Years ago, my sister (deceased these twenty-one years) shared an audiotape of a trip she’d taken with her family, commenting at various sites they visited in the West. At one point, my sister stopped the tape and turned to me and said, “I can’t believe I sound all sweet and light with what I’m saying when what I was actually feeling at that moment was that I wanted to disappear.” I was struck by how one could make a tape—or write a memoir—of sweetness and light while beneath the words were feelings much different. I never forgot those moments with her as she spoke of what was really happening for her on that journey.
Then several years after that, a faithful reader, Carol Oxley, told me about Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage 1877–1880 and 1880–1898, written by Carrie Adell Strahorn, illustrated with Charles Russell sketches, and published in 1911. The two-volume memoir received critical acclaim, sold through its first printing with a second edition issued in 1914, and earned Carrie a place in western history. Her adventurous life on the road with her writer/railroad advance man/investor Robert Strahorn won national appeal and she was called “Mother of the West” and “Queen of the Pioneers.” Her story of being a Victorian lady traveling by stage, rail, horseback, steamship, and walking, too, piqued my interest. Carol loaned me her copies that I read and remembered to return. I then ordered my own reproduction copies and put them in my possible story pile.
Fast-forward twelve years. I read the books again and had this unanswered question: What was really going on behind the scenes of that memoir? Was Carrie sharing how she really felt or was she like my sister, only sharing the sweet and light? I decided to read between the lines to find out.
My thanks go to Carol Oxley, who occasionally asked how that book was coming. My thanks also go to CarolAnne Tsai, a researcher who came into my life at the right time and who found an array of resources, from a student’s thesis on Carrie to portions of Robert’s own memoir written when he was ninety years old to census records and dozens of newspaper accounts of this fascinating couple. CarolAnne’s assistance continues to be invaluable and I thank her for her encouragement and her friendship.
CarolAnne also put me in touch with John Caskey, author of several books, including The Amazing Strahorns: Literary Pioneers of the American West. I thank him for his insights and willingness to arrange events to celebrate Carrie in Spokane. Railroad financing was complex, especially in those days of the titans who competed for access to the West. Mr. Caskey is a historian of note about Spokane and its railroad history and the Strahorns. I’m grateful to him.
I’m also grateful to Jan Boles, archivist at the College of Idaho, begun as the Caldwell College, a Presbyterian university. She shared photographs from Carrie’s scrapbook and identified other resources about the Strahorns and long-time college president William Judson Boone. A lecture given by Louie Attebery, professor emeritus of English, at a reunion of Finney Hall at the College of Idaho in 2010, provided a colorful history of the institution, Reverend Boone’s theology (he was a botanist comfortable with both “Darwin and Deuteronomy”), and a physical description that brought Carrie’s mentor to life (https://www.collegeofidaho.edu/about). John Lundin and Stephen Lundin’s paper “Strahorn, Robert E. (1852–1944)—Railroad Promoter in Washington and the Northwest” (available at historylink.org/file/10159) gave me the best understanding of the railroad machinations and Robert’s part in them. Thank you to musician Mary Ostrander as well, for her loan of the “b-flat” command. These historians, writers, archivists, and musicians made this novel richer, but any errors or omissions are all mine.
In addition to thanking my editor, Andrea Doering, who always asks the best questions and gives the best direction, I also want to thank the Revell team in totality and especially Barb Barnes, Michele Misiak, Karen Steele, Cheryl Van Andel, Hannah Brinks, and so many others who help bring these stories to life and to readers. You are all amazing. My prayer team, Judy Schumacher, Carol Tedder, Judy Card, Loris Webb, Gabby Sprenger, and Susan Parrish, are stalwart companions on this writing journey and I am grateful. My friend Hilary Rothert provided books and discussions about the lavish entertaining Robert and Carrie would have hosted, and while the novel does not go into much detail, the requirements of serving four hundred people is alarming for those of us not born with hostessing genes.
Leah Apineru of Impact Author continues to make my social media presence available, along with my website manager Paul Schumacher. Thank you both tons! Janet Meranda has been my special copy reader and I am grateful for the catches she makes in what I always hope is a flawless manuscript I turn in! And to my readers, my gratitude. Where would an author be without dear readers? And to my most faithful reader, researcher, map maker, and true partner, my husband Jerry, thank you.
My readers always like comments to distinguish fact from fiction, so I share these few while encouraging reading of John Caskey’s book and Carrie’s memoir. Carrie was an early graduate of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; she did marry the former fiancé of her college friend whom she hoped to nurse to health but did not; Carrie’s father was a doctor in Marengo, Illinois, near Chicago, one of the first to use anesthetic as a military surgeon west of the Mississippi. Her younger sister Hattie became a doctor and her older sister Mary was a mother and journalist. Carrie did publish letters and articles in various newspapers across the country both as Dell Strahorn and as A. Stray and Emerald Green. Carrie did remain a lady, and her good sense of humor and wit saw her through some trying occasions.
I relied on Therese O’Neill’s Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage and Manners to give me insight about how difficult it would have been to be a woman of child-bearing age wandering the true wilderness of the West in the 1870s and 1880s. Such intimacies weren’t spoken of in Oregon Trail diaries nor in Carrie’s book. I kept Carrie’s musing about such issues in this novel PG rated.
Carrie’s stories in her memoir inspired my own speculation about them, seeking her motivation, intent, feelings about the events. For twenty-five years she traveled across the West, always trying to remain a lady with her long skirts, bustle, and hat. The incident with the runaway stage and the man who felt compelled to ride seventy miles in the opposite direction of where he’d planned to travel is in her memoir. The Yellowstone experience, the twenty-six men, being the only woman traveling during the snowstorm of 1877–78 are all included in her memoir. Her experience with electricity in Laramie she notes as occurring in 1878, but electricity came first to Wyoming in Cheyenne in 1883. I left her memory intact, even though it must have been a later trip she recalled. Carrie’s father did send her the dog who loved tramps and Carrie was a good shot with a pistol. Her sisters often spent time with her in the West. Her singing abilities and trips to Europe are all as reported.
The offering of the twins to the Strahorns was also a fact, though I gave the twins their names, loaned from two contemporary girls. Both girls’ families won the right to name a character in one of my books as an auction item for a fund-raiser. Kaitlyn Miles’s family supported “Raise the Roof” for a Coos Bay, Oregon, school district facility. Kambree Palmer’s father’s boss, Chip Wahlberg, purchased the auction item to support the Asotin, Washington, library and gave the naming right to the Palmers. Interviews with each girl gave me a picture to help create those tiny twins and project their love of reading and music onto their characters.
Robert did call her “Dell”; she called him Pard, but she also called him Robert and in letters to her mother referred to him as Robin. I decided using Robin as well as other names would be too confusing. As John Caskey noted, “Dell” and “Pard” are not particularly affectionate terms. I chose to have Carrie write her comments as Carrie, as that’s how she signed her memoir. While I read only excerpts from Robert’s unpublished memoir, Ninety Years of Boyhood, it is noted that he devoted but three sentences to his beloved “Dell”:
Here intervened the first real crushing, heartrending sorrow of my life, the sudden death of my deeply loved, superb wife, who had been my inseparable companion, my greatest inspiration and staunchest support for nearly fifty years. The earth, which at times seemed only dangerously slipping before was now indeed gone from under. How attempt to picture the glory surrounding, permeating and emitting from such angelic womankind?
Robert remarried a year after Carrie’s death in 1925 and in that same memoir wrote twenty-six pages about his second wife and their two years of travel in Europe. He was his own kind of entrepreneur.
The sickness that pervaded Robert’s life did affect their travel and Carrie’s looking after her husband, deciding where to travel to get him well. Robert had the mumps (reported in the Omaha paper) and tuberculosis; he was a journalist during the Sioux campaigns and did seem to have an affinity for going into business with military men. The couple had no children, but in reading between the lines, that was not as Carrie wished it. Her comments in her memoir regarding children are poignant and defensive if she saw inappropriate treatment by others of children.
Upon Carrie’s death, Robert donated $35,000 to the City of Marengo for a Strahorn library in honor of Carrie and another $65,000 to fund the library building at the College of Idaho in memory of Dell Strahorn. Since 1967, the building has been called Strahorn Hall. In 1970, the Daughters of the American Revolution in Spokane researched Carrie’s ancestry, hoping to name a chapter after her. However, it was named instead for Carrie’s great-grandfather, Jason Babcock, who served during the Revolutionary War. In 2013, the DAR chapter encouraged and published the Caskey-Victor book The Amazing Strahorns, which gave me great details and wisdom into this couple and is another memorial to Carrie.
The Strahorns did indeed “birth” towns in the West, including Caldwell, Idaho; North Weizer, Idaho; Ontario, Oregon; and Shoshone Falls, Idaho. The latter had been a stage stop, but the Strahorns developed it into a railroad and tourist terminus at the “Niagara of the West.” The Idaho and Oregon Land Development Company, Robert’s first investment company, bought the town of Hailey, Idaho, and owned the power and water plant. They expanded Hailey by building the hotel near the hot springs that became a tourist attraction. The failures at Fairhaven are as described, as is the humiliating departure and the Strahorn years in Boston. Robert was a successful writer, promoter, and some said a bit of a flimflam man, in addition to being charming and a visionary. The lost manuscript in Fairhaven is also true.
I believe that Carrie’s greatest joy was in organizing the Presbyterian women’s group of Caldwell that went on to raise money for a church and to call a pastor. It was identified as the only Presbyterian church to be started by women without the assistance of male elders and without the benefit of first having a missionary. When the church was accepted into the Wood River Presbytery, men were of course the elders and trustees. The women presented were the original committee, except for the addition of Hester Adeline Brown. Hester was named for the grandmother of Hestor (spelling changed for her descendant) Lindberg, who won the auction at First Presbyterian Church, Bend, Oregon, to help renovate the church’s commons area. Hester became a friend to Carrie along with actual historical persons. The Blatchleys did turn their home into a dormitory and later donated money to the College of Idaho for new facilities.
Carrie’s other great joy was The Pines. She rarely traveled with Robert after they moved into the mansion, finding a full life entertaining and riding her horses and enjoying her bulldog. She kept a scrapbook of her travels and of The Pines. How she chose to leave it is as portrayed.
Robert did throw anniversary parties for Carrie and he was so pleased with the success of her memoir that he had the silver edition made of the cover and back with the 174 guest signatures engraved. The artifact is in the collection at the Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane. Charles Russell drew the illustrations.
The census information of 1900 is as described in both Spokane and Caldwell. Census takers often wrote down everyone at home, which might include visitors from afar. But in Caldwell, it is notable that Carrie was listed as “Head of Household,” usually indicating there were no other occupants. The Weiss boys being “children of the Strahorns” is from the actual census record of 1920. Clearly, they were the sons of the chauffeur who for some reason were identified as the Strahorn children. Carrie didn’t correct the assumption.
The Strahorns bought the Browne house and remodeled it under the direction of Kirtland Cutter, a prominent architect in the West. Known as The Pines, it had twenty-two rooms, electricity, steam heat, a bowling alley and buffet area in the basement, Italian tiles, a French artist mural, and so much more. It was a lavish and lush mansion tended by a housekeeper, first and second maids, a chef and chauffeur. After the Strahorn deaths, The Pines was converted into apartments and purchased by the Eastern Washington Historical Society in 1970. It was placed on the historic register in 1974 and then torn down the same year to provide room for expanded facilities and parking. For a more detailed history and a photograph, visit http://properties.historicspokane.org/property/?PropertyID=2017.
Robert made money and Robert lost money. He successfully built the North Coast short line as he had hoped, but he then invested in the Oregon California and Eastern Railway and the landscape demands and the impediments put up by James J. Hill drained Robert of money and the ability to move forward. Large railroad magnates like Harriman and Hill would often wait for the failure of these short line investors, then swoop in and buy them for pennies on the dollar. This is what happened to Robert in 1920.
It’s said that Robert did buy back The Pines, but Carrie never lived there after her and Robert’s move to San Francisco sometime around 1920. Carrie died in San Francisco in 1925 of kidney failure. She was seventy-one. Robert had her ashes brought back to Spokane and a widely attended service was held for her at the First Presbyterian Church. The newspaper account of the funeral noted that Carrie’s friend Reverend Boone gave the eulogy in which he commented on her ability to have “good cheer in unfavorable circumstances” and of “her power to recover from defeat.” Her ashes were placed in a mausoleum at Riverside Memorial Park. It is the same mausoleum where Robert placed his second wife’s ashes and left word for his own to be placed there too. He was frugal in death if not in life. Robert died in 1944.
Carrie did become famous in her time and I felt the Nye poem in the front matter speaks to that fame. Once Carrie remembered what she could do, and did it, she captured a history and a people that would otherwise have been lost to us. I, for one, am grateful. I hope you will be too as you read my version of her life and perhaps seek out her memoir, Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage.