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My mother did not have to go out to work; she was married, my father was the provider. He got a day’s work here and there; he could drive a team, he could carpenter, or paint, or spell a storekeeper at dinner-time, and once he was on a jury, downtown. My mother and I slept at Grandma’s then, every night; the jury was kept under lock and key and my father could not come home. But he got his keep and two dollars every day for five straight weeks and he brought back all that money.
My mother worked to save. She sewed at the dressmaker’s from six o’clock to six o’clock every day but Sunday and then came home to get supper. I had peeled the potatoes thin and set the table. I was not allowed to touch the stove. One day my mother made sixty good firm buttonholes in one hour, sixty minutes; nobody else could work so well, so fast. And every day, six days a week, she earned a dollar.
We were going to The Land of the Big Red Apple when we had enough money. Someone named Mr. Sherwin had gone there and seen it, so the pictures that he sent back were true; pictures of huge red apples and of rows of much smaller trees, and of buildings confusingly named Mansfield. They were not a man’s field, and the print under them said they were The Gem City of the Ozarks.
Around and under these pictures on beautifully shiny paper I read that The Gem City of the Ozarks was in The Land of the Big Red Apple in Missouri. Now I knew three Miss States: Miss-issippi, Miss-consin, and Missouri. Paul said, scornfully, that it wasn’t Miss-consin, it was Wis-consin, but Wis didn’t make sense to me.
Paul and George Cooley were coming with us to The Land of the Big Red Apple. Paul was oldest, George was next, I was only the youngest but they had to let me boss because I was a girl. We had always known each other. Their father had two big teams and two big covered wagons, and Paul would be allowed to drive one of them; he said his father said he could. I did not want to be
lieve this but I knew that Paul would never lie. He was a big boy, too, going on ten years old.
My mother had saved one hundred dollars to take to The Land of the Big Red Apple. All those dollars were one piece of paper, named ‘a hundred dollar bill’. She hid it in her writing desk, a fascinating wooden box which my father had made and polished so shiny-smooth that stroking it was rapture. It opened on little brass hinges to lie spread flat and be a slanting green felt surface to write on. At the top was a darling wooden tray to hold my mother’s pearl-handled pen, and beside this was an inkwell. And the green felt was on a lid that lifted up on tinier hinges to reveal the place for writing paper, underneath it. I was allowed to see and touch the desk only when my mother opened it.
The hundred dollar bill was a secret. My mother locked it in the desk. Mr. and Mrs. Cooley knew, perhaps Paul and George did, but we must not talk about it. I must never, never, speak one word about that hundred dollar bill, not to anyone. Never, no matter what happened.
In the shade of the big empty house my father painted our covered wagon. It was really better than a covered wagon; it had been a two-seated hack though now it had only the front seat. My father painted it shiny black. He made a flat top for it, of black oilcloth, and put straight curtains of the black oilcloth on both sides and the back. Each curtain would roll up when he pulled a rope. Behind the seat he fitted the bedsprings and my mother made up the bed on them. At night she would make my bed on the floor in front of the seat.
She baked two dozen hardtacks for the journey. They were as large as a plate, flat and hard. Being so hard and dry, they would not spoil as bread would. It was a hard tack to gnaw, but it tasted almost like a cracker.
We were going to make haste, driving every day to reach The Land of the Big Red Apple and get settled before winter. We could not stop to look for work, but we would need more food on the way, so my father bought a box of asbestos fire mats to trade, or to sell for ten cents apiece.
Fire mats were a new thing, unheard-of. They looked like round pieces of gray-white pasteboard edged with a narrow strip of tin. Nobody could believe that they would not burn, till my father proved it. He would urge doubters to make a hot fire, hotter and hotter, then he laid one of those mats right into the flames. It would glow red and the watchers would jeer, but that mat came out unharmed. Put one of those fire mats under a pot, my father would say, and the pot could boil bone-dry, not a potato in it would so much as scorch. Every woman alive needed one of those mats.
Everything that we were taking all the way was packed under the bedsprings first. Next, the things that we would be using: the table and chairs with folding legs and the sheet-iron campstove that my father had made; the hammock that blind Aunt Mary had netted and given to us as a parting present; the writing desk, well wrapped; plates, cups, frying pan, coffee pot, wash basin, water pail, picket ropes and pegs; the hardtack in its box. My father tied down the back curtain. Outside it he fastened the hencoop while the hens fluttered and squawked inside the wire netting. But they would soon be used to traveling.
In the dawn next morning we said goodby to Grandpa and Grandma, to the aunts Mary and Carrie and Grace, who all stood around to watch us go, though Aunt Mary’s beautiful blue eyes could not see us. The mares were hitched to the hack; their colts, Little Pet and Prince, would follow them. The Cooleys’ covered wagons had gone ahead, and Paul was driving the second one. I climbed up over our wagon’s wheel and onto the seat by myself. My mother sat beside me; beside her my father tightened the lines; everyone said, ‘Goodby, goodby!’ – ‘Don’t forget to write. I won’t, I will, you be sure to. Goodby!’ and we drove away.
Away from Grandma’s house with its rag-carpets and rocking-chair, the hymn books on the organ, my very own footstool; away from the chalky schoolroom where angelic Miss Barrows taught Kindergarten, Primer, First and Second Readers; away from the summer sidewalks where grasshoppers hopped in the dry grass and the silver-lined poplar leaves rattled overhead; away from the gaunt gray empty house, and from Mrs. Sherwood and her sister who sometimes on sweltering afternoons asked me to fetch ten cents’ worth of ice cream from the far-away ice cream parlor, and shared it with me; away from De Smet to The Land of the Big Red Apple.
My mother made daily notes of our journey in a little 5-cent Memorandum book, writing with pencil on both sides of the pages, of course. Nobody then wasted paper. This is her record.
R.W.L.
? On the Way Home ?
2
July 17, 1894
Started at 8:40. Three miles out, Russian thistles. Harvesters in poor wheat. Crossed the line into Miner County at 2 o’clock. Camped by a spring that cannot be pumped, but there is feed for the horses. Grain about 8 inches high, will go about 1½ bushels to the acre. Hot wind.
July 18
Farmers mowing the grain for hay. At 11:30 we left Howard one mile east. Farm work well along here. Dragging for next year’s crop is all done, without troubling to take this year’s grain off. Worst crops we have seen yet. No grass. Standing grain 3 inches high, burned brown and dead.
Crossed the Northwestern R.R. tracks at 2:25. Crossed the line into McCook County at 5 o’clock, drove 2½ miles and camped. We had a little dust storm in the afternoon and drew the wagons up close together for we could not see what was coming. The wind changed from a hot south wind to a cold north wind, both hard. Though the thermometer stood at 102° in the wagon.
July 19
It rained in the night but did not blow. Nothing in the wagons got wet except one horse blanket. We had fried chicken for breakfast and got a late start at 9:15. Weather is cool and pleasant, wind in the north and dust laid by the rain. Groves are thick and look so nice but farmers are mowing their grain for hay.
We found a good camping place down in a ravine, out of the wind and nearly out of sight. Cooked our supper and ate it. As we were washing the dishes a man came and said if the man that owned the place saw us he would make us trouble, and as he lived just over the hill we thought we would move across the road and be all right there. So we hitched up and drove across. It was a very nice camping place. In the evening two men came up to talk. The thermometer stood at 92°.
Mrs. Cooley and I went to a house to buy milk. It was swarming with children and pigs; they looked a good deal alike.
July 20
Started at 1:10. One of the Cooleys’ horses cut his leg a little in a barb wire fence.
