The first true night on the trail was May 7th, a Thursday. It was neither warm nor cold, but the sky was clear. I shared a tent with all my sisters, a practice we had been accustomed to for some time, thanks to the weeks we spent in Westport. As the eldest, my place was closest to the tent opening, from some logic connected with protection and responsibility. Nam, at eight, no longer got up in the night to empty her bladder, so a peaceful night was to be expected.
We were rolled in quilts and blankets, with woollen socks on our feet and fur-lined caps on our heads. Sleep came quickly to us all.
But that night, I awoke again in the small hours, to the sound of a great howling close by. An unearthly song, rising note by note, which in my fuddled state came into my mind as a succession of great round Os, that I could see as well as hear. Several animals were making the sound, joining in together, and then leaving one to continue alone. Wolves, I thought, without any fear. What harm could a wolf do me, snugly wrapped inside my tent as I was? I liked to imagine their thick grey coats and their pale throats as they raised their muzzles to the sky and called their ghostly call. I wondered how many other emigrants throughout the train were lying as I was, awake and listening. How many felt as I did the summons to a great adventure, symbolised by this wild music? We were going where there were no true roads, no certainty of what we might encounter. The wolves knew the land where we did not. They knew humanity to be red men wearing skins and feathers and living in shelters made from buffalo hide. They would have to learn to live with a new kind of man from this time on, I thought. There would soon be brick buildings, paved roads, mills and furnaces and smithies and coopers and a hundred other industries such as existed back east.
But that future was but a dim dream as yet. That night there was nothing but endless open country, flat-bottomed valleys made by the great rivers, and in the distance gently rising hills, some covered with trees. There were deer, too, and elk, out there. And bears. I was unsure as to how fearful I should be where bears were concerned. They were more dangerous than wolves, I supposed, but also just as likeable. I drifted to sleep on a fantasy in which I befriended a lost bear cub and it grew up to be my closest friend.
In the morning, my father said, ‘Did you all hear those durned coyotes in the night? Never known such a racket in all my born days.’ The American tone was one he had been at pains to acquire, to replace his Irish accent, but it only worked part of the time. Of his children, Reuben and I were the only ones to retain a suggestion of an Irish lilt, having learned it from our parents when it was still strong in them. How people spoke was a topic of endless comment, with immigrants from so many different countries, all striving to sound as American as they could.
‘Coyotes?’ I was mortified. ‘Were they not wolves?’
‘What’s the difference?’ asked Nam, who was looking mulish at having missed the night sounds.
‘A coyote is smaller, with a bushy tail,’ my father instructed her. ‘And it sings a wilder song.’
The poetry in my father’s soul was an Irishness that would never fade, and which I devoutly hoped had been passed to me, though I had little reason to think it likely.
‘Are they a danger, Dadda?’ asked my little sister.
‘Not at all, my pet. Apart from keeping us awake all night, of course.’
‘I did not wake once,’ she said sadly.
It fell to me, for some reason, to record the days as they passed. I had a journal, bound in good red calfskin, for keeping a log of our journey, as a ship’s captain would do. Every evening, at least to begin with, my father would ask to see it, and suggest entries to be added. During the first week, I had written three entries. The third one went:
11th May. Warm day, with a clear sky. Mr Franklin greased the axle of our wagon, and with a dab of spare grease fixed the squeak on Grandma’s spinning wheel. Mr Bricewood’s dog caught a chipmunk and killed it. We ate salt beef and rye, with a cup of Daddy’s beer. The water tastes dusty. We expect to reach a river in a day or so, for refilling.
‘Good,’ my father approved, his dark eyes still on the page. ‘You have a talent for this, my girl. Who else would ever think to say the part about the chipmunk?’
‘Is it too much?’ I worried. ‘The book might be full before we reach -’ I had been intending to say ‘the end’ but it sounded strange. We knew there must be an end, that we would have to stop when the land ran out, and the vast ocean took its place. But we had no name for the precise place we were heading to, other than ‘Oregon City’ – which was really no city at all. We had no pictures in our minds of the fresh buildings we would know as home when the journeying ceased.
He shook his head. ‘Who’s to say what argument that might settle, in a month’s time? Jude might claim ’twas a prairie dog that was caught, or Reuben might insist it was a raccoon, and up pipes young Charity Collins, with her journal, to say “No, boys, it’s written here that the creature was a chipmunk. It says so in plain writing.”’ We laughed at the idea, and I felt deeply important.
And yet it worried at me, the inadequacy of those few words. The dog was in reality a big shaggy dimwit named Melchior, barely a year old with feet scarcely under his control. The chipmunk had no notion of its danger, sitting in all innocence under a tuft of long spiny grass. It lifted its tiny head, eyes fixed on the sudden change to its world and the new sounds we brought with us. Voices, rumbles, squeaks – the invasion that mankind represents to the natural world perhaps a wholly new perception for a creature born during the previous winter or spring. I was watching the munk when Melchior attacked. I was as startled as the little creature itself must have been. His ears rose, his jaws opened and he lunged directly at his prey, like a great whale swallowing a fish. It must have died at the first bite of those strong young teeth. But he did not swallow it like a whale at all. He dropped it, limp and damp and stared at it for a long time. Then he nudged it carefully, perhaps thinking it might bite back. And then our wagon began to move, and I was drawn away from the scene of the careless slaughter, before I could see whether the dog ate the munk, or simply left it dead for no reason at all.
Mr Bricewood kept his dog hungry, saying there was plenty of food for him if he only had the sense to find it. So I expect the chipmunk served as a small meal for the great Melchior, and perhaps gave him a taste for wild raw meat. And although I was glad of my father’s optimism about the use of my journal, I could see no prospect whatever that there could come a time when someone might employ it as evidence of the exact creature that the dog killed on that particular day.
I made no reference, either in writing or speech, to my grandmother’s furtive shaving of her chin and lip. I had no wish to mock her, and I could not pretend – as many seemed to do – that it was somehow her own failing that caused the hair to grow where it should not. It was so plainly a fact of nature, an act of God, and I pitied her for it. Our bodies, like Melchior’s feet, were not under our full control. There were numerous processes such as digestion, respiration, the female monthly cycle and the nameless functions of the male that could not be ordered by an act of will. Our hair grew of its own accord, and our only choice was to permit it or cut it. I had heard that in Asia the men will never cut their hair, during their whole lives. And my sister mentioned once that she believed that Mormons were the same, but that turned out to be only the women.
Such chatter amongst the young ones was common, as we walked beside the wagons, day after day. Without any telling, we assumed we should stay with our own family and not mix without permission, so there were few friendships formed in those first weeks and scant gossip passed along. When we nooned, with the need to watch out for roaming dogeys or gathering water or berries, we were hesitant to take the chance to talk to those from other families within our own party, and even more reluctant to roam to a different party entirely. There were eighteen distinct parties in the train, each of them comprising at least three and often five or six families. We knew only our own group by name before we left Westport – Tennant, Bricewood, Franklin and Fields. I learned a new name for one or other of the children every day and noted them in my journal, along with how much livestock they’d brought along.
It was ten days before I had a full list, on a page I kept clear for the purpose at the front of my book. We were the Collins family, eight of us in total, with fifteen steers, a milk cow and three horses, besides the oxen to draw the wagon. The stock were a lot of trouble, running ahead, or veering off to find better pasture. My mother had argued that fifteen was too many. ‘How can we need so much beef as that?’ she demanded, in her creaky voice that had been affected by a careless surgeon’s knife when she was twenty. He was trying to take out a big back tooth, and somehow slipped the blade across her voicebox. She had not spoken sweetly since that day.
The Tennants had three milking cows, twenty-five beeves, three horses and a crate of laying hens fastened to the back of one of their wagons. Five of their beef animals were calves, recently weaned, who were always unruly and skittish. All together, the beasts from our party alone made a great crowd, always hungry or thirsty, jostling for pasture or a good place at the waterhole. They were noisy, too, especially the hens. Some people in other parties had brought sheep and goats, as well. The sight of us, from the top of a distant hill, must have been enough to cause great astonishment to a savage unused to such an invasion. Although, given that this was the fourth summer in which wagon trains had followed this same trail, perhaps the natives were already becoming accustomed to the sight.
I was the eldest of the five children, followed by Reuben, and the three younger sisters. Too many girl children, said my father, in all sincerity. He dealt differently with us all, and favoured us in a complicated variety of ways. Naomi, the youngest, he made out to be a boy, in his desperation. He called her Nam and gave her a sharp knife to whittle sticks, and a whip for riding. At eight years old, she was as brave as any brother might have been. Above her came Lizzie, with her lazy eye and clumsy feet. When she was a baby she had her ankle broken by a kick from a pony and it healed crooked. It pained her yet, ten years after it happened, and her moans grated on the nerves of us all. My father found little patience for her, and my mother mostly just kept her out of his way. But his conscience pricked him now and then, and he would sit with her reading old Irish legends or the Arabian Nights. Fanny, then just sixteen, was my close companion. I had embraced her hard on the day she was born and never let her go. Nearly four years my junior, with a brother between us - and different mothers, which was a fact we seldom remembered - we were more unlike than we willingly acknowledged. We maintained a make believe that we should have been twins, until our – or more exactly her - mother overheard us and made mockery of the notion. It was that long westward migration which finally and absolutely showed up our differences. Over the months it was harder and harder to pretend that we were two peas in a single pod. By the end of it all, it was more that we were two beings from entirely different worlds.
May 15th. The ground has been rough today. Mrs Bricewood’s blue glass decanter got broke when the wagon lurched suddenly and it fell onto the oven. She wrapped the pieces in a length of velvet, even though she knows it will never be possible to mend it. Billy Franklin threw a burr at me and it caught in my hair. Fanny has toothache and Mother’s great toe on the left is blistered. The oxen are in good shape, and Reuben is a good driver.
I knew full well I ought not to include the part about Billy and expected my father to draw a thick line through it, as he said he would do if I wrote something wrong. But he only said, ‘He’s a good boy, by and large.’ Then he added, ‘Mamma’s toe is nothing worth recording. It will be better by morning.’ But he didn’t score it out.
A day or so later my sister Lizzie claimed she had seen two Indian braves on a hilltop, watching us from the backs of their horses. She had been walking a little way apart from the rest of us, probably because she had been to squat behind a bush and then fallen behind. This was something we were told not to do, with the risk of being bitten by snakes or spiders and nobody knowing until too late.
She came limping quickly back to us in her jerky way, her eyes wide with alarm. ‘Indians!’ she cried.
The reaction was in no way extreme. We looked where she pointed and saw nothing. ‘They were watching us,’ she protested. ‘They had horses and feathers in their hair.’
This spelt trouble for my poor sister. When my father and some other men questioned her about the colour of the feathers, what garments the men wore, whether or not they were painted, she was unable to reply. It was my belief from the first that she had invented the story to make a stir. We saw no Indians at all in those first few weeks. But we had all heard stories of their savage ways, and the need for great care and alertness at all times, lest we should accidentally incite hostility from them and bring about an attack. We had believed they were capable of any sort of wickedness, being entirely ignorant of civilised living, but already this fear was much allayed by the size of our train and the absence of any perceptible cause for concern. Even if it were true that they wore scarcely any garments and had no notion of where we had come from or the lives we led, we saw little reason to fear them. Instead, they became objects of curiosity, as the stories of their ways circulated. They ate their food uncooked, and daubed mud on themselves for decoration. Bones and skins and sticks and rocks were all they had to work with. They were like the first primitive people on earth, without books or faith or finer feeling. I had been going to add music to that list, but that would be wrong. They had drums, and once I heard some strange pipe playing from a group of Kiowa Indians who were at Westport.
Lizzie was chastised for her storytelling, and wept for a long time as she walked alone, a distance from our wagon. I saw the young Mrs Luke Tennant approach and attempt to console her, but I fear she had scant success.
The men and boys had the best of the work, it seemed to me. The trees that covered much of the land were already full of gaps and clearings after three previous years of wagon trains, with the nightly fires for so many people. That meant the wood-gathering parties had to trek further to find what they needed, passing points of interest that we females never saw. They returned with teasing stories of great bullfrogs and beetles and strange snakes, always told with huge delight and excitement that made we women dark with envy. All the life of the wild maintained a careful distance from the strangeness of the wheeled vehicles and chattering people, so the females in the parties saw almost nothing. The thrill of adventure was far more muted for us, kept close to the wagons with our everlasting cooking, cleaning and mending. We would sing and chatter and pretend to be glad, but many of us resented the imbalance. Lizzie surprised me one day by saying, ‘When we have our own homestead, I shall ride my pony ten miles every day, to all points of the compass.’
‘Whatever for?’ I demanded.
‘To see,’ she explained fiercely.
I had no need to ask what she expected to find before her eyes. I knew she would not be able to answer such a question. Simply to view what was there, I assumed, and to escape from the automatic limitations placed on girls and women in every corner of the world, as far as we knew.
Mr Bricewood had in his possession a fine long whipsaw, lashed to the side of his wagon and wrapped in oilskin to prevent it from rusting. In the early weeks we had no use for it, since it was meant for cutting planks or large sections of timber. Reuben in particular was drawn to it, offering himself as the second man when it came time to use it. ‘I’ll keep it in mind, boy,’ said Mr Bricewood. ‘But first there’s some chopping needs doing.’ He passed him a heavy axe with a long worn handle and nodded at a fallen birch tree that was intended for the campfire. Reuben took it willingly, and I watched him for an hour as he chopped and split the fresh green wood, with his arms bare and his face red. I was resting from my own chore of letting down the hem of Nam’s yellow dress, having driven the needle into my thumb far enough to cause a lasting ache and make the work clumsy and painful.
‘How does Father know how many miles we travel in a day?’ I asked. My journal was supposed to record the distance we covered, and each day I wrote Nine miles today or Very nearly twelve miles traversed. But I was never able to understand how these figures were reached. There were no milestones by the roadside, as Grandma fondly recalled from her years in County Wicklow. I had heard her voicing the same puzzlement as my own, the day before.
Reuben paused in his chopping and mopped his brow. ‘He guesses,’ he said briefly. ‘How else?’
‘No,’ I insisted. ‘There is a science to it. Mr McCaudle has an instrument like they have on ships.’ I frowned at my brother impatiently. ‘Have you not seen it?’
He shrugged and I yet again observed how like he was to the lumbering oxen that pulled the wagons. Reuben was strong and willing, well fed and well loved. But he seldom engaged his mind. Book reading came hard to him, and once he saw that all four of his sisters could make a better fist of it than he could, he gave it up entirely. Father made the best he could of it, hiding his disappointment well. Mother herself had never been one for books, and saw no reason to be sorry that Reuben favoured his hands over his head.
For myself, I never stopped trying to make my brother think. I was persuaded, against all evidence, that he did have a brain tucked away somewhere, and if I could just engage his interest, the gears and levers would all leap into action and he would conceive a passion for engines or botany or the works of Lord Byron. But science was evidently not the avenue he was likely to choose for his life. Even the basic mechanisms of the wagon wheels on their axles, or the yoke across the necks of the oxen were never questioned by him. Other young men would discuss methods of improving the design, or fashion spare components without any prompting, but Reuben stuck to the most menial tasks. He carried water, chopped firewood, scattered ash, and butchered carcases. This last he did with some delicacy and minimal wastage, earning himself the closest thing to a special talent he was ever likely to achieve. It led to a concern for the sharpness of knives, and a liking for honing them with a whetstone. When it had come time to select items to take on our migration, Reuben had chosen nothing but clothes and boots and three good knives of differing lengths. Once it was observed how he had a feeling for blades, my father had obtained a sharpening stone for him and told him he would be given the role of Knife Sharpener for the whole party.
His axe was of course wickedly sharp. He sliced it through the sappy birchwood as if it had been a tender ox liver. One of the other lads remarked, as he passed, that Reuben Collins might make a prodigious Indian warrior, if he took an idea to fight with his axe. ‘A man’s head might come clean off, if that was swung at his neck,’ he joked.
Reuben paused again, his eyes on the blade. ‘Tis not intended for such a use,’ he said. ‘What for would I be hacking off a poor man’s head?’
The other smiled. ‘We should hope it never comes to it, then,’ he said. Then he glanced up at a sudden dark cloud that cut out the sun and made Reuben shiver.
Our companion was Abel Tennant, son of Luke, and grandson of our leader. He had a subtle air of old-fashioned arrogance that stemmed from being one of the leader’s family, and I disliked him for it, despite his good looks. His hair was curly, his skin bronzed. He had full lips and a strong jaw. He threw me a look, as if we were conspirators against my poor bovine brother, and caught my eyes in a long gaze that left me feeling as helpless as a rabbit. I understood then, perhaps for the first time, the sense behind the instruction that girls must keep their eyes lowered when conversing with a man. There was a startling awareness of intrusion in that intangible thread that linked us. He was entering into me in some unearthly fashion that I could not control or understand. I felt my own pulse in parts of my body that were barred from exploration. I felt afraid, but also curious as to exactly what was happening. Like Reuben, I shivered.
‘Your mother’s looking for you,’ Reuben pointed out with a duck of his chin. Abel turned and waved a careless hand towards a woman who stood some twenty yards distant, hands on her hips. She seemed angry.
‘Some chore for me,’ Abel muttered. ‘As always.’
‘Abel – where might your sisters be?’ shouted the woman. Mrs Luke Tennant, we called her, mother of two small girls. Without discussion, we all knew that she was a second wife, Luke’s mother lost in some way, as mine had been, too long ago to matter. Mrs Luke appeared to be barely ten years senior to the young man, himself about the age of Reuben – seventeen or eighteen.
‘Am I to be a nursemaid now?’ he called back, more loudly than needed. We had heard him make the same defiant question before. Reuben had snickered in sympathy, even though he was never required to act as overseer to his own sisters.
‘Better that than what I saw just now,’ she shouted back. My insides quivered at the implication. Had she somehow witnessed the throbbing between my legs? Did it somehow show to an experienced woman? Shame sent blood flowing to my cheeks and I almost ran back to our wagon.
I was nineteen, the daughter of a careful man of business, educated with a group of other girls in a schoolroom presided over by a stiff-backed woman much older than my mother. There had been fleeting mention of marriage for me, mainly from my grandmother. An oddly formal little maternal talk had been addressed to myself and Fanny a few days before the wagon train set off. ‘There will be young men of all types amongst our fellow emigrants,’ she said, as if reading from a prepared text. ‘Some could very well prove to be acceptable future partners for you both, but others will be far from suitable. In the absence of the normal social institutions, we must maintain the strictest vigilance where these young men are concerned. I am given to understand that there might be occasional assemblies involving dancing and music, when we reach Fort John, for example, but that is another matter. I am telling you, my daughters, that over the coming months, there must be no loosening of our usual codes of behaviour. Any lapses would only serve to undermine our purpose in making the journey – do you understand?’
Fanny and I glanced at each other, unsure of the real message behind these words. We could barely comprehend the life we were about to engage in, as we crossed two thousand miles without a roof above our heads, or a store from which to purchase new boots or bonnets. We had grown up in the east, where European habits still persisted, but already we could see that many others in the train were from such places as Illinois or Oklahoma, where society barely existed at all, and deference was an alien notion.