The Homesteader's Daughter

Chapter 1

My family, which is to say me, my father and mother and my baby brother, lived in a two room apartment in Pittsburgh. My father worked as an engineer for some big company, but he’d grown up on a farm and starting a farm of his own was what he’d been aiming to do ever since the war ended. He had just somehow not got around to doing it. That’s how it is sometimes in this world.

One day while we were eating supper, he says, casual like, ‘How’d you all like to live on a farm? Get right away from this dirty city and live in the open air?’ My ma seemed kind of dubious. Davy, my brother, being only a year old, was too young to express an opinion, but I said,

‘Pa, that’s a great idea! When can we go?’

He smiled at me and said, ‘We leave Pittsburgh in exactly one month.’ Ma pulled a sour face at that, it seeming to her that he hadn’t really been consulting us at all, but presenting us with what is known as a fait accompli. She said as much, but my father he just laughed, nodded his head at me and told her, ‘Maybelle is right pleased at the idea.’

‘Well,’ said my mother, not a little peevishly, ‘In such a case, I wonder that you and she don’t just move to this farm by yourselves and leave me and Davy here in Pittsburgh.’

My father caught my eye and as clear as if he had whispered it in my ear, I knew that he wished me to smooth things over a little with Ma. To this end, I reminded her of all the complaints which she had voiced over the years about living in a big, dirty city. After a while she softened and at length said to my father, ‘I will allow that there is some merit in the scheme, Ebenezer. Howsoever, I would be greatly obliged if the next time you have any plans of this sort to make, you would first discuss them with me.’

My father did his best to look sheepish and apologetic. ‘Martha,’ he said, ‘I truly thought it would be in the nature of a pleasant surprise for you to be moving away from Pittsburgh. Like Maybelle says, you have had enough to say about this town over the years.’

‘Never you mind what Maybelle says. Do not suppose for one moment that it escapes my notice when the two of you combine in this way to bring me round to your opinion.’

There was little that either I or my father could say to that and we both felt it safer to leave the subject alone now, seeing that Ma seemed content with the plan.

For the next month my father and I were all happy and excited, like you are when you’re getting ready to go on vacation. My mother was still distinctly cool about the business, seeing as how she hadn’t really been given a choice in the matter. The plan was that Pa would send all the money he had saved to an agent in Independence, which was a town on the Missouri river. This man would buy us a covered wagon, fit it out and arrange for us to join a wagon train heading west.

In those days the government would just give land to anybody who wanted it. Anyone who asked could be given 160 acres, and the only condition was that you had to go and build a house and actually live on the land. Imagine that, the government giving folk something for nothing! You’d think there had to be some sort of catch and you’d be right, although we didn’t find that out until later. The land which my father had claimed was in the Nebraska territory, which as you may know was part of the Great Plains. It would be a journey of about 500 miles from Independence, which my father calculated would take us the best part of a month and a half to complete.

Getting to Independence was not a difficult task; we travelled there by railroad. It was a busy town, though not of course as civilized as Pittsburgh. It was a little rough, but there was plenty of money around. Pa said that the town had grown rich by robbing and cheating all the overlanders who came there to join the wagon trains heading west along the Oregon trail. Be that as it may, a week after we arrived we started out along with fifty other wagons, in the direction of Oregon.

I should at this point say some few words about wagon trains. First off is where there were hardly any horses in the whole enterprise. How’s that? I hear you saying. What’s this foolishness, a wagon train without horses? Yes sir, that’s right. No horses at all except half a dozen or so for the scouts who rode on ahead checking out the trail. The wagons themselves were in the main pulled by oxen and I’ll tell you for why. When you claimed that government land, oxen’s a sight more use than horses when it comes to ploughing up virgin soil, on account of they have a deal more stamina.

The main disadvantage of oxen is their speed, or I should say their lack of speed. You probably heard about horse racing, but I’ll warrant you never heard of oxen racing! I tell you, on a good day those creatures might move about as fast as an old man with the asthma who’s carrying a heavy sack up a hill. If we made fifteen miles in a day we thought we were moving at a right smart pace.

Then there’s the noise. We all hung everything we didn’t want cluttering up the inside of the wagon on hooks fix to the outside. By which I mean pots, pans, buckets, tools and so on. The effect from fifty wagons with no suspension and all that ironmongery bouncing about was purely deafening. You didn’t tend to talk much while you was travelling, on account of it meant shouting at the top of your voice.

On top of this is the dust. We travelled not on a road but over what was in essence a mud track. Think on this – fifty wagons drawn by around 200 oxen, all going over a heap of dried mud. By the end of the day, hell, by the end of the morning, we were absolutely coated in dust. So if I were to sum up travelling by wagon train I would have to say: slow, noisy and dirty.

Before I carry on with my tale, I should say a word about language. I mean bad language – swearing and such. I tell you now, the amount of cursing you heard on the trail is something else and I’m not talking about ‘darn’ or ‘heck’, nor even ‘damn’ and ‘hell’. Some of them boys, particularly the scouts, it seemed to me they couldn’t string two words together without one of them being ‘f***’ or ‘s***’. After a while you just got used to it, but if anybody is offended by such words then they would be best advised to stop reading now.

A week after we started out from Independence I saw a man killed. This was the first time I had ever seen such a thing and it has stuck in my memory. Cursing and bad language played a part in this death, which is why it has come into my mind. This is what happened.

Every wagon was supposed to be in the charge of a grown man. Well, one family came to Independence just like us to start along the Oregon Trail. This family consisted of a man and his wife and their son Jed who was, I suppose, about seventeen years of age. Leastways, I guess he was about that age; I was fifteen and I figure he was two years or so older than me. Howsoever, this family had no sooner arrived in Independence than the man contracted some sort of fever, from which he then proceeded to die. Although it was against the rules, the captain of the wagon train let this woman and her son come along anyway. I think he got paid a certain amount for every wagon he took along the trail and I guess he was reluctant to lose the fee from this wagon.

You might think the boy would have been glad to be allowed along despite his father dying, and would’ve kept his head down and his mouth shut. Not him. He was the most contentious youth I ever encountered. He was forever interrupting conversations, offering his opinions uninvited and generally making a nuisance of himself. People made allowance for him because his pa had died, but one day he really pissed off one of the scouts. This was during the halt at midday and I happened to be near by. I did not hear what Jed had said, but the scout suddenly exploded, shouting at him in front of everybody, ‘Boy, why don’t you just shut the f*** up?’

Jed, he was mortified. He particularly disliked being called ‘boy’. From what we made out afterwards, what happened next was this. During the rest of the day’s driving Jed let his mother handle the team of four oxen while he gave his attention to a bottle of rye whiskey which he had discovered in the wagon. It had probably belonged to his dead pa. Anyways, he commenced to drink most of the bottle, with the natural result that by the time we stopped at sundown he was drunk as a fiddler’s bitch.

Whilst we were all setting up camp, Jed came staggering up to the scout who had sworn at him. He could hardly stand, but he was waving around his father’s gun, which was a Navy Colt .36 calibre revolver as my father later told me. When the scout, whose name I don’t recall, saw Jed he made the mistake of laughing at him, saying, ‘Shit, boy. You better put your daddy’s gun away till you growed up a bit.’ Whereupon Jed shot him in the belly.

Now something that surprised me at the time was that you would expect under such circumstances for blood to begin to flow at once. What happened, though, was just a neat little hole in the scout’s shirt, which hardly noticed at all. I’m talking here of course about a bullet from a handgun. A shotgun will make considerably more than a neat little hole, as I discovered for myself later that year when I had occasion to kill a man with one.

In the meantime, the scout is standing there in surprise, clutching his belly and hollering, ‘He’s killed me. The boy’s killed me.’ Jed is still waving this pistol around and people are diving to the ground and hiding behind wagons in case he takes it into his head to shoot somebody else. Then he turns in my direction, not meaning me any harm, I think, but kind of dazed with the liquor and hardly knowing what he was doing. It was however enough for my father who, perceiving as he saw it a threat to his family, jumped on Jed from behind and knocked him to the ground. Then he grabs Jed’s hair and bangs his head up and down vigorously on the ground until he has knocked him out.

I never knew a man to make such a production out of dying as that scout. It was plain to everyone as set eyes on his wound that he was done for, there not being a doctor for many miles in any direction. He spent the whole evening and most of the night wailing and complaining about his fate. He was shouting, ‘Oh, God I don’t want to die!’ and ‘Lord, I ain’t ready to come to you yet!’ and similar things. It was specially ironic seeing as how this man had been a notorious hard drinker and gambler, the last person you would have suspicioned to have been worrying about the afterlife! My father said it was right heart-warming to hear such a profane roughneck turn to religion in this way. I think he was joking. However the novelty wore off and by midnight folk had had enough of it and were wishing he’d just die peaceably and let the rest of us get some sleep, which he finally did, but not until it was nearly dawn.

And that is the true story of how bad language caused a man’s death. If the scout had asked that boy politely, ‘Excuse me young man, would you mind remaining silent for a few moments?’ instead of shouting and cursing, then he most likely would not have got shot.

Next morning they buried the deceased man, which is to say they scraped a hole two inches deep and laid him there with a load of rocks piled on him. My father said he figured that as soon as we left there, the coyotes would dig up the body and pull it to pieces.

As for Jed, since nobody was fond enough of the dead man to avenge him, the captain of the wagon train decided