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An Ordinary Woman
A Dramatized Biography of Nancy Kelsey
By Cecelia Holland OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1999 Cecelia Holland
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0763-4
CHAPTER 1
On October 25, 1838, a girl of fifteen rode eagerly through the blazing Missouri autumn to her wedding.
She was a tall, pretty girl, with long dark hair and dark eyes and a wide, humorous mouth, her face shaped with the high cheekbones and strong jaw of her Scotch-Irish heritage. Her hands on the reins were strong and capable, and she rode astride. No pampered sheltered city flower, she had been working since her childhood. She could milk a cow, skin a deer, plant a field, drive a team of oxen, load and shoot a rifle. She had made the dress she was wearing. The child of pioneers, bred to courage and risk, she had grown up in the wilderness, only a few miles from the great Missouri River that was in 1838 the border of the settled United States. Her name was Nancy Roberts, and westering was in her blood.
In marrying so young, and marrying whom she did, she was choosing a westering life, one that would take her across the unmapped continent and change American history.
Her new husband was Ben Kelsey, twelve years her senior. One shoot of a sprawling family tree rooted in a Scotch-Irish immigrant who settled in Pennsylvania before the Revolutionary War, Ben was a big, bluff man with woolly red hair and piercing blue eyes. He was a hard worker, and a go-getter, too: he already had a farm of his own. He was sickly. Every once in a while a bout of something like malaria laid him flat on his back, but he was always up again in a little while, back to work, and back to dreaming.
Because Ben Kelsey had ambitions wider than a Missouri homestead. He simmered with plans for the future, all leading to riches and glory, and listening to him lit Nancy's imagination like a torch.
Ben was going places. Nancy was going with him. To a fifteen-year-old, there seemed no obstacle between heaven and earth that could stop them. Before Judge Applegate, the formidable Justice of the Peace of Rives County, she put her hands into Ben's and bound her life to his.
At first, the only place they went was back to Ben's farm, a clearing at the end of a long muddy pathway that was like a tunnel through the trees.
This was a familiar life to her. Nancy had grown up on a farm like this one, in a two-or three-room cabin made of trimmed logs, with a big stone hearth for cooking, a puncheon floor that had to be swept constantly to keep it clean, windows covered with oiled cloth, all the water hauled in from the spring. When she first moved in with Ben, winter was coming, and they probably spent their honeymoon getting ready for the cold time: chopping wood and chinking the cracks in the cabin walls and laying by supplies. Having just been married helped. As wedding presents their friends and families gave them hams and quilts, jugs of cider, honey, sourmash.
They had no trouble keeping warm. By spring, Nancy was pregnant with her first child.
In her few, scattered writings, Nancy mentions her own parents only once. When she married Ben, she became a Kelsey. His brothers lived within riding distance, and they did everything together—when one hollered, everybody came. Two of the brothers were married and had children, and there were Kelsey cousins all over Missouri. When they all got together, to build a fence, sew a quilt, plow a field, or celebrate Christmas, they made a loud, ebullient swarm—a comforting web of relations.
In the midst of this family Nancy ran her own household. She sewed her clothes and Ben's and, soon, their children's. She cooked their meals, planted a garden where she grew their vegetables and potatoes, tended chickens and milked the cow and cleaned house. Every year she would preserve as much food as she could for the winter months, when in spite of all, toward March and April, there was nothing left to eat but what Ben could shoot or trap.
In everything, she made do with what she had around her. Once in a while, in those first years of their marriage, they could have gone to Independence, the Jackson County seat, where stores sold staple supplies and some made-up goods, but everything was very expensive. Now and then a tinker would rattle down the lane in a clatter of pots and a cloud of gossip.
Nancy never had money to buy much. If she needed a tool she made one, or Ben did. She hoarded sugar and coffee in tins on her shelf; when she took the corn to be milled she watched to make sure the miller didn't cheat her of a few ounces of meal. She picked up windfallen apples, used and reused every scrap of fabric first as clothing and then as patching for clothing and finally as diapers and rags, she gathered herbs in the woods, as her mother had taught her, to doctor bellyaches and headaches. She had no remedies for Ben's occasional spells of the shakes, although she never gave up trying.
None of the Kelseys kept slaves, although they could have: Missouri was a slave state, according to the Compromise put together in 1820, and there were slaves on the bigger farms around them, and in rich households back in St. Louis. Slavery was a luxury in Missouri, and Ben's farm was too small to support more than the family that worked it.
Often, as the 1830s closed, it didn't even look capable of doing that.
This was from no lack of work. Ben had built the cabin himself, with his brothers' help; the Kelseys were great builders. Like all frontier people, like Nancy, they had a range of skills, from gun-smithing to distilling hard liquor, which they put to use as needed. Ben cleared some of his land to grow corn, and planted some fruit trees. Nancy tended the corn, too, those first two summers, while he went out hunting, his favorite way of life, roaming the wilderness.
That was another problem. The wilderness was disappearing. Missouri was filling up with settlers. Great stretches remained of the primordial forest that once had covered the country from the Appalachians to the great river, but Ben had seen all of it. He longed for new, untracked places. Because of his chronic health problems, a doctor had already advised him to go to the sea or to the mountains, but Ben didn't really need much of an excuse. He was footloose, a rambler, by nature; he had to keep moving.
But it must have seemed sometimes that the Kelseys were trapped.
By 1840, the burgeoning new American settlement had come up against the edge of the Great Plains. In its first westward surge, the young country had bitten off more than it could chew, and it was suffering hard for its greed. The tremendous speculation in land that began after the Revolutionary War with the Kentucky boom, which seeded the whole Ohio Valley with new people, had finally collapsed in 1837. The accompanying bank failures threw the whole young country into a downward economic spiral that by 1840 was a full-blown depression.
In their land hunger, the farmers and hunters of the settlements had far outstripped the economic systems of the young republic. Until new transport developed so that people on the frontier could sell their crops in the distant eastern cities, the backcountry was going to remain depressed and poor, in spite of the wealth of the land. Ben and Nancy Kelsey had their own farm, yes, but every day that farm was seeming less like home and more like a millstone tied to their necks.
Nor could the settlers escape by pushing out onto the broad Plains across the river. The government in Washington had given that land to the Indians for all time; it was forbidden, out of reach forever.
Of course the United States government's idea of forever was a little different than most people's.
Back before Nancy was born, Missouri had been admitted to the Union under the laws known collectively as the Missouri Compromise. What made this artful legal structure necessary was the perilous problem of slavery, and whether to allow the spread of slavery into states newly admitted to the United States. One of the terms of the Missouri Compromise allotted to Missouri a western border that was a straight line running due north and south through what is now Kansas City.
West of that north-south line was the Sauk and Fox Indian Reservation, for all time and forever.
In 1837, forever came to an end. With settlers clamoring for land, the government paid the Sauk and Fox seventy-five hundred dollars and some trade goods for the territory lying between the original north-south border of Missouri and the westward-trending Missouri River. This rough triangle of trees and bountiful meadows came to be known as the Platte Purchase.
The Platte Purchase was like the bell that tolls before the earth starts to quake. It signaled the growing instability of the situation on the frontier, and, indeed, of the whole United States. The Purchase breached the supposedly fixed and eternal western boundary, making further violations inevitable, and because the Platte Purchase became part of Missouri, the event extended slavery north of the Mason-Dixon Line, in violation of the Missouri Compromise.
Throughout the 1840s and 1850s Missouri was to be a continual hotbed for both these issues. Passions for and against slavery were already leading to scattered violence that would gradually become endemic, a low-grade civil war going on years before the official war broke out. And Missouri was the point of greatest pressure on the western boundary.
Throughout the 1830s that pressure was mounting. Immigrants were flooding into the country from Europe, aggravating the depressed economies of the eastern cities. As conditions east of the Appalachians worsened, people there were pulling up and heading west, in search of the fabled American second chance. But there was no room. Within only a few years, the whole Platte Purchase was filled up with homesteads. Still more people were looking west, hungry for new land and new lives.
The Kelseys among them. By the time Nancy bore their first child, in December of 1839, Ben was already planning to move on. While the sixteen-year-old mother and her infant daughter, Martha Ann, figured out together how to nurse, he was talking about selling out their farm here and going to Iowa, the Platte Purchase, or maybe Tennessee.
To Nancy, where hardly mattered. Wherever Ben went, she would go. She and Ann. She looked into the face of her tiny daughter, full of infinite, untested dreams.
Selling out here, however, was going to be something of a problem. On the whole frontier, times were bad and getting worse. The Panic of 1837 had closed banks and dried up the cash. Even if you had something to sell, like that old staple commodity, deer hides, there was nobody who could buy it. Jesse Applegate, whose sister Lucy was married to Ben's brother Sam, had loaded up a whole steamboat with lard and bacon, and gotten only a hundred dollars for it, and then it had all been burnt for fuel.
And the cost of those few things these farmers needed to buy—cloth, coffee, iron, gunpowder—was steadily climbing. When Ben and his brothers, big outspoken Sam, and the hot-tempered Andy, and Zed, got together in the Kelsey cabin to talk over the future, what they did mostly was gripe. Nancy didn't see they were getting anywhere at getting anywhere.
Then John Marsh's letter came.
The Kelseys may have met this young Harvard man, gifted liar and crank, when he worked as a sales clerk in a store in Independence, the frontier city and county seat, only a few miles from Ben and Nancy's farm. Raw, violent Independence, with its fringe of wharves along the Missouri, its blocks of warehouses on miry streets, was the gateway to the West. From Independence the beaver trappers set forth on their yearly treks to the Rockies. From Independence, too, caravans of wagons rumbled on down the Santa Fe Trail into northern Mexico, taking out trade goods and bringing back mules and fur.
John Marsh, clerking in a store, waiting every day on people with tales of gold and adventure to the west, one day took off along the Santa Fe Trail. Somewhere he began to hear about a fabulous country on the Pacific coast, where the dew was sweet as honey and the sun shone without cease. A place called California.
From Santa Fe he traveled down into Sonora and over to the great Mexican port of Guaymas, on the west coast. From Guaymas he took a schooner north to Monterey, California's only port of entry.
There, thousands of miles from anybody who could say otherwise, he announced he was a medical doctor. Since this made him the only physician in the entire territory it gave him a special cachet. He was a voracious reader, able to learn enough from books to practice, and he was good with words. He talked his way into a grant of land, up in the north of Mexican California near San Francisco Bay. There, he built a ranch, patched up broken legs, delivered babies, and wrote a series of letters back home to friends in Missouri.
California, he said, was wonderful. And empty. The land was fertile, the climate sublime, the Indians meek, and the local Mexican government utterly lax: paradise was there by the Pacific, just waiting for enterprising people to come grab it.
Marsh had even figured out a way to get there. The Santa Fe Trail was too hard and long and expensive for most people; going by sea was even longer and cost even more. Marsh had devised a more direct route. In his travels, he had picked up a lot of information about the territory lying between California and Missouri, and he thought it possible to come straight across the continent. In his letters, he presented this route with as much confidence as if he had actually traveled it himself. He proclaimed it direct and easy for wagons, with good pasturage and water all the way, a matter of a few months on the road, with Eden at the end of it.
Marsh sent his letters to several friends in Jackson County, Independence's hinterland, including local farmers like Billy Baldridge and John Bartleson, who knew everybody. Baldridge and Bartleson passed on the letters to the newspapers. Ben Kelsey could not read, but Nancy could, and when she read him the letters out of the newspaper Ben made up his mind where it was they were going.
The long discussions around the Kelseys' front room began to boil with excitement, and every other word was California. Soon Ben had his brothers talked into it too.
They weren't the only ones. A sort of California fever was sweeping through Missouri. All across Jackson County, people were signing on. Marsh's correspondents, Baldridge and Bartleson, were among the first, but in the spring of 1840 dozens of other men pledged to join them. Many intended to take their wives and children. Of course, they had missed the best time for leaving* this year, but they all vowed that come hell or high water they would set off next year for California.
The movement got another boost when the dashing Antoine Robidoux turned up in the Platte Purchase, just north of Independence on the river.
Robidoux, the brother of Joseph Robidoux who founded St. Joseph, Missouri, was a fur man. In the late 1820s he had operated a trading post in the Uinta Mountains in Colorado, and from there had traveled down to Santa Fe. From Santa Fe he made his way through Arizona to California, where he spent some time in Monterey.
Back in Missouri, he talked so much and so loud about the wonders of far-off California that some of his listeners organized a meeting in the little settlement of Weston, up the Missouri from Independence, so that Robidoux could tell them all again.
Robidoux laid it on thick. He talked about the oranges and the sunshine, the countless wild horses and cattle, the fabled hospitality of the Californios, the docility of the Indians. The flavor of his discourse can be inferred from his answer to a question about fevers and agues, a primary concern of the Missouri settler.
"He said there was but one man in California that had ever had a chill there, and it was a matter of so much wonderment to the people of Monterey that they went eighteen miles into the country to see him shake." So wrote young John Bidwell, Platte pioneer, who took to Robidoux's words with enthusiasm.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from An Ordinary Woman by Cecelia Holland. Copyright © 1999 Cecelia Holland. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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