While all went west to make a better life for themselves—some to find gold, others lured by the promise of land—the Mormons were looking for wealth of a different kind. Excoriated by some, and feared by others, throughout the 1850s an estimated seventy thousand made their way to the Great Salt Lake basin in Utah, to found a utopian city in the deserts of the West. Those who were too poor to provide themselves with wagons would walk the entire route, pulling their possessions behind them in handcarts.
Among these handcart pioneers was Priscilla Merriman Evans, a young Welshwoman from Tenby in Pembrokeshire. The second daughter in a family of eight children, Priscilla was seventeen when she converted to Mormonism.
“After the death of my mother we were very lonely, and one evening I accompanied my father to the house of a friend, where, by chance, two Mormon Elders were holding a ‘cottage meeting.’ I was very much interested in the principles they advocated,” she wrote, “despite seeing that my father was very worried, and would have taken me away, had he known how. When he became aware that I believed in the Gospel as taught by the Elders, I asked him if he had ever heard of the restored Gospel. He replied sarcastically, ‘Oh, yes, I have heard of Old Joe Smith, and his Golden Bible.’ ”190 Despite her father’s opposition, Priscilla believed that she had “found the truth.” “When I heard the Elders explain it, it seemed as though I had always known it, and it sounded like music in my ears.”
“Old Joe Smith,” or Joseph Smith, was born in Vermont in 1805. When he was still a very young man, Smith claimed to have had a series of visions. In one of these, an angel named Moroni had directed him to a place where a number of golden tablets lay buried deep in the ground. These tablets, which Joseph Smith transcribed, were believed to have been written by a hitherto unheard-of prophet, Mormon, containing the history of an ancient people. The church that Smith went on to found, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, was believed by his followers to be a restoration of the Christian Church to its original and “true” form, as it had existed in the days of the apostles, and as described in the golden tablets. Smith also claimed that God had given him, and him alone, divine authority to lead the church back to its true Christian roots. More specifically, Joseph Smith had been instructed to found a “New Jerusalem,” a shining city of the righteous and godly, where all new believers should gather.
The fact that no one other than Joseph Smith himself ever set eyes on the “Golden Bible” presented no intellectual difficulties to his followers. Not surprisingly, it presented a great many difficulties to almost everyone else. From the beginning, Joseph Smith and his followers were both reviled and feared, not only for their unorthodox views, but also for their desire to live in a community apart from others, and for the increasing power of their charismatic leader.
In the early years of his movement, Joseph Smith had made several attempts to found his “New Jerusalem,” attracting both converts and bitter opponents in equal measure. He and his followers moved first to Kirtland, Ohio, with an outpost in Jackson, Missouri, but the Missourians, alarmed at the large numbers of converts pouring into their lands, soon ran them out of town. In 1837, a financial scandal caused the church in Kirtland to regroup again, and this time Smith and his followers headed to Far West, in Caldwell County, Missouri, only to be forcibly expelled once more after the governor declared that all Mormons were to be “eliminated” and driven from the state.
For all the controversy surrounding his new religion, Joseph Smith continued to collect enthusiastic converts, many of them from abroad. In 1839, Smith and his followers, now some eight thousand strong, migrated east again, this time to the small town of Commerce, Illinois, where they at last succeeded in building a temple. They renamed the town Nauvoo. Here, yet again, Smith found himself in trouble. A short-lived local newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, published an article in its first (and only) issue, exposing the fact that Smith had secretly begun to advocate a form of polygamy to be enjoyed by the senior men in the church, known as the “apostles.” Smith’s “vicious principles” were “taught secretly and denied openly,” the editorial claimed, and now others, too, were set to adopt these same “abominations and whoredoms.”191 In short, it accused Joseph Smith, in extremely plain terms, of being a sexual predator. In fury, Smith found the newspaper printing press and destroyed it. Not long after, on June 27, 1844, while being held at the country jail in Carthage, Illinois, he and his brother Hyrum found themselves surrounded by an angry lynch mob, and both were killed.
Joseph Smith himself never succeeded in founding a permanent New Jerusalem. This would eventually be achieved by Smith’s successor, Brigham Young.101 Realizing that their longed-for utopia would only be possible in isolation, Young had set his sights west. In 1847, a party of 143 men, three women, two children, and three Black slaves made the journey along the emigrant trail, where they eventually found sanctuary on the edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah—the place that is known today as Salt Lake City.
For all the harshness of the land, the city flourished. “Saints” began to flock there, not only from the US but from all over Europe, where Mormon elders had carried out a vigorous proselytizing campaign. Shortly after her conversion, Priscilla had met one of these elders, a man named Thomas Evans. Although he was just twenty-one, Thomas was already an accomplished speaker and had a fine tenor singing voice. Soon the couple were not only engaged but had determined that they would follow Joseph Smith’s dictates and travel to join their fellow “Saints” in the unimaginably far-distant deserts of Utah.
The Evanses would need all their convert zeal to hold true to their decision. “About that time the Principle of the Plurality of Wives was preached to the world,” Priscilla wrote, adding that the news, when it reached Tenby, had “caused quite a commotion in our branch.” Another young woman, who like Priscilla was also engaged to marry a Mormon and follow him to “Zion,” came to her with tears in her eyes and said, “ ‘Is it true that Brigham Young has nine wives? I can’t stand that. Oh, I can’t stand it.’102 I asked how long it had been since I had heard her testify that she knew the Church was true, and I said if it was true then, it is true now,” Priscilla counseled her. “I told her I did not see anything for her to cry about.”
Perhaps more emotionally challenging for such a young couple was the strenuous opposition of both their families. It was not only Priscilla’s father who bitterly disapproved of their decision. Thomas’s family, too, did everything in their power to stop the couple from leaving. “They were all well off, and his brothers said they would send him to school, support his wife, and pay all of his expenses,” Priscilla wrote—but to no avail. On April 17, 1856, the couple set sail for Boston on board the SS Curling. A newly pregnant Mrs. Priscilla Merriman Evans was sick the whole way.
From Boston, the couple traveled first to Iowa City, where they remained for three weeks, waiting for their carts to be made. These carts—“small, two wheeled vehicles with two shafts and a cover on top . . . very much like those the street sweepers use in the cities today”192—were the brainchild of Brigham Young. Young had very quickly realized that for many of the new converts—rich in faith but poor in everything else—the expense of building and equipping a wagon outfit was likely to be prohibitive. The handcarts were devised as the most efficient and inexpensive way to transport large numbers of Saints across the plains to the Great Salt Lake. Like many thousands of other handcart pioneers, the Evanses prepared themselves to walk thirteen hundred miles to Salt Lake City, pulling their possessions behind them.
Although Handcart Pioneers are usually associated with the Mormon exodus west, many others, too poor to afford the ox-drawn wagon outfits, had no option but to walk.
Priscilla Merriman Evans and her husband were part of the Third Handcart Party, one of five that made the journey in 1856. Theirs was a curious company. Their fellow travelers consisted of three hundred Welsh Saints, many of whom spoke only Welsh, which Priscilla did not. “Don’t you think I had a pleasant journey,” she wrote, “traveling for months with three hundred people of whose language I could not understand a word?” The people who were detailed to share their tent were more curious still. These were a motley group consisting of “my husband with one leg,103 two blind men . . . a man with one arm, and a widow with five children. The widow, her children, and myself were the only ones who could not talk Welsh.”
But there were other more pressing problems. The carts were so small, and their allowance for personal possessions so tiny—just seventeen pounds of clothes and bedding per person—that Priscilla found that she was obliged to leave most of her belongings behind. “My feather bed, and bedding, pillows, all our good clothing, my husband’s church books, which he had collected through six years of missionary work, with some genealogy he had collected, all had to be left in a storehouse.”104 At night they slept on an old overcoat on the ground with just a shawl for covering.
Although there were five mule teams pulling the wagons that contained their tents and some of their provisions—these included extra flour and “a little coffee and bacon”—it soon became clear that they were woefully under-provisioned. The bacon and coffee were very soon used up, and “we had no use for any cooking utensils but a frying pan,” Priscilla wrote. “The flour was self-raising and we took water and baked a little cake; that was all we had to eat. . . . My husband was commissary for our tent, and he cut his own rations short many times to help the little children who had to walk and did not have enough to eat to keep up their strength.”
On these all but starvation rations, the entire company was expected to walk all day, pulling their carts behind them. There were no concessions for the sick, the infirm, or even the very young; far less for women who, like Priscilla, were pregnant. The captain of their company, Edward Bunker, made these conditions plain. “If there are any sick among you, and are not able to walk, you must help them along, or pull them on your carts.” No one, Priscilla noted, rode in the wagons (which were for provisions only). Instead, “strong men would help the weaker ones, until they themselves were worn out, and some died from the struggle and want of food, and were buried along the wayside. It was heartrending for parents to move on and leave their loved ones to such a fate, as they were so helpless, and had no material for coffins. Children and young folks too, had to move on and leave father or mother or both.”
If Priscilla, although pregnant, had not a word of self-pity to say about herself, it was perhaps because Thomas, with his wooden leg, had a much worse time of it. “My husband, in walking from twenty to twenty-five miles per day, [had pain] where the knee rested on the pad; the friction caused it to gather and break and was most painful. But he had to endure it, or remain behind, as he was never asked to ride in a wagon.”
The Evanses survived their journey, but only just. When they arrived in Salt Lake City at last, they were met with prayers, hymns, and general rejoicing, but Priscilla was almost beyond caring. By now six months pregnant, her feet were bleeding, her clothing was in rags, she was at the point of collapse, “and so weak we were nearly starved.” But at least she lived to tell her tale. Two more handcart parties had left Iowa that year but had fatally delayed their departure. The Fourth Handcart Party was caught in a blizzard in Wyoming, and large numbers of them died of cold and starvation before any backup from Salt Lake City could reach them.
It was not only the followers of Joseph Smith who believed they would find a utopia in the West. In 1856, the same year that Priscilla Evans left for Salt Lake City, her contemporary, Miriam Davis Colt, set out with her husband on one of the odder quests in the history of the West.
The Kansas Vegetarian Colony was the brainchild of an Englishman named Henry Stephen Clubb.105 Clubb was the founder and first president of the Vegetarian Society of America. Having done a reconnaissance of some land just west of the Missouri border, Clubb’s plan was to attract a group of like-minded people—about a hundred in all—who would form a colony together. This utopia would not be so much about spiritual rewards as physical and intellectual ones. Potential colonists had to agree to abide by certain rules, carefully set out in Clubb’s constitution. These included not only abstaining from alcohol and the flesh of animals, but also “to assemble together frequently . . . for the discussion of agricultural, physiological . . . and other sciences [to avoid] the dullness and monotony of country life.”
The scale of the colony was an ambitious one. Clubb foresaw not only grist mills, stone quarries, and brickyards, but printing presses, machine shops, and orchards. All this would be paid for by the colonists themselves, who would buy shares in Clubb’s company. The pièce de résistance, the crowning jewel at the heart of all Clubb’s proposals, was the city he hoped to build there. The weirdly modern-sounding Octagon City would feature an octagon-shaped town square, radiating from which would be eight roads. Between each road, the members of the commune would build not only octagonal-shaped farmhouses but also octagonal-shaped barns and an octagonal-shaped communal building with sixteen farms grouped around it.
Miriam’s husband, William Colt, had long been a practicing vegetarian. When he learned of Clubb’s plans he proceeded to sell their farm and purchase shares in the newly formed “Vegetarian Company” and sent all his money, “as directed,” to the Company Secretary, Mr. H. S. Clubb.
“We are going to Kansas,” Miriam wrote in her journal on January 5, 1856. “The Vegetarian Company that has been forming for many months, has finally organized, formed its constitution, elected its directors, and is making all necessary preparations for the spring settlement. . . . We can have, I think, good faith to believe that our directors will fulfil on their part; and we, as settlers of a new country, by going in a company will escape the hardships attendant on families going in singly, and at once find ourselves surrounded by improving society in a young and flourishing city.”
Seven members of the Colt family planned to be part of this social experiment: Miriam and William and their two children, William’s parents, and his “good fat sister” Lydia. Their outfit was quickly fitted up, and at the beginning of May they set out, their wagon groaning beneath the weight of “eight trunks, one valise, three carpet bags, a box of soda crackers, 200lbs flour, corn meal, a few lbs. of sugar, rice, dried apple, one washtub of little trees, utensils for cooking, and two provision boxes.” Whatever other private thoughts Miriam might have had about it all, she at least looked forward to living in a more “genial clime” (they had spent the previous seven years in Montreal), with people “whose tastes and habits will coincide with our own.”
At first the auguries seemed good. The spring weather was favorable and the landscape beautiful—“Will our Kansas scenery equal this?”—and she was struck particularly by the “sweet odor . . . from the blossoms of the crab apple trees that are blooming in sheets of whiteness along the roadside.” There was also much-needed camaraderie with their fellow travelers, as “we ladies, or rather, ‘emigrant women’ ” chatted around the campfire: “We wonder if we shall be neighbors to each other in the great ‘Octagon City’?”
It was with a gathering sense of excitement that they drew near to the allotted place. “Full of hope, as we leave the smoking embers of our campfire this morning,” she wrote on May 12. “Expect tonight to arrive at our new home.”
When Priscilla Evans and her husband arrived in Salt Lake City, they were greeted not only with prayers, hymns, and general rejoicing but also with something more sustaining. Kind neighbors had been detailed to take the exhausted travelers into their own homes, giving them food and shelter until the they had recovered from their ordeal. No such welcome was on hand to greet the Colt family. Although they had sent three men in an advance party to announce their coming, and Miriam expected every minute to see the secretary of their society, Henry Stephen Clubb, “with an escort to welcome us into the embryo city,” nothing of the kind was forthcoming. “No escort is seen! No salute is heard!” Instead, like a presage of things to come, a fine drizzle had begun to fall as they moved “slowly and drippingly into town just at nightfall—feeling just a little nonplussed on learning that our worthy, or unworthy, Secretary was out walking in the rain with his dear wife.”193
The colony they were expecting to find, and had indeed already paid for, the much-vaunted Octagon City, was nowhere to be seen. The family left their wagons and made their way, through the dark and the rain, to a large campfire around which could be seen a number of men and women cooking their suppers. More suspiciously, “not a house is to be seen. In the large tent here is a cook stove—they have supper prepared for us; it consists of hominy [grits], soft Johnny cake (or corn bread, as it is called here), stewed apple, and tea. We eat what is set before us, asking no questions for conscience sake.”
Apart from the conspicuous lack of buildings, there were other signs that all was not well. Some of the women told Miriam that they were sorry to see her come to that place, “which shows us that all is not right.” Weary and dispirited, they found beds where they could, some in tents and some in their wagon.
The next day, May 13, Miriam took up her journal again. “Can anyone imagine our disappointment this morning, on learning from this and that member, that no mills have been built; that the directors, after receiving our money to build mills, have not fulfilled the trust reposed in them, and that in consequence, some families have already left the settlement?”
It was not only the promised mills that were not forthcoming. When they went to look over what should have been “the city grounds,” they found that it contained a single extremely small log cabin measuring sixteen feet by sixteen feet, “mudded between the logs on the inside, instead of on the outside.” The cabin had neither door nor windows, and the oak shingles for the roof, although they were over three feet long, were only “about as wide as a sheet of fools cap paper.” Perhaps most dispiriting of all was the sight that daylight afforded them of the other families, most of them now living like refugees in a makeshift camp around the perimeter: “some living in tents of cloth, some of cloth and green bark just peeled from the trees, and some wholly of green barn [i.e. branches], stuck up on the damp ground, without floors or fires.” There were, she noted, only two stoves in the entire campsite.
In these less-than-utopian conditions, Miriam and her family had no choice but to make the best of it. Although it was now the middle of May, the weather had turned cold and windy, with a steady drizzling rain. They had taken up residence in the partially built communal octagon, but despite her husband’s valiant attempts to make what improvements he could, it remained “dark, gloomy, cheerless, uncomfortable, and cold inside.” “The prairie winds come whizzing in,” reads her journal entry for May 13. “Have hung an Indian blanket at the door, but by putting trunks and even stones onto the end that drags, can hardly make it answer the purpose of a door.”
More difficult still was the fact that she had to cook everything on an open fire. “Have a fire out of doors to cook by; two crotches driven into the ground with a round pole laid thereon, on which to hang our kettles and camp pails, stones laid up at the ends and back to make it as much as it can be in the form of a fireplace, so as to keep our fire, ashes and all, from blowing high and dry, when these fierce prairie winds blow.” Anyone who tried to cook in these conditions was scorched by the flames, so much so that “the bottoms of our dresses are burnt full of holes now, and will soon be burnt off.”
It was dispiriting work. “I have cooked so much out in the hot sun and smoke that I hardly know who I am, and when I look in the little looking glass I ask, ‘Can this be me?’ Put a blanket over my head, and I would pass well for an Osage squaw. My hands are the color of a smoked ham, and get so burnt that the skin peels off one after another.” “If we stay here,” she added, only half in jest, “we must needs don the Bloomer costume.”
First advocated by a popular health periodical, the Water Cure Journal, bloomers106 had initially been worn by women in public in 1851, but outside sophisticated urban areas such as New York, where they were first adopted, they would have been regarded with a suspicion bordering on disgust. For Miriam they were, literally, a lifesaver. “Am wearing the Bloomer dresses now; find they are well-suited to a wild life like mine,” she wrote in her journal on May 30. Any scruples she might have had were dissolved by the newfound freedom. “Can bound over the prairies like an antelope, and am not in so much danger of setting my clothes on fire while cooking when these prairie winds blow.”
Just a few days later, a tremendous thunderstorm threatened to overwhelm their still-fragile living quarters. “The thunder tumbled from the sky, crash upon crash . . . the rain came in torrents, and the wind blew almost tornadoes.” When they heard the storm approaching, the Colts had dressed, wrapped themselves tightly in their blankets, “and made ready to protect our children from the rain that was then dripping through the roof.” Putting all the bedding that they had around them, and “all we could see to get by the glare of the lightning (could not keep a candle lit),” they huddled together under their umbrellas and sat the storm out as best they could.
The next morning dawned cloudless and bright, the sun rising “as majestically as though there had been no war in the elements through the night.” But a terrible scene met their eyes. “The rain had dissolved our mud chinking, and the wind had strewed it all over and in our bed, on our clothes, over our dishes, and into every corner of the house. Have had all our sheets to wash, beds and blankets to dry in the sun and rub up, our log walls to sweep down, our shelves and dishes to clean, and our own selves to brush up. ‘Such is prairie life,’ so they say.”
Not everyone was so philosophical. For many, prairie life had already proved too much. Several of their colony were already packing up and heading back East. Just two days after the storm “our young and very much respected Mr. Sober has left the settlement, and gone back to his home in Michigan,” she wrote; “disappointment has darkened every brow.”
The Colt family were not yet ready to give up. Under the Vegetarian Company’s terms and conditions, which were made possible by a government scheme, individual members of the company had each been able to lay claim to 240 acres of land—160 acres of timber and 80 acres of prairie. Miriam’s husband, her father-in-law, and her sister-in-law Lydia were all claimants; taken as a whole, the family now owned, or believed they owned, a substantial 720 acres of potential farmland. It was too valuable an asset to give up on so soon.107 194
They spent their days deciding on the site of what they hoped would be their future home, eventually plumping for an idyllic spot just a little way from the clear, stony-bottomed creek that flowed nearby. Sitting in their wagon, Miriam would marvel at the view over the wide-open prairie—“not a stump, fence, stone or log, to mar the beautiful picture”—while her “hopeful husband” planted corn and garden seeds.
Never previously farmed, at first the prairie was deceptively easy to cultivate. “After the plowing, the planting is done by just cutting through the sod with an axe and dropping in the seeds—no hoeing the first year; nothing more is done until the full yellow ears are gathered in autumn time.” And yet for all this, she was not quite convinced. “I do not like to hear the voice which whispers, ‘This will never be,’ but still it will whisper.”
Although Octagon City, what there was of it, was only thirty-eight miles from the Missouri border, the settlement was still extremely isolated. The Colts were a hundred miles from the nearest grist mill and fifty miles from the nearest post office; when one of their plows broke, it was another fifty-mile round trip to the nearest blacksmith to get it mended. The work they were now faced with proved backbreaking: not only were there crops to sow but clothes to wash, cornfields to fence, rails to split, poles to cut—and, most tiresome of all for Miriam, the never-ending job of baking bread for her family every day in a tiny Dutch oven (a cast-iron cooking pot on legs) over an open fire. “Have labored really hard all day,” she wrote in her journal, “and have baked only two small loaves of bread, while, in a family of seven like ours, one can be dispatched at each meal.”
Morale was not helped by the fact that there was never enough to eat. Over a month after their arrival, Mr. Clubb finally showed up at the colony with some extra provisions, which he had bought at Fort Scott, the nearest settlement, fifty miles away. Despite the fact that they had been bought with the company’s money, they were still charged a very high price for them. Even potatoes, at four dollars a bushel, were so expensive that the family could not afford to have even one meal of them. “I live entirely on food made of corn-hominy and milk, and Johnny-cake and milk.”
There were times when anxiety for the future threatened to overwhelm Miriam. “The people say we have had our hardest time here, but it does not seem so to me. I often ask myself, ‘Why do I have so many presentiments of coming sorrow?’ . . . I am so impressed some nights with this feeling, that I sit up in bed for hours, and fairly cringe from some unknown terror. I tell my husband, ‘We are a doomed ship; unless we go away, some great calamity will come upon us; and it is on me that the storm will burst with all its dark fury.’ ”
“What are we to look for, and what fear next?” she wrote on June 16. One night it was reported that Mrs. Clubb had found a rattlesnake in her bed; but the worst plague of all was the mosquitoes. “They troubled us very much at the creek today while washing. . . . Our bed being short, in the night they have a good chance to nibble away at our protruding extremities. . . . I try to keep my children covered, so they won’t eat them all up before morning. As for myself, I get so infuriated that I get up, descend the ladder, make my way out into the wet grass upon the run, not minding what reptiles may be under my bare feet; then I return from my dewy bath, lie down and try to sleep, but it is almost in vain.”
The whole family came down with malaria. “Dishes of water have been set near our heads, so that we could help ourselves to drink when it seemed as though we should burn up with fever. My head has ached dreadfully; am glad to crawl down the ladder, with weakened limbs get out door[s] here, sit down on a stone, lean my dizzy head against the logs of the cabin, breathe a little fresh air, see the sun go down, and ask, ‘Can this be the same sun that shines [on] our Northern friends, who are enjoying blessings and comforts they know not how to appreciate?’ ”
So much for utopian dreams. By now, almost all the other colony members had simply given up and returned east. One of their closest neighbors, Mr. V, had arranged for a passage in an ox wagon that would take his family back to Kansas City. William Colt believed that they too should cut their losses and go with him, but his father was determined to hold out. Despite the fact that “Mother,” the “good fat sister,” and Miriam herself were all by now equally anxious to leave, the old man refused: “His indomitable will is not thus to be turned.”
The prairie summer was scorching hot. “Today the sun comes pouring down his floods of heat again,” Miriam wrote on July 4. “I can’t step outside the cabin door without burning my feet. The prairie grass makes such wear and tear upon our shoe leather, that I am trying to save my own calf-skin shoes, for I see they are being worn badly now, and I shall want them more when cold weather comes; so I go barefoot inside, and slip my feet into my rubbers when I go from the cabin.”
Soon, their water supply began to dry up. “The spring that was cleaned out and dug deeper, in the gulch below our cabin, is almost dry,” she wrote on July 1; “the water is not fit to drink.”
Even this was not enough to deter old father Colt. About four miles away from the settlement he had spotted a house belonging to some Osage, which was standing empty while they were away on their annual hunt. Knowing that the water there was still in good supply, Mr. Colt was determined to move there. Miriam and her husband debated whether to follow the old people. If they moved, they would be four miles away from their nearest neighbors. Furthermore, “if [the Osage] should return from their hunt and find us there, they would think we were intruding almost too much, and I know not what our fate would be,” Miriam wrote. “We cannot stay here without water, neither can we leave the old people four miles away, alone. . . . We conclude that we must submit to the dominion of paternity, and take the result.” The house turned out to be a dilapidated dwelling, built around three sides of a north-facing “piazza.” Despite having no glass in the windows, it was, Miriam wrote, “a palace [compared to] the rude cabin we have left.”
But it was no use. As the summer ended it was clear to all that their enterprise had been a failure. Continued bouts of malaria, the loss of their oxen, and altercations with the Osage when they returned from their hunt, whose precious resource—water—they had taken, were finally too much for them. On September 2, Miriam and William and their two children headed back East, leaving William’s parents and sister Lydia behind at what remained of the Octagon City.
Of the seven members of the Colt family, only two would survive the experience. Miriam’s husband and her son both died on the journey back home, probably of malaria. It was not until she reached New York City that she also learned of the deaths of her parents-in-law and sister-in-law. It was to earn money for herself and her daughter, Mema, that she wrote her memoir, giving it a title as strange and sorrowful as the experience itself: Went to Kansas: being a thrilling account of an ill-fated expedition to that fairy land, and its sad results.