18
Singing in the Snow
Landscapes ask us to ponder our inner being. Dutch painters coined that word—landscape—when they moved from painting seascapes to capturing the beauty of the interior of a land, her mountains and valleys and rivers. Wish I could paint what feelings the West’s grand landscapes inspire in me.
October 10, 1880
Remember the cancelled trip to Yellowstone?”
I nodded. Autumn had arrived and I was homesick for Marengo.
“Well, it’s back on.” Robert grinned. We were at our hotel in Virginia City, the city bustle active outside our window. “The owner of the stage route will himself drive us on the official first run. Just you and me as passengers.”
“I hope it’s not too late in the season.” It was October.
“Marshall says we’ll do fine. We’ve got to load up with felt for our boots, though, take mittens, scarfs, overcoats, a felt skirt, heavy woolen shawl, blankets, pillows. We need to finish shopping and get you a pair of thick-soled boots. The ground there is said to be too hot for your thin leather soles, and if we encounter snow, too thin for those too. Come along.”
He dragged me out of my moroseness that had settled after Mary left. The lack of fashion of the boots I eventually bought made me grimace. “They’re not very attractive, are they?” I said. Heavy soles of thick rubber held leather sides.
“They’ll keep your feet dry and your ankles safe. You have such dainty feet.” He lifted my foot as I sat at the mercantile. He rubbed my calf above the boot top.
“They weigh a ton.”
“All the better to protect you, my dear. That’s my job on this trip and those boots are my partners.”
Once on the road in our private stage, Robert teased me about those heavy boots, said they looked like how he imagined Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s monster boots must have looked. “I had no idea you had such big feet, Dell.”
To silence him I said, “I’ll wager you five dollars that I could get both my dainty feet inside one of your boots.”
“I accept your bet. Now prove it.”
“When we settle for the night. I’m not taking them off in this stage.” The weather brought cool but clear skies, and the leaves had begun their annual turn toward amber, red, and cinnamon woven between deep greens of pines and fir. A vast stillness shrouded the place as we stopped by Henry’s Lake. Teal and canvasbacks and mallards quacked their calls to fellow ducks. I’d stepped outside the new coach to stretch my legs and heard an elk’s bugle. Then soft sighing through the trees, broken by the sudden clatter of antelope racing beyond snowcapped mountains shadowing tiny green plants. Pine scented the air. It was a place for tourists, that was certain.
“You’re the first woman to come into the park,” Marshall said. He was Robert’s height, older though, and carried himself as a man who found strength in the elements.
“First white woman, I imagine,” I countered. “No Indian woman would have kept her distance from so grand a landscape as this.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Marshall said. “When Colonel Vandervort of the survey team was here, he wrote that ‘no lovely woman’s sweet voice had ever floated across Henry’s Lake.’ No longer true now, thanks to you, Mrs. Strahorn.”
It wasn’t true before, I’m certain of that. Sometimes men didn’t listen and for a moment I wondered about that Arapaho or Shoshone, Crow or Blackfeet woman who might have sung a song heard in this natural cathedral.
Several hours later, we came upon our rest stop for the night. It was a two-story house that a ranger had built but then, with Indian troubles, had abandoned, taking out the glass windows and doors for fear the house would be burned and he’d lose those costly items. Canvas flaps were hung to keep out the wind. There were no beds inside, only a crude table and chairs.
Mr. Marshall rustled up supper for us. “I hope you like cold beans.”
“Beans make anything a complete meal,” Robert said. He did like his beans. After we ate, Robert said, “We’ll head out to the stage for the night. Best place to keep warm.”
“No, no,” Mr. Marshall insisted. “The upstairs has hay. It’ll be softer and warmer. You take this candle lantern and head on up there. I’ll bed down in the stage, keep the horses company.”
I made a quick foray for personal things left in the stage and became aware of how cold and tired I was. My bones ached. In the darkness I heard the serenade of crickets, the crunch of horses chewing; then I returned and climbed the ladder to the loft. Robert waited with the candle lantern that the wind kept blowing out. I wondered why they’d hauled hay up above the living space in the first place, but there it was. I was cold, tired, hungry, and my feet hurt, and I’d take what comfort the loft provided. I’d slept in a stage. It was not a pleasure.
Robert made a bed of sorts over the hay and rubbed my gloved hands trying to warm them. I started to cry, I’m not sure why. I didn’t often, but the contrast of being in that magnificent park by day and in this primitive accommodation by night overwhelmed.
“I’d let you sleep with those boots on, but we need to dry out the felt. Besides, I wouldn’t want anyone to mistake your limb for a log.” I knew he teased to make me feel better, but it wasn’t working.
I began the unhooking of the heavy boots, no easy task, as my fingers were slowed by cold. “My feet have got to have a rest from these.”
Pard helped pull them off, massaged my stocking feet. “Now’s the time to determine if your five-dollar wager brings me five more.” He removed his boots, handed me his big brogan. “OK, let’s see you get both of your dainty feet into my boot.” Our eyes had adjusted to the darkness. The moon gave off pale light through the cracks in the roof and walls.
“Robert, please.”
“Oh, come on. We might as well have fun as be miserable. There’s a choice.”
I sighed, stuck my stocking-clad foot in Robert’s boot; took it out. Then I daintily slipped in the other foot, and took it out. “Done. I win.” I reached for a blanket.
“Hey, wait a minute. You were supposed to put both feet into my boot.”
“I did. Where’s my five dollars?”
“No, no, no, no. At the same time.”
“I never wagered that. I said I could get both of my feet into your one boot and I just did. Pay up.”
His mouth hung open. “Well, I’ll be.” He tossed me a five-dollar gold piece but in the pale light I missed it and it landed in the hay.
I scrambled to find it, patting up dust, messing up the blankets. He knelt too, and pawing, we both started laughing. It took half an hour until, voilà, I had it in my hand.
“Woman, you are amazing.” He re-spread the blanket, rolled onto it, and motioned me there too. Then he pulled another wool blanket over us. And the first white woman to visit Yellowstone Park giggled in the arms of her hero, five dollars richer than the day before.
Love drives out tiredness.
After a heartier breakfast than our supper, we continued our tour by stage, stopping whenever we wanted to gaze and be amazed at the grandeur. “Thank goodness this is protected now,” I said. “No railroads, correct?”
“Not likely. But the railroads will bring people to the entrances, and stages and horses will bring them into the interior.”
Mr. Marshall had a half-built cabin that awaited us for supper. He planned to bring his wife here, leaving in the winters. This time we had both a stove and a bed. In the morning, rangers brought horses around and we began our tour by horseback, really a better comfort than the stage, though more exposed to the elements. We kept our mounts far back from some of the stranger park oddities.
Geysers greeted. “Astonishing.” I couldn’t say the word enough. I made detailed notes each evening, writing the names of the geysers, the height of their explosions, how long they stayed in the air. Hot springs, boiling lakes, rainbow-colored pools, it was all so intriguing. Some of the geysers sent a kind of spray over my notebook that preserved my lead pencil writings as though they were etched in stone. Someone had thrown socks in one pool, and though they were white as snow, they were brittle and broke when Mr. Marshall tugged them up. We slept without tents that night, heard the horses being restless for a time, continued our journey in the morning, and had ridden several miles before Mr. Marshall told us he’d found bear tracks not far from the horses when he went to saddle them that morning.
“Should we head back?” I asked. Being the first white woman to be a bear’s breakfast didn’t appeal at all to my adventurous spirit.
“We have a few miles’ ride to Yellowstone Falls. You wouldn’t want to miss that.” Mr. Marshall spoke to my husband’s happy nod.
We slept out under the stars and I put aside thoughts of bears and in the morning peered at the glorious lake with pelicans and swans as we began the twenty-mile ride around the lake. We’d picked up the superintendent of the park by then—Colonel Norris, who led us—and we carried on, knowing we had another twenty-five miles to ride to reach the falls. Storm clouds hovered and by midafternoon . . . sent a calling card of snow. And then hail.
“Dismount! Rest the horses!” came the colonel’s order.
Darkness closed over us in a steady rain as we figured we were five miles from the falls. We’d make that trek easily in the morning, I was assured. Robert had gone on ahead to shoot an elk for our dinner and the superintendent had left Mr. Marshall and me, too, to find the best camp. When we found Colonel Norris’s choice for where to spend the night, it was in the open instead of under trees. Rain pelted down that would turn to snow. I said nothing and I knew Robert would never question a colonel’s choice, but truly, if I’d had the strength, I would have complained and offered up another solution, one that included trees for shelter.
Robert returned without our dinner and pulled canvas over the bedding, hoping to keep it dry. He said nothing about the campsite. Bread and bacon was our fare that night. Snow fell as we kept the fire going to find scant warmth.
I awoke after a miserable night, cold and shivering, to Mr. Marshall’s mutterings and learned that our horses had departed without their riders. Robert was livid and said words to Mr. Marshall, who hung a sheepish head, adding, “I lost my pipe too,” as though that was the real disaster. Men. The horses had already been gone for two hours, but in daylight the men hoped to track them. I was given an extra blanket with a canvas draped over me and a rifle for protection. Bears. They stoked the fire with wet limbs, then left me alone while the men made their search to take us back the thirty miles to any kind of supplies. I prayed they’d find those horses or we’d be walking back.
You can learn a lot by sitting and thinking. A person could freeze to death in circumstances like these. My feet were this side of wet inside those boots. Thank goodness for wool socks, wool skirts, wool coats and hats. I didn’t see my life flash before my eyes, yet. I almost wished it would. I got up, stomped around, sat back down. Memories of my childhood did come back though: my sisters and I slumping through snow, the light from our house a beacon as we walked home from school in the early dark. I imagined a warm fire. The one in front of me lacked sufficient fuel. I remembered my mother’s words in her letter after I told of our plans for Yellowstone, of how cold meals are not good for a person. What would she say about cold everything? I tried to write but couldn’t hold the pencil in my wet-gloved hands. I was grateful I wasn’t pregnant, the first time that bit of gratitude had pushed its way into my brain. And I’d have a story to tell. I considered singing but didn’t . . . it might attract a bear. What did I know about bears? As the hours wore on, I prayed aloud.
My prayers were answered when the men arrived back with the horses, who had stopped at a hot creek and, reluctant to cross it, tore at the grass rather than heading on home. But instead of us now returning to get out of the storm, the men decided that since we were so close to the falls, just five miles, we couldn’t turn back, now could we? I would not complain and be known as the first white woman to deprive men of their Yellowstone adventures.
It was decided Mr. Marshall and I remain behind, and Colonel Norris and Pard rode on to see the falls.
Now, that decision smoldered my thinking. After all this sitting and freezing, I should be deprived of being the pioneering woman to visit the falls? No. It took me awhile to decide what to do about that—and I then asked Mr. Marshall to saddle my horse. We argued—I was very ladylike—telling him if he didn’t saddle my mount, I’d head out on foot and follow the horse’s tracks. He finally saddled both our mounts and we started off, but he muttered about bears getting our camp box so I told him, “You head back. Look after things, pack up. When we return, we can leave straightaway. Go on.” My gloved hands shooed him like he was a gaggle of geese. He finally agreed, but I suspect he watched me until I was out of sight.
I had much less fear being alone between Mr. Marshall and Pard and the colonel than when I’d sat and waited for those same men as they searched for horses in bear country. Having a direction, knowing I was headed somewhere with a trail to follow, invigorated me. Plus, I began to sing. Oh, what a glorious time to hear my voice pressing against the low clouds, the dense timber, the snow-filled trail. My horse kept up a steady pace.
I met Pard and the colonel coming back. “I’m glad you decided to come,” Robert said. “I should have let you in the first place.” He reached out to pat my shoulder as he brought his horse up beside mine. “It is truly magnificent. I wish you could have seen it.”
“And why can’t I? I’ve come this far.”
“Let’s hurry on now, Strahorn, Missus.” The colonel tipped his hat at me, wore a worried face.
“I deserve to see the falls, don’t I?”
Robert frowned, then to the colonel, “You go ahead to Marshall’s camp. I’m taking her on up. She’s come this far. She deserves to see it all.”
“It looks like more weather rolling in. It’s not a good idea.”
“I see that.”
I’d rarely seen Robert stand up to a colonel, but he did this time. Maybe he shouldn’t have. Off we rode to that magnificent canyon to see those breath-arresting falls. Robert and I lingered longer than we should have, even lying on our bellies in the snow to look over the side of the canyon to that marvel of color and depth. My fingers felt numb inside my gloves; my feet felt frozen. But I’d seen the magnificent artistry of God’s very hand and I was in awe.
“We’d better get going now,” Robert said. His eyes searched the lowering sky.
“I’m ready.” We let our ponies take us back, the animals seemingly aware that we headed now toward home.
The weather didn’t cooperate. Snow, sleet, misery, but we caught up with the colonel, who had sent Mr. Marshall on ahead to make our next camp—forty miles forward at that unfinished log house.
It was a long, quiet ride as the cold seeped through my bones, and I did have a moment of wondering if my blustering toward adventure, not wanting to be left out, might have a cost greater than anticipated. Frostbite was nothing to laugh at.
Robert said to me, “What is there worth having that one does not have to strive for?”
“I’ll feel better about philosophy when I’m in front of a stove,” I told him.
We kept a steady pace, but in snow, well, we had magnificent animals. I felt guilty for asking them to do what they did. The pale light of the cabin pierced the darkness, a beacon. The horses hurried up, then stopped at the hitching post, heads hung low. Robert dismounted. He reached up to help me down.
“I can’t move.”
I couldn’t.
All three men had to lift me, nearly frozen, from the saddle and carried me into the cabin. Robert clucked over me and hung a blanket for privacy so he could help me strip the frozen garments, wrapped a blanket around me, then set me before the small stove. Here I offer statistics as it seems relevant: I had ridden eighty-five miles in two days, one hundred twenty-five miles in three days, all in a man’s saddle splitting my hips, in horrible weather. I felt like a wishbone already pulled apart.
I could barely move the next day, but we had to leave. The men created a platform so I could slide into the saddle, and I rode with them another twenty-five miles, eating my lunch of bacon and bread atop the horse for fear I would not be able to get back on if I slipped off. My knees ached in places never known to me; my hips were stones that nevertheless felt pain. And we were getting low on beans, bacon, and bread.
Pard did shoot a fine elk later that next day, which helped. It had seven prongs. Colonel Norris insisted he would ship the head back for mounting so it could hang in Pard’s office. “People see that and they’ll flock to Yellowstone.” He sent other specimens of plants and rocks that Robert had packed into our saddlebags, too, so many that later in his career, all that we’d brought back became an exhibit at a special showing in Denver.
I did not tell Pard of my continuing discomfort in my knees and hips. I hoped that if I put distance between the four hundred miles on horseback that we’d ridden during our weeks in the park, my body would heal up. But he must have noticed. I hope he noticed just a little.
We were back at Virginia City (where I’d bought those boots), staying at the Rodgers House recuperating, when Pard said, “I think we’ll stick to a few more populated places in the next year and then, maybe find an alternative way for us to make a living.” He rubbed my feet, his good strong hands felt heavenly against my arches and toes.
“Give up the railroad writing?”
“No. Well, maybe do a bit of a side line with the UP’s permission. They want an Idaho book and a Pacific book and after that, we’ll see. The truth is, I never want to see you as you were the night it took three of us to get you off that horse. Golly, I felt responsible for that.” He shook his head. “I meant to expose you to amazing things but not to bring you physical pain like that. The colonel was right, we should have headed back.”
“And miss the most glorious moment of lying on our bellies looking into that canyon, together as partners? Oh, Robert, no. Please don’t decide on what to do next based on that one painful day. I found out I could endure more physical discomfort than I ever imagined. I don’t know if you heard me, but I sang Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in German riding through that landscape alone, tracking you down. It was one of the most magnificent moments of my life. And I have you to thank for that.”
“I didn’t hear you. That would have been grand.” He kissed my toes.
“Besides, we must strive for things that matter.”
“If you say so, Mrs. Strahorn.”
“I do.”