20
A Remarkable Journey
Cleopatra’s journey down the Nile was remarkable. Mary’s journey to Bethlehem was remarkable. I’d venture to say that Tabitha Moffat Brown, who wrote of her journey by wagon across the continent from Missouri to start a university in Oregon, was a more remarkable traveler than me, but the eastern papers commented on our previous year of so much travel. Frankly, exploring in different conveyances while hoping to remain friends with your husband, well, that might be the most remarkable challenge in any woman’s history. The eastern papers never wrote about that.
December 15, 1880
I did my best to enjoy the moments on the Columbia River as they presented themselves to me. I’m building memories, I told myself. I did notice that my memories were starting to incorporate a lot more statistics and data than I had ever intended. But it was easier, less painful to write of “twenty-five thousand miles” somewhere than of what was really happening.
Fog greeted us on that Columbia River steamboat as we headed to Los Angeles, leaving sweet Walla Walla behind. The rapids and falls on the river required numerous portages around places like Celilo Falls, where chubby Indians standing on platforms brought up big fish called sturgeon and salmon, while our portage line proved to be a cart and a mule on the Washington side of the river. In my memoir, if I write it, I will neglect to mention that cart and the taciturn man who had managed to claim the portage line, as he referred to it.
I’d tell you about the small towns like Dallas City, but I was looking at them and the terrain as Robert might have, because he was taken to our cabin by seasickness. My notes were not of what intrigued me but meant to cover what he was missing, suffering in that chilly room even with the little stove popping itself out to give us heat. I suffered too. Everyone was gracious when I joined them at the dining table without my husband in the evenings, but I felt false having to make small talk, smile, and ask questions of others to keep them talking so I didn’t have to speak about anything that really mattered. But Robert’s reputation meant everyone wanted a few minutes with him or his “remarkable” proxy, me, seeking information they thought we had about the railroad’s interests, commerce, migration, economics, politics, et cetera, et cetera. It was fatiguing.
“What were they asking?” Robert queried when I returned to our room after a lengthy dinner during which I regaled the other passengers with my stories, making them laugh and think me the finest of table hostesses. I was tired, cranky as a hungry baby, even though I’d eaten more than my share of roast pork at the Umatilla where we’d pulled up for the night and checked in, hoping to sleep before resuming our steamboat cruise. I wasn’t hungry for food.
“The usual. They want to know what you know.” I set the tray down and unhooked my throat brooch, put it in my precious box along with my rings. Robert looked peaked, but he wasn’t vomiting anymore, which was good. “I brought you a cracker and some weak tea. Do you think you can drink it?”
“I’m miserable, Dell. I don’t think I should try. I’ll just heave it up.”
The lavender sachets I’d put around the room helped but clearly not enough. “You’ve got to keep fluids in you. My father always insisted that the sick suffered more from dehydration than from whatever might ail them. Should I call for a doctor?”
“What good would he do?”
“He might have powders to settle your stomach.” And it would be someone else to tell your troubles to and not follow his advice, as you don’t follow mine. Yes, I was sarcastic and petty in my nursing role, but at least I didn’t say those things out loud to him. After all, I was on a remarkable journey.
“Not worth the effort. I feel miserable.”
“I know, poor baby.” I patted his hand. It felt chilly, but then the room was. It was nearly January. Of course, the room felt cold. “Try the tea. I brought some sugar.”
“No. Nothing.” He sighed. “Read to me.”
“In a minute.”
I don’t know why, but his tone caused my own stomach to tense. I slipped behind the painted screen, peeling off the layers of clothing down to my nakedness, donned a linen nightdress, then squatted over the chamber pot. At the washstand, I poured water in the basin to rinse out my underdrawers that I twisted, then hung to dry, when my dear Pard said in a voice no louder than a kitten’s mew, “Alright, Dellie. Go ahead and call for the doctor. Maybe he could help me.”
“Won’t you try the tea and crackers?” I spoke with my back to him, wet hands holding sopping unmentionables.
“No, you’re right. I should talk to the doctor.”
I slapped my underthings into the bowl, stomped behind the screen, tore off the linen, yanked on my underdrawers that I had to dig through the trunk to get, donned the still warm chemise, loosely laced my corset, pillowed my dress over my head. I did not re-pin the brooch. I decided to just wear my slippers and not take the time to re-hook my shoes.
“I’ll only be—”
He snored.
I left our room, seeking out the doctor for anti-anxiety powders. For myself.
We both survived the night, though Pard barely.
Thank goodness, the little coastal town of Astoria proved a fine respite from the rainy December weather, the rocking of the steamboat, and Robert’s stomach upset. We had not yet embarked on the ocean journey, which was said to have its trials. But the three days we waited in Astoria were godsent. Robert felt better and his mewing ceased. He was his jovial self at the dining table and I could once again watch and listen. More importantly, we walked on Clatsop Beach and heard it attracted honeymooners. I could see why.
Seagulls swooped over us and I did for a little while have that sense of what a “remarkable” journey we were on.
“We never took a honeymoon like others,” I commented. We walked arm in arm, bundled up in our robes and wraps, basking in sea air so crisp and a sky so blue. A look toward the horizon brought the vast ocean rolling almost as though the two were one.
“We’ll never do anything the way others do, Dell. That’s part of the marriage contract.”
“Is it? I guess I didn’t realize that when I said ‘I do.’”
“I’m sure I promised you a journey unlike any other.” He maneuvered me around a driftwood log and we continued our stroll.
“And the cowcatcher ride certainly qualifies.”
Robert laughed. “I do have other plans, you know, for thrilling adventures you can tell your grandchildren about.” I must have stiffened because he stopped. He stuttered, “I . . . I didn’t mean—”
“It’s a great line to lure the adventurer west, speaking of legacy.” I kept my voice light. “You’ll have to remember who you’re talking to, though.”
“Forgive me. That was thoughtless.”
It was a moment I might have broached a discussion about taking on an orphan—there were plenty in the West. Or perhaps seeking agreement about talking to a doctor once we reached Los Angeles. My sister said there were specialists there working on issues of infertility. But in that brief moment, Robert’s developer-self had slipped into his husband-self and I had trouble sorting out my own feelings about which one I was truly married to. I let the opportunity slip by. He spoke then of the complexity of laying tracks in remote places, of his own wish to one day build his own railroad. “It’s a license to make money, Dell.” He prattled on about wealth in money, not in relationships.
Robert’s sickness continued once we “crossed the bar,” as they referred to the ocean-meeting-river place. We had to wait out a storm, and the sea that had been so much a part of the horizon now roiled and boiled often beneath a cloud of fog and rain. I did much nursing during that voyage, and as I look back, I can see how my role began to change. He was a different man when he was ill, more . . . needy. The effects of tuberculosis persisted long past the original disease. I wondered if his illness during the Sioux siege came back to him when his body didn’t respond in the way he willed it to. And was that why he pushed his body so when we were on dry land?
The trip south took three days longer than scheduled because of the severe weather, and our captain had taken us farther out to sea, so when we finally came to dock, there was much ado as people had thought we were lost. There was quite a write-up in the paper about our “resurrection” when we hadn’t even known of our demise. I hoped my mother hadn’t seen it.
Robert recovered and we explored Los Angeles. I thought we’d then go back to San Francisco and take the transatlantic back to Omaha. But no, we took a southern rail to Yuma, my first real exposure to desert land. Barren was the word that came to mind and I said as much.
“I don’t see it as that. Wait until we spend the night here. You’ve never seen stars as you’ll see them from a desert perch.”
“There’s a perch there?” It all looked like a squashed straw hat brim, colorless to me.
“The stars at night are pluckable,” Robert said. “You’ll see.”
And there in our hotel, he gave me my Christmas present. A diamond bracelet.
“It’s . . . fabulous. Where did you . . . ?”
“You can get anything in Los Angeles.”
“But can we afford this?”
“We can. And I hope you’ll think of the desert night sky when you look at that bracelet. The stars sparkle like those stones.”
“You’re a hopeless romantic, Robert Strahorn.” I used my most affectionate name for him, then kissed him. I loved the bracelet.
“I have a new romantic adventure planned for us.”
“Should I pack my boots?”
“Maybe. We’re going to make a town.” He said it like a man might say to his wife, “We’re going to make a baby!” He continued: “Our writing work”—I was glad he included me—“has paid off and people are arriving with no place for them to unload or for the tracks to end. The UP has a new route for us, to not only assess what’s possible, but also to make it happen.” I looked confused, I guess, because he sat me down. “This is what we worked for, Dell. City building.” He was a child in a toy shop, with visions of the future where he’d not only get all the toys inside but he’d own the shop itself. “And you’ll get a diamond or another precious stone for every town we build.”
I would have preferred a child.
His boyish joy was bittersweet. I wanted to see that look in his eye not just on town building but on our lives. But I would have to set aside my hopes for that and be grateful that he loved me in his way, looked after me, gave me diamonds in lieu of babes.
We didn’t make Omaha for Christmas, of course. And early in 1881 we returned to Idaho, and before long, Pard and others formed the Idaho and Oregon Land Improvement Company. Here I must digress because our dear federal government, in an effort to advance the cause of expansion in the West, gave the Union Pacific sixty million acres of western landscape from Lake Superior west to Puget Sound. An 1862 act granted ten square miles in alternate sections on either side of the railroad right-of-way for each mile of track laid. The railroads could sell that property or develop it. (It’s true that in later years the UP had to give back twenty million dollars because they didn’t live up to the contract, but it was still more land than any other railroad received.) Robert’s development company then purchased some of those lands for resale for future townsites and to sell to merchants and even homesteaders who might not qualify for free land, all with the intent to lure people west. The railroad, investors, and Robert’s partnership would make money—after a time. The country would expand.
I found myself intrigued by all the court doings, the trips hither and yon settling deeds and registrations and boundary lines and forming new counties. Pard was in meeting after meeting about how to fund needed public things, like getting water to a potential townsite because parts of Idaho resembled Yuma, Arizona, if one was honest. And there was politics galore, the most significant being where a town would grow up and then whether it would be the county seat or not. These negotiations, Pard assured me, were all part of our remarkable journey.
Hailey, Idaho, became Pard and his partners’ firstborn. It was a mining town with few structures to recommend it, but it was for sale. It became the coveted county seat of the new Blaine County where, when the election for county seat was over with, Hailey earned fourteen more votes than Bellevue and fourteen more votes than all the registered voters in the county, imagine that.
Then the voting boxes were stolen.
A new count gave the win to Bellevue, but Hailey supporters hired their lawyers, and it was determined by the court six months later that Hailey it was! Of course, all that was there to start the town was a tent mercantile and the promise of a railroad stop. Soon a newspaper was started, the Hailey Miner. I wrote a piece or two for it under my own name, Dell Strahorn.
It was Robert’s choice, Hailey. Or rather, the company’s choice. The railroad would lay its tracks and Robert’s status as a town builder took off.
“We could settle here, Dell. Build a house. You could write your letters about a town forming out of nothing but goodwill and effort.”
“And the government giving millions of acres of land to the railroad.” I’d had forty-five of my letters printed in the Omaha Republican that summer, and I was enamored with Hailey’s landscape nestled inside mountainous country along the rushing Wood River. It was high and dry—Pard said almost a mile high like Denver. It got lots of snow in the winter. We walked beside the river in the spring. But Pard would still be traveling on to start the next town, and there I’d be, left behind. Maybe in a makeshift house, but worse of all, driftless without him, without a family, without a direction.
“And what if you get sick again while you travel hither and yon? Who will look after you?”
“I’m hardy as a horse in this country. It’s an ocean that does me in.” He’d forgotten Omaha. “You could entertain the senators and mayors who will come and explore the West. And when I’m home, we’ll have a happy little love nest. You won’t have to pack and unpack ever again. And there are hot springs here, good for TB patients and others. A healing place.”
I imagined myself with pioneering tables and stumps for chairs. “No. Let’s not make Hailey our permanent home, but we could build a little cottage.”
Hailey became the beginning of a separation with the railroad, even while Pard’s prospects improved because of the UP. Those lengthy railroad tracks scratched westward like a two-clawed sloth inching its way to change what had been wilderness. And it changed our lives once again. We’d no longer be traveling wide stretches of the West. But neither would we be settled into one place for a very long time. We were indeed on a remarkable journey.