti-bilious’ laxative) – the last of which eroded her mouth so that ‘I had one of my cheeks cut half way through’.
When the fever struck, Rebecca was pregnant with her fourth child. The first three had died in infancy. Either the illness (or more likely the bizarre treatment for it) brought on premature labour. Her brother-in-law ‘did not like to help me as he had not studied midwifery much’, so they had to wait two hours for the doctor to come. When the baby was born, ‘he cried like a child at full time’, but lived for only ten minutes, before taking ‘his flight to heaven to join my other 3 little angels’.
‘I felt when I heard him crying so if I could have him in my arms and put him to his breast I would be glad’, she added, ‘but the lords will be done and not ours.’