The move west—early in the country’s history across the Appalachians, later across the Rockies—made marriage a necessity. Men moving to set up homesteads knew they needed women in order to make it; they couldn’t expect to clear the land, build the house, plant and tend a garden, care for the animals all by themselves. The living was hard, but the lure of making it someplace new appealed to American men from the beginning. Their wives often objected to being uprooted from home and family, as their letters and diaries tell us. Even so, hundreds of thousands of them eventually did make the difficult and dangerous trek across the prairies and peaks. Between 1840 and 1848, fewer than nineteen thousand people went to settle California, Oregon, and Utah. By 1860, almost three hundred thousand more had joined them. The discovery of gold accounted for much of that migration, but the real pull of the West was toward the land—a place to possess, and make produce, and pass on to children. Those dreams could not come true without marriage.
Every time America pushed westward, the men went first. They so outnumbered women that they would advertise for wives. In the early 1800s, Nettie Harris, a young woman in upstate New York, answered an ad in her local newspaper: “Every respectable young woman who goes to the West is almost sure of an advantageous marriage, while, from the superabundance of her own sex in the East, her chances for success are not greater than those for disappointment.” Off she went on a flatboat for Iowa with about forty other women. A magazine of the time described what happened when they arrived at the dock: “The gentlemen on shore make proposals to the ladies through trumpets: ‘Miss with the blue ribbon in your bonnet, will you take me?’ ‘Hallo, that girl with a cinnamon-colored shawl! If agreeable, we will join!’ The ladies in the meantime are married at the hotel, the parties arranging themselves as the quire sings out, ‘Sort yourselves, sort yourselves!’” Romance clearly did not enter into the picture.
Once married, these women could expect to work alongside their husbands in the business of survival, while they struggled physically and emotionally. Bearing babies every couple of years was the norm; too often so was burying them. Bearing the loneliness of the isolation of the farms was sometimes almost as trying. The women’s letters are filled with longing for their mothers and sisters and female friends. They seized on any opportunity to socialize, especially weddings. And these hardscrabble pioneers loved to dance. All of that comes through in their records.
What’s hard to glean from their writings is how husbands and wives felt about each other. And there’s no going back and asking them, so we are left with their own scant renditions. Some of the diaries are downright funny in their sparseness of language. When Amelia Stewart Knight left Iowa for Oregon with her husband and seven children in 1853, she kept an account of her days on the trail, as many people did. But she never tells us that she’s pregnant for her eighth child, until the last entry, after five months of traveling. What she does tell us about is the weather.
Friday, April 15th. Cold and cloudy, wind still east. Bad luck last night. Three of our horses got away. Suppose they have gone back. One of the boys has gone after them, and we are going on slowly.
Saturday, April 16th. Camped last night three miles east of Charlton Point in the prairie. Made our beds down in the tent and the wet and mud. Bed clothes nearly spoiled. Cold and cloudy this morning, and every body out of humor. Seneca is half sick. Plutarch has broke his saddle girth. Husband is scolding and hurrying all hands (and the cook) and Almira says she wished she was home, and I say ditto, “home, sweet home.”
That’s about the closest we ever get to sentiment. Then it’s back to the weather, through May, June, July, and August.
Wednesday, Sept. 14th. Still in camp. Raining and quite disagreeable.
Thursday, Sept. 15th. Still in camp and still raining. (I was sick all night.)
Friday, Sept. 17th. In camp yet. Still raining. Noon—it has cleared off and we are all ready for a start again, for some place we don’t know where…[She breaks off, then picks up.] A few days later my eighth child was born. After this we picked up and ferried across the Columbia River utilizing skiff, canoes and flatboat to get across, taking three days to complete. Here husband traded two yoke of oxen for a half section of land with one half acre planted to potatoes and a small log cabin and lean to with no windows. This is the journey’s end.
The trials of the trail—the disease, death, the danger of children falling out of wagons, getting run over or lost, the fear of Indians—are well documented in letters and diaries. Everyday life stories are harder to come by from a taciturn and proud people. One scholar in the field calls it “the history of the inarticulate.” Fortunately, some of the pioneer women managed to find their voices and tell the stories of their marriages.
George and Keturah Penton Belknap: Always a New Frontier
Even in the early days of this nation, people from many different countries came together to form uniquely American unions. One of Keturah Penton’s father’s parents was English, the other Irish; one of her mother’s parents was Swedish, the other Dutch. Raised in New Jersey at the time of the Revolution, Johon and Magdalena Burden Penton migrated to Ohio in 1818, to what was then the frontier. The trip meant a wagon ride over the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh, where they then went by boat to Cincinnati. About sixteen miles away, in Hamilton County, Penton bought land and found work helping some nearby settlers thresh wheat. His wife and oldest daughter would spin flax in the winter for summer linens, wool in the summer for winter warmth.
The fifth child, Keturah, was born in 1820, and started keeping a journal when she was fifteen years old. She recounted how the family lived in a log cabin until she was six, then moved to a farm near Cincinnati, where her father truck-gardened and brought his produce to market every day. Everyone in the family worked. At night, after a day on the farm or at the market, the boys shucked corn to sell as meal. The girls helped on the land, hired out as baby-sitters and dishwashers to more fortunate settlers in the area, and spent their evenings spinning and knitting. When Keturah was sixteen, the family moved again, this time to northern Ohio, one hundred and twenty-five miles and five long days by road from Cincinnati. The new move meant more backbreaking work, building the log cabin and clearing the land. To help make ends meet, Keturah hired out as a housekeeper for seventy-five cents a week, and a washerwoman for twenty-five cents a day. That was her life, and what she expected to remain her life until, at the age of nineteen, she listened to some motherly advice.
One day, as she was getting ready to go care for a sick neighbor, Keturah’s mother lingered over her tea and Keturah “thought she looked a little sad. Like she wanted to say something that was hard to say.” After some coaxing, her mother blurted out, “Kitt, if I was you I would get married and be fixing up a home for myself and not be a drudge for the whole country. There is plenty of these fellows that want you and could give you a good home, and with the tact you have you could soon have a nice place of your own.” Keturah objected, insisting that she didn’t want to leave her parents. Her mother counseled that if Keturah could better herself, she had no objections. “They could get along very well now they had land enough cleared to make them a good living on, and if I stayed till they died, I would be an old broken down old maid and maybe so cross nobody would want me and then would be kicked about from one place to another without any home.” It’s a pretty good summary of the attitudes about marriage at the time.
Given permission, Keturah started husband hunting. First prospect: a young preacher on the circuit. But the presiding elder of the church warned her against him, telling her “not to waste my talents on so unpromising a youth.” She got rid of him in short order. “The next one that appeared on the scene was a rich young doctor, but he was too lazy to practice and he did not know how to do anything else. He had been raised in the South and had slaves to wait on him. So he was no good.” Then came “an old bachelor with hair as red as fire. He had two sections of land and lots of money. He said it was waiting to be at my disposal, but he was too stingy to get himself a decent suit of clothes. So he was shipped pretty quick.” Finally, along came a man in a stovepipe hat. George Belknap had decided to come to a church meeting at the Penton house, even though there was another meeting at his own, a thinly veiled excuse to start calling on Keturah, with visits that “became more frequent and more interesting.” That’s about as close to romance as we get.
On one of his calls, Belknap announced that his family was preparing to sell their place and move west, and “if we went along we must bring matters to a close pretty soon. So him and mother had a long talk out by the well that evening in the moonlight, and before morning it was settled that we would be married on the third of October, 1839. So then we had to get ready for the wedding and also for the journey.” The journal tells us nothing at all about the wedding, but a good deal about the journey. Two weeks after they were married, Keturah and George set out in a two-horse wagon, traveling through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, camping out along the way, buying food from farmers. They expected to spend the winter in Rushville, Illinois, until they heard about some property they could buy from the Indians in Iowa, so they hazarded a mean snowstorm, with Keturah driving the horses and George driving the stock, rushing to claim the land. They bought the parcel, with a house on it, from a family who had not yet finished paying the Indians. Collecting enough cash to make the final payment meant working all the time. The men planted and made rails, the women cooked and made cloth. Keturah did the spinning, her mother-in-law the weaving. While the men tended the fields, the women tended the farmyard, collecting enough eggs and making enough butter to sell as well as eat.
Even in those hard times, the young married couple understood that it was important to get away for a bit. “George and I are going to take a vacation and go about ten miles away to a campmeeting. There are four young men and two girls going with us, but I made them promise there should be no sparking.” The young people behaved admirably and that fall each of the girls was married to one of the men. After the meeting, Keturah announced, “Now we have had a rest and have got strengthened both soul and body—we will go it again.” Back to work, day and night. But it was paying off. The hogs sold well, there was enough wheat to sell as flour, and their dreams of building the first frame house on the prairie seemed close to reality. In between planting and harvesting, they would work on the house. Oh, and by the way, “August the 20th, harvest is over and we have the sweetest little baby girl. We call her Hannah.” The house wasn’t ready for that winter, so it was another season with the in-laws. But Keturah was coming into her own; her Christmas dinner was a great success. The next spring she hosted a party for twelve “nice old ladies.” After chicken and pound cake like her mother used to make, “my name is out as a good cook, so I’m alright, for good cooking makes good friends.”
Companionship on the prairie made life bearable, and George appears to have been an amiable husband. After spinning yarn during the day, in the evening Keturah would twist it for weaving, “while George reads the history of the U.S., then we read some from the Bible together and have prayer and go to bed feeling that the sleep of the laboring man is sweet. My baby is so good and she don’t seem much in my way.” They moved into their new house, and all seemed perfect with the birth of a boy in March 1843, but then, in November, little Hannah died of “lung fever.” Keturah called it the first real trial of her life, and she expected to spend the winter mostly in the house. Fortunately for her, weekly prayer meetings were held at the Belknaps’, so she could regularly see her neighbors. A year later another baby boy arrived, but six months after that, Keturah passed “through another season of sorrow” when their three-year-old boy died. Then, in a few months, the arrival of a baby girl brought this sad journal entry: “We have another baby, such a nice little girl, only six pounds at first and it is a month old, not much bigger than at first. It has never been well, so we have two children again for a while, neither of them are very strong.” In the same entry, though, Keturah goes on to give the news. “The past winter there has been a strange fever raging here. It is the ‘Oregon fever,’ it seems to be contagious and it is raging terribly. Nothing seems to stop it but to tear up and take a six month trip across the plains with ox teams to the Pacific Ocean.”
The Belknaps resisted the fever for a while. They went east instead, on a trip to see Keturah’s parents. She and the baby were both sick, and she was heartsick knowing once she went back to Iowa they would be Oregon bound—there was no way to hold back the men once they heard of new lands to conquer—and she would never see her parents and old friends again. “It was hard for me not to break down but they all thought in about two years we would come again.” On the way back west she boarded a train for the first time, for a seventy-five-mile trip that took half a day, which greatly impressed Keturah because a wagon would have taken three days. Once they arrived in Iowa, everyone was bustling, getting ready for the trek west: “the loom was banging and the wheels buzzing and trades being made from daylight till bedtime.” The Belknaps’ house had been sold, but she didn’t want to move in with her in-laws until it was time to go. “For the first time since our marriage I put my foot down and said ‘will and won’t.’” They moved into another house, and there, their baby girl died. “Now we have one puny boy left. So now I will spend what little strength I have left getting ready to cross the Rockies.”
Keturah busily went about making clothes for the family to last for a year. “Have cut out four muslin shirts for George and two suits for the little boy, with what he has that will last him (if he lives) until he will want a different pattern.” Poor woman, she’d buried three children and has every expectation of losing her fourth as she prepares to leave everything she knows behind, yet again. The neighbors helped pull her through, pitching in with the sewing, and her husband kept her company. Traveling in a covered wagon meant the women had to make the cover; Keturah spun the flax for a huge piece of linen, which her mother-in-law and a friend wove into cloth. With Keturah spinning away, George read to her. Finally, the months of preparation were finished and in April 1848 they were ready to set out for the edge of the continent. Keturah couldn’t face going to church the last Sunday, after they had already made their farewells, “so George stays with me and will take a rest, for tomorrow will be a busy day.”
The big day came and “Father Belknap’s voice was heard with that well known sound: ‘Wife, wife, rise and flutter.’” As Keturah took her place in the wagon, the preacher came by and “told me to keep up good courage and said, ‘don’t fret, whatever happens don’t fret and cry. Courage will do more for you than anything else.’” That could be the motto of the pioneers, something to embroider on the wagon covers. Keturah kept a detailed journal of life on the trail, including this entry twelve days into the trip: “We all started but had only gone about five miles when a little boy was run over by the wagon and instantly killed. We then stopped and buried the child. We were near a settlement so he was not left there alone.” In addition to the sad observations, Keturah noted the funny ones. After four weeks of traveling, they hit Pawnee Indian territory and thought it wise to join a larger company for defense. With so many people, some rules needed to be established and leaders selected, not easy tasks, according to Keturah: “They have quite a time with the election of officers—every man wants an office.”
A posse of men rode into the camp from the west, warning about attacks, and some in the party started agitating to go back home. “In the next wagon behind ours a man and wife are quarreling. She wants to turn back and he won’t, so she says she will go and leave him—that these men will furnish her a horse and she will leave him with the children and he will have a good time with that crying baby. Then he used some very bad words and said he would put it out of the way. Just then I heard a muffled cry and a heavy thud as though something was thrown against the wagon box and she said, ‘Oh, you’ve killed it’ and he swore some more and told her to keep her mouth shut or he would give her some of the same.” Just then the man was summoned to take his turn keeping guard, “so he and his wife were parted for the night. The baby was not killed. I write this to show how easy we can be deceived.”
As they journeyed on, Keturah’s diary petered out. “For want of space, I must cut these notes down and will pass over some interesting things. Watts and the sheep pulled out and fell behind…. The old mother Watts said after they got through, ‘Yes, George Belknap’s wife is a little woman but she wore the pants on that train.’ So I came into notoriety before I knew it.” Her last entry from the trail is about her boy, Jesse, who was very sick with “mountain fever”: “I have held the little boy in my lap on a pillow and tended him as best I could. I thought in the night we would have to leave him here and I thought if we did, I would be likely to stay with him. But at day light we seemed to get fresh courage.”
The Belknaps reached Oregon and the men set off for the California gold mines. In April 1849, Keturah, once again keeping a journal, wrote, “We women folks began to realize that we were the providers for our families…we had to rustle for our families and also for the church.” When the men returned with little to show for their adventure, they started serious farming. But George Belknap couldn’t stay put. Though Keturah was a respected personage in the settlement, acting as nurse and midwife to the immigrants, and friend to the Indians, he uprooted the family again, moving in Oregon, and then, in 1879, to Washington. Ten years later, they celebrated in style their golden wedding anniversary, but still they weren’t settled. They lost the farm in 1895 and moved in with their children. George died in 1897, but Keturah lived until 1913. Her grandfather had fought in the Revolutionary War, her parents had been some of the early settlers of the first frontier, then she and her husband moved with the nation ever west. She buried six children in the course of her journeys; five others survived her. Their children understood that their grandmother’s primitive and hastily written journal told the story of what it took to extend the country from coast to coast.
Elkanah and Mary Richardson Walker: Talk to Me
Mary Richardson might have been born female at a time in history when a girl could not expect to have goals of her own, but she had ambition—she wanted to be a missionary. To fulfill her mission one thing was necessary: she had to be married. Born in Maine in 1811, Mary was known for her scientific interests and her wit, and she was ready to share her feelings, at least with her diary. She started keeping it when she was a twenty-two-year-old not particularly interested in marriage: “I see very few men that are perfect enough to please me.” A couple of years later, however, her tune began to change: “my attention has been called of late to the subject of matrimony.” But Mary was not at all happy with the man who was making her an offer: “Ought I to bid adieu to all of my cherished hopes and unite my destiny with that of a mere farmer, with little education and no refinement?…In a word, shall I, to escape the horrors of perpetual celibacy, settle down with the vulgar? I cannot do it.” Pretty risqué stuff for an aspiring missionary in 1836! She didn’t settle down, petitioning instead to the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions for an assignment, but was told she must be married. A mutual friend introduced her to Elkanah Walker, who also wanted to do missionary work.
The first impression wasn’t very promising: “I saw nothing particularly interesting or disagreeable in the man, though I pretty much made up my mind that he was not a missionary, but rather an ordinary kind of unaspiring man who was anxious to be looking up a settlement.” But then she read the letter he brought her, and it was clear they had the same goals in mind, which presented her with a quandary. “The hand of Providence appeared so plain that I could not but feel that there was something like duty about it, and yet how to go to work to feel satisfied and love him, I hardly know.” Soon, though, he grew on her: “I have no more doubts as to being able to love him.” There were times after that when she did have doubts, but they stayed married, and eventually happily married for many years to come. But it was a rocky road along the way, both literally and figuratively.
The other suitor stayed after her, telling her that “people did not think I was cutting a great cheese” with Elkanah. The competitor for her affections succeeded in raising her doubts: “Can it be that I have been mistaken?” Then, when Elkanah sent protestations of desire—“I love you, therefore I want you,” he wrote to her; “to fold you in my arms, hear from your faithful lips that I am still your dearest one would be sweet, sweet indeed”—she melted. “Oh, Elkanah what a desolate being should I be if you should forsake.” She at least believed herself to be head over heels in love. In December 1837, word came from the missionary board that they should expect to leave in April to go “beyond the Rocky Mountains.” They set a wedding date for March, but even as they prepared to be married, tensions between them cropped up. In January, she received a letter from him which “contained such severe criticism as I almost feel as if I could not bear it…. I will however retaliate a little by just letting him know that I have noticed a thing or two in him as well.” Shades of Abigail! This was not going to be an easy match. He might have gotten some sense of that when the bride wore black to the wedding, to show the grief she felt in leaving her family, even though she had always wanted to go to the missions. A week after she was married, Mary wrote, “Nothing gives me such a solitary feeling as to be called Mrs. Walker…. My father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters all answer to the name Richardson. The name W. seems to imply to me a severed branch.”
Soon she was truly severed. Mary and Elkanah, along with two other couples, left Missouri, the “gateway to the West,” in April of 1838. Mary was already pregnant, and seemed at sixes and sevens about how to behave. “Should feel much better if Mr. W. would only treat me with more cordiality. It is so hard to please him I almost despair of ever being able. If I stir, it is forwardness, if I am still, it is inactivity.” Here were these newlyweds, crammed together with two other couples in close quarters, traveling difficult terrain and trying to get to know each other all at the same time. A few days later she recounts, “Had a long bawl. Husband spoke so cross I could scarcely bear it, but he seemed to pity me a little when he found how bad I felt. Today has been very kind.” That didn’t last long, however; a couple of weeks later she was fretting again: “Husband sick. In a big worry lest he does not feel as well satisfied with me as he ought.” She, too, was sick, so much so that she was bled as a treatment; she doesn’t tell us by whom. But by June she was feeling better, and reflecting on her husband: “I can but believe he loves me. I, however, experience some anxiety on this account. But I think I am gaining ground.” She wanted desperately to please him; still, she had trouble staying cheerful, never feeling really well, wanting to cry, fearful of danger: “A long journey before me, going I know not whither, without mother or sister to attend me, can I expect to survive it all?” The group did follow a strenuous course. One day in July they rode thirty-five miles without stopping, and she was four and a half months pregnant. Emotionally, though, things were getting better: “Becoming every day more fondly attached to my husband. Indeed he seems every day to become increasingly kind and I am more and more confident of my ability to please him and make him happy.” Making her happy turned out to be another matter altogether.
Finally, on August 29, 1838, after 129 days, Mary and Elkanah reached Oregon, where fellow missionaries feted them with melons and salt salmon and pumpkin pies. It was a great celebration, joined by a few dozen Indians. Then came reality—nine adults and two children in one house over the winter, while Walker and one of the men who traveled with them searched out their ideal spot for a mission. Mary truly missed him: “I can hardly refrain from tears every time I think of him…. I have so good a husband…. I have enjoyed his society so much.” When he returned in October, she was much relieved: “Was glad once more to see my husband and he appears glad to see me and I suppose he really was for he has no faculty of making believe. Could not sleep all night for joy.” Over the fall Mary wrote a good deal about how much she loved her husband, and worried he might not love her as much. He could completely undo her with a word: “Slept little last night. Mostly in consequence of something husband said to me.” Her chief complaints, though, had to do with the other women. Mary thought they let her work too hard establishing their household, considering her pregnancy. Soon she was grateful for their company.
Mary woke early in the morning on December 7 and realized she was in labor. The ladies came to her aid, but they knew she had a while to go before the baby. After about four hours, “felt as if I almost wished I had never been married. But there was no retreating, meet it I must.” A couple of hours later a baby boy arrived, and when Elkanah returned from his travels that evening, it was with “plenty of kisses for me and my boy.” Mary had a hard time nursing and she missed everyone at home; maybe this missionary life wasn’t such a good idea. She was filled with self-doubt: “I have desired to become a missionary and why? Perhaps only to avoid duties at home.” She now had a new home, a log cabin they moved to in January, and new worries about her husband. She still didn’t seem to be able to please him, and she wanted to fervently. Romance was her goal: “I can never with all my care make myself what he would like me to be. I never intended to be the wife of a man that did not love and respect me from his heart and not from a stern sense of duty…. I am tempted to exclaim, woe is me that I am a wife. Better to have lived and died a miserable old maid and with none to share and thereby aggravate my misfortune. But it is too late.” Later that night, Mary told her husband how bad she felt and he apologized, assuring her he loved her: “So I think I will try to feel better.” Still, her entries continue to complain of his harsh words, of her upset at his unhappiness with her. Meanwhile, Mary was beginning to fulfill the mission she had so long sought, to teach the Indians; she was also pregnant with another child, and trying to cope with frontier life. A wall of the house fell down one day; another day, after doing the milking, Mary “found it necessary to call my husband.” He arrived, and quickly called a doctor, and on May 24, 1840, a baby girl was born. Mary had now settled into her life well enough that she was able to take up the household chores—ironing, baking, washing, milking—within a few weeks after the baby’s birth, and her missionary work soon after that. By the end of July, she tells us excitedly about her teaching: “think I succeeded pretty well as the children seemed pleased…. I gave them a lesson in geography on an egg shell which I had painted for a globe.” Soon, she voiced the cry of all busy women: “It is all I can do to get along, do my work and take care of my children. How I can answer a single letter I do not know.”
With two children, and finally performing her missionary work, Mary started casting a critical eye toward Elkanah, instead of just worrying what he thought of her: “Have felt the past week several times as if I could no longer endure certain things that I find in my husband…. What grieves me most is that the only being on earth with whom I can have much opportunity for intercourse manifests uniformly an unwillingness to engage me in social reading or conversation.” He wouldn’t talk to her! Who knows why not, we don’t have his side of the story, but he was driving her crazy. At home she would have been able to visit with her mother and sisters, to share secrets with female friends, but on the frontier she had only her husband. She wished she could make up for his lack of conversation by “improving my mind” but she had too much to do, she needed his company. Mary became increasingly introspective: “My husband and children seem to engross my heart and I fear they will be taken from me.” But her fretfulness did not get in the way of her work; she made such notations as, “Cast wicks and dipped nineteen dozen candles.” Occasionally there are notes about news from home—which she refers to as “the United States”—like this one in May 1841: “I am not pleased with the course my brothers are pursuing in regard to certain young ladies.” Over the months, Mary seemed to get into a rhythm of housework and teaching, if her diary is to be believed, and then in March 1842: “Rose about 5 o’clock…got my housework done up about 9. Baked six more loaves of bread…. Nine o’clock pm was delivered of a son.”
Mary was overwhelmed, and soon truly depressed, a word she actually used in her accounts, instead of the term of the era, “melancholy.” Her oldest boy was a hellion and she didn’t know how to handle him, the younger boy was underfoot, the work was never ending, the weather was miserable, her husband was absent either physically or emotionally or both. What a relief it would have been to be with her mother! As she baked eighteen loaves of bread one day, Mary pined, “What a handy thing an oven would be.” But they were progressing in the mission. They had a printing press and used it to provide the Indians with a primer in their own Flathead language. The Walker family was progressing as well. Another boy was born in March 1846.
The baby boy, Jeremiah, was healthy and she had an easier time nursing than with the others, and Mary seemed to settle down some; by now she was thirty-five years old. She also took up her old interest in science, getting her husband’s “permission to pursue collecting a few objects in natural history.” And, for a little insight into the mores of the frontier: “Teacher’s daughter had a child born. Her father was enraged and threatened to shoot himself.” Then, in December 1847, came the horrible news. The Whitmans, the couple they had stayed with when they first reached Oregon, had been murdered by Indians, along with others in their mission. It became famous throughout the West as the “Whitman Massacre” and scared off some future settlers. What happened to the ones who escaped? That was Mary’s worry, along with her fear that her family, too, despite their friendship with the Indians, might be attacked. And she was once again ready to have a baby; a nine-pound boy was born a couple of weeks after the Walkers received news of the Whitman slaughter. The couple had been in Oregon just ten years and had produced five children. As hopeful as she now felt about the prospects for her family, Mary no longer expected success for their mission: “I fear our labors for the Indians must soon cease…. The hope of our seeing them much better than they now are, fondly as I would wish to cherish, is all hope against hope.”
And so, after all that, they abandoned the mission. Mary had married Elkanah because she wanted to be a missionary, and missionaries needed to be married. The missionary part didn’t work; the married part did. After the massacre, the Walkers settled in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, living simply and raising eight children. After almost forty years of marriage, Elkanah died; by then it was his company that Mary missed: “I think of so many things I want to tell Mr. Walker, I realize more and more how much more I love him than anyone else.” Either he had started talking to her somewhere along the line, or she had decided to talk to him regardless of response. They had actually made the trip all the way back to Maine once, after the railroad made it possible, but she didn’t stay there with those female friends she had so longed to see. Mary Richardson returned with her husband to the frontier, which had become their home.
Clyde and Elinor Pruitt Stewart: Married in Haste, No Cause to Repent
Not all pioneers were married. Single men, and occasionally single women, would set out on their own to try to establish homesteads in the West. One who thrilled to the enterprise was Elinor Pruitt, a hardworking woman who expected to make it on her own. But she ended up getting an assist, and some affection, from Clyde Stewart, a husband who delighted her.
Elinor Pruitt was born into a poor family in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the late 1870s. She took over as caretaker for her brothers and sisters as a young teenager, after her parents died. She went to work for the railroad, moving steadily west and managing to educate herself enough that she wrote articles for the Kansas City Star after she got married at the age of twenty-two to another worker for the railroad, Mr. Rupert. Four years later her husband was killed in a railroad accident, leaving his wife with a baby girl, Jerrine. To support her daughter and herself, Elinor moved to Denver, and hired out as a laundress and housekeeper to a woman named Mrs. Coney, who became her friend. But the young woman wanted to homestead, and in 1909, after she heard about the wide-open spaces of Wyoming from a friend, Elinor quickly placed a newspaper advertisement asking for a job on a homestead. A Scottish rancher looking for help, who happened to be traveling through, saw the ad and hired her. Instead of a journal, Elinor wrote letters about her adventures to Mrs. Coney, which were published as a book, Letters of a Woman Homesteader, in 1914.
Traveling by train and stagecoach, it took three days for the Scottish rancher, Elinor, and Jerrine to reach Burnt Fork, Wyoming. When they arrived, the new employee deemed everything “just lovely for me. I have a very, very comfortable situation and Mr. Stewart is absolutely no trouble, for as soon as he has his meals, he retires to his room and plays on his bagpipe, only he calls it his ‘bugpeep.’ It is ‘The Campbells are Coming’ with variations, at intervals all day long and from seven to eleven at night. Sometimes I wish they would make haste and get here.” Never losing her humor, Elinor shows herself a woman of endless energy and boundless optimism, easy to please, and eager to file for her homestead. After about six weeks in Wyoming, she did, choosing land adjoining Stewart’s and declaring herself “a bloated landowner.” The trip to the filing office meant taking Jerrine by wagon through snowstorms, meeting wolves along the way, enjoying the spectacular scenery even so, and then returning home to Mr. Stewart. “If you will believe me, the Scot was glad to see me and didn’t herald the Campbells for two hours after I got home. I’ll tell you, it is mighty seldom any one’s so much appreciated.”
Mr. Stewart soon married Elinor, but she didn’t want to tell her old employer. Instead, her next letter, in September 1909, dwells on the joys of the busy summer just past. Mr. Stewart had been unable to find enough men to do all the work, so, without asking, one day when he was out looking for help, Elinor took out the mowing machine, which she had learned to operate as a girl. “I had enough cut before he got back to show him I knew how, and as he came back manless, he was delighted as well as surprised. I was glad because I really like to mow, and besides that, I am adding feathers to my cap in a surprising way. When you see me again you will think I am wearing a feather duster, but it is only that I have been said to have almost as much sense as a ‘mon,’ and that is an honor I never aspired to, even in my wildest dreams.” This was a woman who worked day and night and seemed to love it, but she would occasionally take a day, ride up into the mountains with Jerrine, and just bask in the beauty, without any need of consort.
At Thanksgiving, a young woman in the neighborhood got married at the Stewart house, where “our dinner was a success, but that is not to be wondered at. Every woman for miles around contributed.” Elinor draws a picture of homestead weddings, where first the justice of the peace came, then an enormous dinner was served immediately in order to finish before the obligatory and much-anticipated dance. “Dances are never given in the home here, but in ‘the hall.’ Every settlement has one and the invitations are merely written announcements posted everywhere.” The accounts of Christmas also paint a happy scene; still, Elinor had not let on that she was married to the man of the house. The following April, she gave a clue. She told her former boss that she had built her homestead house adjoining Mr. Stewart’s, “so that I could ‘hold down’ my land and job at the same time.” Then she made a tantalizing admission: “I have not treated you quite frankly about something you had a right to know about. I am ashamed and I regret very much that I have not told you.” In the next letter, Elinor decides to “confess and get it done with. The thing I have done is to marry Mr. Stewart. It was such an inconsistent thing to do that I was ashamed to tell you. And, too, I was afraid you would think I didn’t need your friendship and might desert me.”
That didn’t happen, clearly, because Elinor kept up her correspondence. In the next letter she tells Mrs. Coney, “I have been a very busy woman since I began this letter to you several days ago. A dear little child has joined the angels. I dressed him and helped to make his casket. There is no minister in this whole country and I could not bear the little broken lily bud to be just carted away and buried, so I arranged the funeral and conducted the services. I know I am unworthy and in no way fitted for such a mission, but I did my poor best, and if no one else is comforted, I am.” It’s one of the few sad moments Elinor recounts over four years. Some letters show the playfulness in her marriage, like one she wrote in the fall of 1911, where after a long story about tricking Mr. Stewart into taking her to town, Elinor suddenly closes with this news: “I am not going to let my baby prevent me from having many enjoyable outings. We call our boy Henry Clyde for his father. He is a dear little thing, but he is a lusty yeller for baby’s rights.” She did keep taking her “outings,” camping trips with Jerrine and the baby on which they encountered all kinds of excitement, be it horse thieves or snowstorms, in between many hours of work on the ranch, where she still insisted on making money to pay off her own homestead.
Finally, two and a half years after she arrived, Elinor decided to tell her friend all about her husband and her marriage. She said she hadn’t before because “I could not even begin without telling you what a good man he is and I didn’t want you to think I could do nothing but brag.” She was also still embarrassed by the speed with which she married him. “But although I married in haste, I have no cause to repent. That is very fortunate because I have never had one bit of leisure to repent in. So I am lucky all around. The engagement was powerfully short because both agreed that the trend of events and ranch work seemed to require that we be married first and do our ‘sparking’ afterwards.” Elinor explains that they had to “chink” the wedding in between the planting because “Wyoming ranchers can scarcely take time even to be married in the springtime.” He sent for a marriage license by mail and called the neighboring justice of the peace to come for the ceremony; she fixed up a dress, cleaned up the house, and cooked up a meal. “Everything was topsy-turvy, and I had a very strong desire to run away. But I always did hate a ‘piker,’ so I stood pat.” She described how she had wanted to “stay foot-loose and free” but first she wanted to try homesteading, so there she was.
Also, Elinor revealed that the dead baby she had written about was her own. “For a long time my heart was crushed. He was such a sweet beautiful boy. I wanted him so much…so you see our union is sealed by love and welded by great sorrow.” Over the next two years, “God has given me two more precious sons. The sorrow is not so keen now.” To read her high-spirited letters, it would have been impossible to know that Elinor had been grieving. She was always cataloging her blessings, among them her “clean, honest husband, my kind, gentle milk cows, my garden which I make myself.” As happy as she was with her husband, Elinor wouldn’t let him on her land. She was a great proselytizer for homesteading as the answer to poverty: “any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed.” She goes on to explain all about the Department of Agriculture’s role, and how the homesteaders can experiment with different seeds. “I would not, for anything, allow Mr. Stewart to do anything toward improving my place, for I want the fun and experience myself. And I want to be able to speak from my experience when I tell others what they can do.” Slowly, over the months, she opened up more about Clyde. In June 1913, four years after she arrived in Wyoming, Elinor wrote, “I am as proud and happy as the day I became his wife. I wish you knew him, but I suspect I had better not brag too much, lest you think me not quite sincere.”
In the last letter, written in November 1913, Elinor rejoices in her success. “I set out to prove a woman could ranch if she wanted to…now Jerrine and I have put in our cellar full, and this is what we have: one large bin of potatoes (more than two tons), half a ton of carrots, a large bin of beets, one of turnips, one of onions, one of parsnips, and on the other side of the cellar we have more than one hundred heads of cabbage.” She lists the pickles and preserves she’s made over the summer, the ten cows milked twice daily, providing enough butter to pay for a year’s supply of flour and gasoline, plus the chickens and the turkeys. “In all I have told about I have had no help but Jerrine.” Clyde’s mother came in the summer and helped with the cooking and the babies, but Elinor proudly concludes, “I have tried every kind of work this ranch affords and I can do any of it.” She didn’t need her Clyde to support her. She needed him to love her, and he did.
Elinor Pruitt Stewart’s experience with marriage was not the norm; she enjoyed it but didn’t need it. For most of the men and women of the plains and prairies, it was just the opposite—they depended on each other, they sought comfort and stability. After all, these couples were picking up their lives, shaking up their societies, reinventing their relationships. Romance was a little suspect, passion distracting. Marriage was a partnership, a bargain—he stayed sober, did the clearing and the plowing and the planting and the harvesting; she produced children, did the gardening and the cooking, the pickling and preserving, the spinning and the sewing, the candle making and the animal tending. The basic contract’s made clear even in some of the songs of the time:
[He] Go tell her to make me a cambric shirt…Then she can be a true lover of mine.
[She] Go tell him to clear me an acre of land…Then he can be a true lover of mine.
It might not have been the stuff of hearts and roses, but it worked. These practical people stayed together and settled the country.
NOTE: The writings of Keturah Belknap and Mary Walker have been taken from Women of the West, by Cathy Luchetti and Carol Olwell (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1982). We corrected spelling and punctuation for easier reading. Elinor Pruitt Stewart’s Letters of a Woman Homesteader was reprinted by the Mariner Books division of Houghton Mifflin in 1988.
We can both trace our origins to Europe—Cokie’s family first came from England early in the seventeenth century, Steve’s from Russia and Poland three hundred years later. And we both grew up with a strong interest in our foreign-born forebears and the stories of their journeys. Immigrants have generally tried to transport the customs of the “old country,” wherever that was, to their new homes, and invariably, those customs have crumbled under the pressures to be “modern” and “American.” When it came to marriage, couples quickly discovered that the old rules no longer applied. They were free to make choices and cross lines that would have been unthinkable for their parents.
In this section we focus on Steve’s tribe, Eastern Europeans, and in that world, the concept of romantic love was pretty foreign. Couples were often brought together by their parents, sometimes with the help of a professional matchmaker. Reporter Lillian Wald, writing about the immigrant Jews of New York early in the century, quoted a shocked father as saying, “What? Let a girl of seventeen, with no judgment whatsoever, decide on anything so important as a husband?” Alfred Kazin, in his lovely memoir, A Walker in the City, says of his parents’ generation: “Their marriages were neither happy nor unhappy; they were arrangements.” And he describes how stunned he was to hear his cousin and her friends talk about their romances: “They were the first grown-up people I had ever met who used the word love without embarrassment. ‘Libbe! Libbe!’ my mother would explode whenever one of them protested that she could not, after all, marry a man she did not love. ‘What is this love you make such a stew about? You do not like the way he holds his cigarette? Marry him first and it will all come out right in the end.’”
Similar stories run through all immigrant communities. In writing about our Greek experience, we describe Cypriot families fleeing from war who discover that in a refugee camp, the old custom of needing a dowry to get married has been destroyed, along with their home villages. Today in California, parents place ads in Indian newspapers seeking appropriate grooms for their daughters. But those traditions are struggling to survive. One of Steve’s students at George Washington University describes a family of Indian immigrants with three daughters. The parents demanded that the oldest girl, a doctor, enter an arranged marriage. The second daughter, while on a longer leash, was barred from attending her senior prom with a date. By the time the third daughter hit high school, the parents allowed her to fly to Mexico on spring break with a bunch of friends. In just a few years, the new culture of California had overwhelmed the old culture of India. Every Sunday, Cokie is struck by the banns of marriage announced in the church bulletin: the couples might all be Catholics, but there are a lot of O’Hearns marrying Garcias and Nitkowskis marrying Nguyens.
For the first generation of immigrants, as Kazin points out, marriage was often an arrangement, not a romance, and in some ways that was a whole lot easier. Expectations were lower and community support was greater. But there was no escaping the change. As these immigrants and their children adapted their Old World customs to the New, one of their hardest adjustments was coping with a culture where everybody was making “such a stew” about love and marriage.
Irene Gut Opdyke: Only a Girl
In the fall of 1956, Irene Gut was having lunch in a small coffee shop on New York’s East Side, near the United Nations. The place was full, and a tall man with glasses asked politely if he could share her table. When he sat down, he looked at her more closely and said, “I know you.” The man was William Opdyke, and he did know her. They had met more than six years before, in a displaced-persons camp in Germany. She was a young Polish woman then, a refugee from the war, and he was an American working for the UN. That day in the camp she had told him her story, and he had never forgotten it. Or her.
We learned Irene’s full story during several long interviews that expanded on her memoir, In My Hands, a book aimed at high-school students. The tale starts in September 1939. Irene was a seventeen-year-old nursing student in the city of Radom on the day the Nazis invaded Poland. Raised a strict Catholic, she had never kissed a boy and wanted to be a nun. As the German forces pushed eastward toward Radom, she and other medical personnel joined the outmanned Polish army and fled to the forests of the Ukraine. One night she and several soldiers slipped into a nearby town on a bartering mission. She was posted as a lookout when a Russian patrol came by and spotted her. “I was brutally violated, beaten and left in the snow to die,” she recalls. “But I did not die. God did have other plans for me.”
Another Russian patrol found her and brought her to a hospital. After recovering her strength, she went back to Radom in search of her family, but she was conscripted to work in a hotel serving the German high command. The back side of the building looked down into the Jewish ghetto, and after watching from a window as a Gestapo force swept through the area, gunning down helpless victims, she decided to act. The next day she stole some food from the hotel and pushed it under the ghetto fence.
A few weeks later she saw a Nazi officer fling a Jewish baby into the air and then shoot it with his pistol as the baby’s mother watched. Something cracked deep inside her. “Like a little child, I have tantrum with my maker,” she recalled, her English still tinged with a Polish accent. “But in the morning, there was an answer in my soul, in my heart. God gives us free will, to be good or bad. I asked God at that moment for the opportunity to help.” A resistance fighter was born. Gradually she took bigger and bigger steps: from stealing food and passing secrets to hiding Jewish fugitives and raiding Nazi convoys. As her work got riskier, she realized she could be discovered and executed at any moment, but the knowledge that she “could only be killed once” kept her going. In her memoirs, Irene writes: “I only wanted not to die in too much pain, and to foil the Germans as much as I could before I went.”
Transferred by the Nazis to the Ukrainian city of Ternopol, she met a group of Jewish laborers assigned to the laundry she was running for the German officers. Through her contacts with the laborers she smuggled food and intelligence to the Jewish underground hiding in the nearby forests. But when word came that the Gestapo was planning to liquidate every Jew in the city, including the slave laborers, her friends were suddenly facing mortal danger. She promised she would help, but one of the men, older and gloomier than the others, dismissed her with a shrug: “You’re only a young girl. What can you do?”
Quite a lot, it turned out, but Irene refuses to take all the credit. “I believe a miracle happened,” she says simply. The German major she was working for commandeered a large villa and put Irene in charge of the housekeeping. Designed by a Jewish architect, the basement of the villa contained a network of secret rooms and passages, and just hours before the Gestapo arrived, she hid a dozen of her friends in the major’s house.
They lived there for nine months. During the day, after the major left, the Jews would emerge from the cellar and help Irene run the house. At night they would return to their hiding place, and one frequent dinner guest was the local head of the Gestapo, who never knew he was eating meals prepared by Jews living literally beneath his feet. The scheme was working well until one of the Jewish women discovered she was pregnant. The group decided to abort the baby—any other course was too dangerous—but Irene pleaded with them. Wait, don’t let Hitler have this life, too. The Russians are advancing and something could happen.
But then danger appeared from another direction. One day Irene was walking back to the villa and ran into a crowd blocking a square where a gallows had been built. A Polish couple and their two small children were being hanged for hiding a Jewish family. Irene was so upset that when she got back to the villa, she forgot to lock the front door behind her. Two Jewish girls, about her age, came up from the basement to console her, and suddenly, without warning, the German major walked in.
He did not know that ten others were in the cellar, but he was still furious. That night the Nazi officer exacted a bargain from Irene: I’ll protect your friends if you become my mistress. The next morning, she writes, she fled the major’s bedroom and filled a tub: “I sank into water so hot it made me cry, and my tears plinked into the water as I scrubbed myself. This was worse than rape.” And yet she kept her bargain with the major. “I had banked on his affection for me for too long, used him for too long,” she writes. “I could not be surprised now that it had come to this accounting.” And besides, she adds, her shame “was a small price to pay for so many lives.”
Sixteen lives in all, plus the baby conceived in the basement of the villa. With Russian forces approaching Ternopol, the Nazis fled and Irene smuggled her charges into the forest, to join the Jewish underground, and that’s where the baby was born a few months later. The German major took Irene with him on the retreat westward, but she managed to evade him in the city of Kielce and join a band of Polish partisans who were harassing any target they could find, German or Russian. She took the nom de guerre “Mala,” Polish for “little,” and fell in love with the group’s leader, Janek. They were planning to marry and settled on May 5, 1944, as their wedding day. Three days before, she was at the home of Janek’s parents, trying on her wedding dress, when her groom burst in the door, surprising her. “It’s bad luck to see the bride in her dress before the wedding,” his mother scolded, but he had news. A German transport was moving through the area that night and he would lead a raid against it. Irene pleaded with him not to go. “But, sweetheart,” he teased, “I’m the fearless leader.” Janek was killed in the ambush and buried in the forest.
With her love lost and her heart shattered, Irene made contact with some of the Jews she’d helped to save. The Germans were gone, and the Jews felt free to emerge from hiding, but the Russian occupation weighed heavily. Irene was particularly anxious to see the baby, Roman Haller, who’d been born in the forest, and her eagerness dulled her survival instincts. Just blocks from the Hallers’ house, she was arrested by Russian police and interrogated for days about her partisan comrades. Again she escaped, but there was nothing left for her in Poland. If she looked for her family, she would place them in grave danger. In a final irony, her Jewish friends found her a forged transit pass with a Jewish alias, Sonia Sofierstein. With her blond hair dyed black, she took a train to Germany, and in May of 1946, she settled into life at a DP camp near the city of Hessich-Lichtenau. She’d been in the camp more than three years on the day, in the summer of 1949, that William Opdyke arrived to interview the residents.
It was a rabbi in the camp who introduced them. As she remembers: “We had six languages between us but not one in common—except the language of laughter. We could not help chuckling at the predicament we were in. He called across the room to a colleague, and in a few moments we had another American with us, one who spoke German.” Opdyke asked a few questions but mainly let her talk. As she writes in her memoir: “I left nothing out. I think I wanted to shock him, to tell this well-fed American what a simple Polish girl was capable of. Opdyke had been taking notes, but he finally just put his pen down and stared at me. For a moment, I feared that he did not believe what I had told him. He said something to the interpreter in a gruff voice. ‘Mr. Opdyke says he feels honored to have met you, and that the United States would be proud to have you as a citizen.’” In our conversations with her, Irene embellished the story: “I liked him very much, a man with black hair with lots of silver in it. Tall, very distinguished, that reminded me of my father.” But she says sternly, “there was no romance” at the time. He was married, and he left without giving her an address or a telephone number in America.
Later that year she arrived in New York aboard the troopship John Muir, which was carrying refugees from Europe. The Jewish Resettlement Organization found her a place to live in Brooklyn and a job in a corset factory, but they could not replace what she had lost: “I was alone without money, or family, or marketable skills.” After getting her first wages from the factory, she remembers: “I was so proud of myself—I could earn money!” But she lived quietly, still nursing her emotional wounds. When we asked if she had any social life in those years, Irene replied: “No, no. I was scared of men. I didn’t want to have anything to do with men.” She deliberately dressed to hide her beauty, in drab dark clothes, without any makeup. Still, one day when she was heading for work, a group of young men whistled at her. “In Poland, they do that for prostitutes, and when I came to the factory, I was so upset,” she says. “I asked the other girls, ‘Why did they do that to me?’” But she got a quick, amused reply: “In America, when they stop doing that you’re in trouble.”
After several years in the corset factory, Irene met Ruth Altman, a Jewish dressmaker originally from Poland. Ruth hired Irene for her business and the two women became friends and roommates. They went to movies and plays together, and the chill that had gripped Irene’s heart for so long began to thaw. “I was already six years in the United States and I quieted down,” she remembers. “I started having dreams. I wanted a normal life.” Then one day Ruth sent her on an errand, and Bill Opdyke sat down at her table. During lunch, he explained to her that his wife had died, and as they were finishing, he asked, “May I call you?” Irene’s English was still so poor she had trouble explaining to him where she lived, but he figured it out. On their first date they went to a nightclub and everybody else was laughing at the jokes. Irene didn’t get most of them, but apparently it didn’t matter. They danced instead—“he was a wonderful dancer and played the piano beautifully”—and she went home and prayed that he would call her again. He did, and when he proposed six weeks later, Irene remembers: “I was ready to accept. I was a woman, I wanted a child.”
They were married quietly, on November 14, 1956, and Irene invited only two guests, Ruth Altman and Ruth’s mother. In the wedding pictures she is wearing a silk cocktail dress, with a short white veil—nothing like the fancy gown she was trying on that day, more than twelve years before, when her beloved Janek was killed. But she is clearly happy, slender and blond, beaming up at her husband who is almost a head taller. When it came to sex, she was both very innocent and deeply scarred, and as she puts it: “Bill knew my story, so he was very gentle with me.”
She was so inexperienced that when she got pregnant a few months later, she didn’t know the signs. But when she started asking for some Polish food she hadn’t eaten in years, a friend took her to the doctor and he confirmed her condition. Bill was fifteen years older, he already had three children by his first marriage, and Irene was nervous about how he would take the news. He was pleased for her, but not exactly a modern, engaged father. After their daughter, Janina, was born—named for Irene’s favorite sister back in Poland—Bill “never changed a diaper, he didn’t know what to do, he was more like a grandfather.”
Their time together was happy but brief. Bill was stricken with Alzheimer’s, and as Irene recalls: “He became a man I did not know. He would go into these rages and I thought he did not love me. It’s the most painful sickness, people change in front of your eyes.” Money was running low, the family was in danger of losing their house. And then, says Irene, “a miracle happened—again.” A rabbi who knew her story interceded. The Jewish old-age home in the area took in Bill Opdyke, a Christian, without charging a fee, and he died there five years later.
Today Bill and Irene’s daughter, Janina Opdyke Smith, is the mother of two sons, and the grandmother of two girls, and Irene says proudly, “I’m a great-grandmother now.” Her marriage did not last long, but it lasted long enough. The man who gave her a new home in America also gave her something else. He gave back her life.
Abe and Miriam Rogow: A Photo in the Window Sam and Norma Weiss: A Book of Poems
These are two family sagas that Steve has told for years. For this book he interviewed several elderly relatives, filling gaps and correcting mistakes, and he retells the stories here.
My grandfather, Abe Rogow, was always a restless person, full of schemes and dreams. As a boy, he helped his father in the textile business, running errands and collecting shipments of cloth at the train station. His hometown of Bialystok, now in eastern Poland, was then under Russian domination, and his older sister became an early convert to Bolshevism. Family legend has it that his sister would occasionally ask young Abe to pick up a package for her, and since he was well known at the station, no questions were asked. But they should have been. His sister’s packages contained copies of Iskra, the Leninist newspaper, that were being smuggled into Russia. If the bundles had broken, and revealed their contents, Abe would have been shot on the spot, but fortunately for me that never happened.
It was Zionism, not communism, that fired Abe’s imagination, and he was still a teenager when he stole money from his father and made his way to Palestine. I have a photo of him working on the first road ever built in Tel Aviv, and his plan was to settle there and help build a new Jewish state. One problem: if a young man was drafted into the czar’s army, and failed to appear for induction, the penalties on his family could be severe. So after a few years away, Abe returned home, a chalutz, a pioneer, with the dust and the dash of foreign lands still clinging to his clothes. He would go into the army, save his parents a problem, and see what happened.
Meanwhile, a young woman named Miriam Wasilsky had come to Bialystok from the village of Eishishok, probably to find a job and a husband. She had her picture taken by a local photographer, and he displayed it in his shop window as a sample of his work. While Abe was waiting for his draft notice, he had a lot of time on his hands, and as he roamed around Bialystok, he noticed the photo of the girl. Every day he’d pass the shop window, and gradually he fell in love. As the legend goes, he finally met Miriam one night at a gathering of young people and stammered, “You’re the girl in the photograph.”
Soon they agreed to be married, and I have a set of photographs taken at about this time. The date on one is stamped 1912, and it shows my grandparents gazing straight into the camera, their heads tilted toward each other, barely touching, as they faced a very uncertain future. She’s wearing a dark dress, with a lace panel at her throat, and a slightly saucy expression. He’s wearing a white shirt with a banded collar, in the Russian style, and looks a bit nervous. There’s another shot, of Miriam alone, that shows why Abe fell in love with her. Her huge dark eyes leap through time and space, looking directly into mine. And as I look back at her, I find myself thinking, “Oh, Grandma, if you knew then what I know now…”
Under Russian rules, once you were drafted you were the responsibility of the army, not your parents, so Abe hit on a scheme. After he joined up, he’d escape as soon as possible, get back to Palestine, and send for Miriam. His mother aided the plan by making him a special cap. On one side it looked like an army cap, but when you flipped it over, it became a civilian hat. As he left for training camp, he put on a layer of his own clothes under his uniform, and as best I can tell, he spent no more than a couple of hours in the service. The first time the train stopped, he leaped out, stripped off his uniform, flipped over his cap, and took off.
Abe wound up in Odessa, a Black Sea port where ships left for Palestine, but since he had no papers and was a deserter from the army, he couldn’t sail legally. As he used to tell the story, he met a family with twelve children. And when the youngest one died, he stepped in as the oldest child and everybody else moved down one rung. Of course, the genders on the papers no longer matched, but the customs officials were too lazy to check. They lined the kids up on a bench, counted twenty-four knees, and allowed the family to board.
When he finally got back to Palestine, Abe realized it was not a good place to bring a young bride. The Arabs were rebelling, World War I was approaching, and he decided to switch course. He wrote to Miriam and said, meet me in New York, not Tel Aviv. She already had a brother in America, who would take her in until Abe arrived, but Grandpa did not make a good first impression when he landed in his new country. Getting off the boat, he tried to look debonair by twirling a cane. My mother says Miriam’s brother was so incensed at the greenhorn that he took the cane, broke it in half, and snapped at Abe: “In the United States, we don’t use canes.”
Grandma’s brother tried to break off the relationship as well, but he didn’t succeed. These two young people had risked too much and come too far to be kept apart. After they were married, my dad was born a year or two later, in 1916, and the family settled in Bayonne, New Jersey, not far from where my mother’s family, the Schanbams, were also living. In fact, Abe Rogow and Harry Schanbam met long before their children married—and never liked each other. Harry’s family owned a dairy farm, and one story has it that Harry fired Abe from a job delivering milk. Years later, after Abe became quite successful, Harry would brag that he gave Abe his start in this country. But he’d usually leave out the part about firing him. My parents were still living in Harry’s house by the time I was born in 1943, and Abe and Miriam lived just a few blocks away. I have from those years another photo I cherish: my brother Marc and I are three or four, dressed in our Sunday best, white shirts and navy blue short pants, and sitting on a couch with our grandparents. Miriam is much grayer and heavier than in her earlier pictures, but you can still see flashes of the girl Abe first noticed. The girl with the slight smile and smoldering eyes. The girl in the photographer’s window.
The other family fable starts back in Eishishok, Miriam’s home village. As a young man, her father, Max, was a bookbinder, hardly a lucrative trade, and as my mother remembers the story, Max “spent more time reading books than binding them.” He fell in love with Bodonna, a girl from a wealthy family, which looked down on the poor bookbinder. I always heard that Bodonna was sent away to break up the romance but her granddaughter, Norma Weiss, says that Bodonna and Max were actually engaged, and that she went to America assuming he would follow her. “He never got here,” says Norma. Whatever the details, we know this: before Bodonna left, Max bound a book with his own hands, inscribed it in Yiddish, and gave it to her as a going-away present. My father always said it was a book of love poems. Norma insists it was a Bible. I’ll accept her version, grudgingly, but I prefer my father’s.
In any case, Bodonna took the book to America, and the two young lovers never saw each other again. They both married others and had many children. I have a photo of Max and the woman he did marry—my great-grandmother—a rather stern and unappealing person, to tell you the truth. Surrounded by his family, Max wears a skullcap and a full beard, and there’s my grandmother Miriam in the back row, as always looking fearlessly forward. After Miriam came to America and married Abe, she was joined by her other brothers. One of them was a monument carver by trade and his life was shadowed by tragedy. In 1925, while his wife was pregnant with their seventh child, he died in a flu epidemic. The first two children, twins, had died at birth, a son had died in an accident, and the latest blow was too much for his wife. She suffered an emotional and physical collapse and could no longer care for her children. The four surviving kids were sent to the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum, where they remained until they went to work or were taken in by relatives.
The oldest boy, Sam, was a real go-getter. At age fourteen, he got a job as a mail clerk at the Classy Coat Company in Manhattan’s garment district and was soon taking care of his younger siblings. “He became our father,” recalls his sister Pearl Bronstein. Sam was rising quickly through the ranks of the garment trade when he went to a social club in the Bronx one evening and met Norma Kass. Norma’s father was also in the garment business, but her family was not pleased with her new beau, who had been raised in an orphanage and seemed to have no family background. Norma’s grandmother was particularly upset, and today, more than sixty years later, Norma can remember the old woman complaining, “Who is he? Who’s his family? What’s what?”
Sam was not about to be thwarted, so he asked his aunt Miriam, my grandmother, to come with him and meet Norma’s family, to show them that he did have relatives of his own, that he was somebody. So Abe and Miriam made the trek to Norma’s house in the Bronx, and things started stiffly, with the grandmother sitting over in the corner and not saying much. But Miriam was a gregarious person and the group fell into conversation about the old country and where they were all from. Finally the grandmother broke in and started asking questions: You say you’re from Eishishok? Your name was Wasilsky? (Weiss was the Americanized version.) Your father was Max the bookbinder? Please. Just a minute.
She went upstairs and after a while brought down a book, a book inscribed to her in Yiddish by a young man many years before. The grandmother was Bodonna, the girl who left for America and never saw Max again. She had never forgotten her lost love. She still had the book he had given her, a book he had bound with his own hands. And now their grandchildren had found each other. There was much rejoicing. All was forgiven. Bodonna gave her blessing and Sam was embraced. Soon they were married, at a synagogue on the Grand Concourse, a large boulevard running through the middle of the Bronx. After the wedding, the guests trooped to a restaurant around the corner for a meal, and Norma remembers how happy her grandmother was that day. “She was so excited, she went around telling everybody” the story. And the match was a good one. Sam and Norma were married for sixty-three years before he died in 1998.
There is a footnote to the story: Sam wound up owning his own business and hired his father-in-law to run one of his factories. He was so respected in the garment trade that after his death, a scholarship was named in his honor at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Norma, who insists that Max gave Bodonna a Bible, not poetry, does not know what happened to the book, but that’s all right. To me, his gift will always be a book of poems, and I know where it is. In my heart.
Lilly and Ludwig Friedman: A White Wedding Dress
If you buy a wedding ring from Lilly Friedman, she won’t charge a commission. And sometimes you’ll get more than you bargained for. “I tell them stories,” says Lilly, sitting in her tiny jewelry shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “When a young couple comes to me, I’m always very excited if I see that things go well.”
Lilly has quite a story to tell, but you wouldn’t know that just looking at her, a shy, soft-spoken woman of seventy-five who is about to become a great-grandmother. It is a story of one woman’s strength and spirit, of her refusal to give up her dreams, simple dreams, really, of a home and a husband and a white wedding dress. But they were not simple in Czechoslovakia, not in 1944, not when the Nazis were doing everything possible to exterminate her family and her future.
Lilly was born and raised in the small Czech village of Caricha, where her ancestors had lived for generations. There were only twenty-five Jewish families in the whole place, “but we lived very good,” she remembers, baking their own matzoh and building their own synagogue, where Lilly’s father presided as the rabbi. Things changed in 1939, when Germany’s Hungarian allies occupied the area and “made our lives miserable.” Jews were forced to wear yellow stars and barred from shopping in stores, traveling on trains, or running their own schools. Lilly’s older sister, Celia, had gone to America in the mid-thirties to live with an aunt, and the family was desperate to join her. “We always wanted to go out but we didn’t have a chance,” says Lilly. Celia sent tickets for her father and two brothers, but when they got to Lisbon, they didn’t have the right papers for America and the boat—one of the last escape routes from Europe—left without them and they had to return home.
In 1944, the Gestapo moved into Czechoslovakia and Lilly and her whole family were put on a train for Auschwitz. “But we didn’t know what to expect,” she recalls. “We never heard of Auschwitz, we never heard of the crematoriums.” At the camp, her father and two brothers were separated out and never seen again. Lilly, her two younger sisters, and a cousin were dispatched on a work detail, where they basically moved rocks from one place to another, and were then sent back to Auschwitz. By this time they knew what to expect and “we were sure we wouldn’t survive,” she says. But they did for one reason—the Nazis needed healthy workers—and the four girls were assigned to a weaving factory that ran twenty-four hours a day.
By January 1945, the Russians were advancing from the east and the Germans retreated, taking their workers with them, marching through fierce winter storms and shooting anyone who faltered. One of Lilly’s sisters, Fayge, couldn’t walk, so the three other girls carried her most of the way. Czech villagers living along the route would sometimes hide vegetables in the snow for the Jews to eat, but by the time they got to the camp at Bergen-Belsen, most of the survivors were half-dead. “From here we don’t go,” said Lilly’s cousin. “Either we die or get liberated.”
So many people were dying so quickly that the corpses were just stacked in a corner of the room where the prisoners slept. Lilly remembers being told to remove a pile of clothes from one room and finding the bodies of dead babies wrapped in the bundle. “I became hysterical crying,” she says, “those babies are always with me.” Somehow, all four of the girls made it through: “We held on to each other and we helped each other however we could. If one of us got a piece of bread, we cut it into four and everybody got a piece.”
On April 15, Bergen-Belsen was liberated, but as Lilly remembers that day: “We were so sick when the British came, we couldn’t walk. We had typhus, our hair came out, everybody had sores and frozen toes.” After getting emergency medical care, and enough food to regain their strength, the girls were moved to a displaced-persons camp near the German town of Celle. “It was a very sad life but we all wanted to live,” says Lilly, who was then twenty years old. “We lost everything, we lost everybody, but we still wanted to go on with life.”
Soon Lilly started noticing a tall man who worked in the camp kitchen: “We were so thin we were always standing in the line, and he was also very thin, because he was also liberated on the fifteenth of April.” The man’s name was Ludwig Friedman, although Lilly now calls him by his Hebrew name, Aaron, and as they started talking, they realized their home villages were only thirty kilometers apart in Czechoslovakia. “At night he used to bring a little more food for me and my sisters,” Lilly recalls. “I felt so sorry for him. I didn’t see how thin I was but he was tall, six feet five, and he was so thin. He had a pair of sneakers, some kind of white shoes, and I said, at least don’t wear those white shoes, you look terrible in them.”
At first, Lilly was not taken with Ludwig: “I said to my sisters, ‘He looks terrible,’ and my sisters said, ‘What do you care? Food he brings us. So?’ I couldn’t see how I could fall in love with him.” But time passed and Lilly changed: “We went out, we talked, we both had very little education, so we talked about what we would do, what kind of jobs we would have. Most of the time we were with the girls, with the family, and little by little, I started to see he doesn’t look so bad as I thought.” Little by little, other survivors were also regaining their health and vitality. Some who were musicians before the war begged and borrowed instruments and occasionally played for dances, often after synagogue services. Lilly was a quiet girl, but Ludwig was a good dancer, so when the young people got together, he was the “life of the party” and Lilly liked that about him, he brought out her fun-loving side. “Sometimes he made me jealous, he would dance with other people, and I didn’t like that,” she admits. But when other boys tried to dance with her, “he would not let anybody near me, he was terrible about that.”
Soon they were getting serious. “We were religious people, you can’t just hang out,” she says with a laugh. “We went for a walk in a park, and on the way home he says, ‘Look, Lilly, why are we schlepping around? Why don’t we get married? I would like it if you should be my wife.’” Such boldness would have been unthinkable back in Caricha. Lilly’s father probably would have arranged a match for her. If not, his approval of her choice would have been essential. But the village life Ludwig and Lilly once knew was gone forever, and he felt free to tell her: “I wouldn’t dream of this before the war, but now we could get married, we could be very happy, we’re entitled to it.” The young couple was discovering what all immigrants realize: one way or another, the old rules don’t apply. They had no parents to ask permission from, no community to please but their fellow survivors. They could make their own decisions, and when Ludwig proposed, Lilly was eager to accept: “I felt very much to have a home of my own. I didn’t want to be in camp. I wanted to make a home for me and my sisters.”
But this was still 1945, only one other wedding had taken place in the camp, and Lilly asked Ludwig: “How will we get our wedding together? Do we just go to the rabbi and get married?” He answered: “No. I get you a beautiful dress, a white gown, and I give you everything you really wanted. We’re going to be married the way you want.” A hard promise to keep, but Ludwig was a clever and resourceful fellow. He’d made friends with an English sergeant, a supply officer for the camp and something of a fixer, the sort of guy who could get you anything—for a price. And when the sergeant told Ludwig he had a German parachute for sale, Lilly recalls her husband’s reaction: “Right away it hit me—this could be made into a gown!” Money was worthless, the local economy operated on a barter system, and Ludwig established a price with the sergeant: two pounds of coffee plus some cartons of cigarettes. (Lilly and Ludwig didn’t smoke cigarettes or drink coffee, so when those commodities were included in relief packages sent from abroad, they would always save them for use as currency. They were better than cash.)
When Ludwig showed his purchase to Lilly, she exclaimed: “Oh, my God, where did you get this?” And he replied: “I bought it, maybe you could do something with this.” Indeed, she could. She brought it to a friend named Miriam, an accomplished seamstress, who said: “We could do something with this, definitely.” She worked for two weeks, Lilly remembers: “Everybody was very excited, so everybody went to look for the dress. I said she will never finish it if people will be interfering all the time.” In fact, when Miriam finished the dress, she had enough material left over to make Ludwig a shirt. “I don’t think I could describe the feelings I had about that dress, that gown,” Lilly says today, fifty-four years later. “It was something a young girl dreams to have.”
The wedding was set for late January of 1946 and the preparations began, helped immeasurably by a British woman named Lady Rose Henriques who had come to Germany to help care for the survivors. “We cooked, we baked delicious pies,” says Lilly. “We couldn’t get nothing, but that Lady Henriques, she could get it for us. It was beautiful how she helped out. Everybody helped out. We set beautiful tables, and we had guys who used to play, so we had music.”
Ludwig borrowed a truck from the English sergeant “and went to ring bells to bring people to the wedding.” Somehow, at a local hothouse, he found Lilly a bouquet of white lilacs, her favorite flower, to carry at the ceremony. The wedding was held in a makeshift synagogue, located in an old house. And then the couple and the guests marched through a snowstorm to a kosher restaurant that had been set up to feed the religious Jews. “Soldiers were marching, people were marching, whoever went along joined the wedding party, it was very exciting,” says Lilly. “It was a joy to have the wedding. This was a survival, really something we wanted so much to have.” Over four hundred guests were still celebrating when the curfew came at eleven and the restaurant closed down, so the party moved back to the camp. “We had music, we danced, we danced all night.”
The wedding set off a “chain reaction,” says Lilly. About two thousand girls from Czechoslovakia were housed in the camp at Celle, and as she remembers with a laugh: “There were a lot of boys liberated, too, so the chances were good. Boys and girls started to date, to go out and get married and live again and not think about what happened to us. Because if you thought about it, you couldn’t go on with life.” Lilly’s younger sister Fayge met a Polish Jew named Max and wanted to get engaged, but Lilly was concerned. Her sister was only nineteen, but Fayge retorted: “I feel like a hundred years old, not nineteen, and I love Max and I want to get married, too.” Besides, the old rules didn’t apply to Fayge either. She told Lilly she’d get married anyway, whatever her sister said, so Lilly gave the couple her blessing.
But there was also the issue of the dress. Many brides wanted to wear it, but Lilly said, no, Fayge gets it first, then others can have it. Lilly took up the hem a bit, the dress fit Fayge “very nice,” and then it started making the rounds: “It just went from one to the other; they didn’t even bring it back to me.” She stopped counting after about eighteen brides, and Lilly figures more than twenty women wore her dress. Each one took it in or let it out, made it longer or shorter, and for Lilly, the gown took on symbolic meaning: “When they asked me for the dress, I told them, I would like that this dress should represent a beginning for us, for the survivors. We got married and we want to live and build Jewish homes and show that Hitler didn’t succeed in what he wanted to succeed.”
Meanwhile, Lilly had lost touch with her sister Celia, the one in America. She enlisted the help of a Canadian soldier who was going home on leave, and he put an ad in the Forward, the Yiddish newspaper in New York, telling Celia that her three sisters were all alive and looking for her. A friend of Celia’s saw the ad and the family was reunited by mail, but Lilly was desperate to see the sister she had not seen in twelve years. Her daughter Miriam was born in 1947, and when President Truman agreed to take in a hundred thousand additional refugees the next year, Lilly pressed Ludwig to go to America. He preferred Israel, but agreed to her wishes, and Celia sent the baby a little sweater and a hat with pom-poms to wear on the journey. “If I don’t recognize you,” said Celia, “I’ll recognize the baby.”
The family settled in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and Ludwig found a job in construction, but after he hurt his back and couldn’t work, he opened a kosher butcher shop on Flatbush Avenue called “L&L,” for Lilly and Ludwig. Two boys were born, and as Ludwig’s dream of moving to Israel faded, the family moved to a nicer neighborhood in Sheeps-head Bay. After the children went to school, Lilly started working in the jewelry business, where she had a relative, and it turned out she had a talent for selling. Eventually Ludwig closed the butcher shop and joined her selling jewelry, and he died in 1992 after almost forty-seven years of marriage. The tiny shop she still runs today is also called “L&L,” in honor of their years together. Celia is also dead, but the three sisters who survived the war together, Lilly, Fayge, and Eva, are all still alive and living within a few blocks of each other in Brooklyn. Lilly has seven grandchildren, and the oldest, Miriam’s daughter, is pregnant. “My God, my fourth generation,” says Lilly. “I couldn’t believe it. When I was in the camp and struggling to survive, to live, I’d just ask God for a piece of bread. And now I have a home and children and grandchildren and I’m expecting a great-grandchild. It’s the biggest gift God gives me.”
And what of the wedding dress? When she came to America, Lilly put it away in a closet, protected by a plastic box. “Every time I cleaned the closet, I’d say, what’s going to be with that gown? This is not even good for a garage sale.” But she was wrong. One of her nieces told a curator at the Holocaust Museum in Washington about the dress, and it’s now part of an exhibit detailing the history of the displaced-persons camps in postwar Europe. Lilly is very pleased because putting her wedding dress on display completes a journey she started in 1944, when she first got on the train for Auschwitz: “We wanted to live, and to tell the story, this was our most important thing. To tell the story that happened, so that it shouldn’t happen again.”