Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

Although Pa and Ma had high hopes for a better situation in California, it grieved me something sore when it came time to leave the farm. I had lived there for all of my life, and Grandpa Reverend was one of the first settlers around Mount Gilead. The truth is that the prospect of taking to the trail did not seem quite real to Brother Jon and I, until the very day that we finished packing the wagon with all of our traps and treasures, to stay at Grandpa Reverend’s house for a week or so until we departed for Missouri and the beginning of the trail west. The new owner, a man named Roberts, wanted to move his own family into the place before he began spring ploughing. It was not quite time for us to head west, as snow was still on the ground and the weather still very cold. Pa said we would linger a week, maybe two, if it stormed bad. The journey from Ohio would take us at least six weeks to get to the jumping-off place, if the weather stayed fair and we didn’t encounter any delays. We meant to go to Independence, on the great Missouri-Mississippi River, and join with other travelers to form a company to venture across what was then called the American desert.

“The grass has to have grown tall enough to feed the animals,” Pa explained. To me, it made perfect sense. Our team oxen had to graze, all eight of them, and Daisy the milk cow which was to come with us on the journey. The snow wasn’t anywhere near off the fields yet in Ohio, so it likely wasn’t any better in Missouri – or across the river, where the trail led west.

Still, it was a wrench to leave the farm, and see our house emptied out, the rooms echoing and comfortless. All the furniture – and there wasn’t much, as we were not rich folk – was sold or given away. Pa said cheerfully that he could always make more, as he was a fair hand at carpentering, as long as there was good wood to be had. On the last afternoon, Pa found me in the barn, where our favorite barn cat, Cally (for Calico) had birthed another parcel of kittens the week before. She had them in a nest of old horse blankets in the stall where we had kept harness and tack for the oxen.

They were beautiful kittens, and their eyes had just begun to open, all blue and wondering at that strange world around them. Cally was accustomed to Jon and I, so she let me hold the new kittens without raising a cat-ruckus. The largest was another calico, like their mother, but I liked best the orange kitten with four wee white paws and a white tip to it’s brief tail. I thought that was the sweetest of the litter. I was holding it in my lap, and letting it play with the end of a wheat-straw, when Pa found me. Boomer the hunting hound pattered after him, but he knew well enough not to pester Cally when she was nursing kittens. Boomer lay down on the old straw and rested his nose on his paws, while Pa asked Cally if she had caught any more mice that day, since mice were a plague in the wintertime, and came inside from the fields looking for warmth. Pa liked animals, and animals liked him, you see. There wasn’t a better hand with oxen or horses in the whole of Marion County then.

“I should have asked for another dollar for the place, seeing that a new passel of barn cats are included in the sale,” Pa said, finally.

“Pa, this one is so pretty,” I held up the orange and white kitten. I was crying, all of a sudden, like a ball of sadness suddenly unraveled inside me, like a skein of yarn. “Can’t I keep just this one, and take it with us to California?”

Pa heaved a sigh, shook his head and sat down on the straw next to me, while Boomer pricked his ears up and looked back and forth between us, as if he were wondering about what we were saying. “We can’t do that, Sugar-plum,” he replied. Sugar-plum was his pet name for me, and he used it only in the family. “It’s too little to be taken away from it’s mama. Besides, cat’s ain’t really at all like dogs. See – cats; they’re set on a place that they like. Oh, they’ll tend to like the people in it, well enough – well, mostly. But it’s the home-place they favor over anything. Not people so much. It’s pert-near impossible to move a cat from a place that it’s accustomed to. Now dogs,” and Pa fondled Boomer’s ears, “Dogs are different. Dogs favor the person they love over anything. Leave a house for someplace else, that dog will follow you over all creation. A cat will just yawn at you and wonder when that new person in the home place will give them some fresh milk. So, no, Sugar-plum. Leave the kitten with it’s Ma. Besides, I hear tell there’s wolves out west, big hungry prairie wolves. A little kitten like this wouldn’t last a minute, and you couldn’t keep a cat in a cage all that way to California. Tell you what, though,” and Pa ruffled Boomer’s ears again. “I can promise you this – when we get to California, and get ourselves a nice farm there, and have a good house – then I’ll get you a pretty orange kitten to keep for your very own. A pretty orange kitten with white feet, just like this one.”

“Promise, Pa?” I had no notion of the likelihood of finding an orange kitten in California, or even if they had cats there at all. I knew practically nothing about the place, even from hearing Pa and Ma and our friends talking about it.

“Of course, Sugar-plum. Now, wipe your eyes and blow your nose. Don’t I always keep my promises?” Pa fetched out a calico handkerchief from the front of his heavy roundabout jacket and handed it to me.

“You do, Pa,” I gulped, still feeling tearful. Pa kissed my forehead and said,

“Now, say goodbye to Cally and her babies, and go find your Ma – she’s packing up the last of those things that we’re taking with us, and needs your help.”

I walked through the house – from the kitchen, through the parlor, listening to the hollow sounds of my footsteps. I found Ma in the empty room where she and Pa had slept, folding the last of her good quilts into the small trunk. She stuffed a pair of good goose feather pillows into the top of the trunk. They didn’t really fit, until she punched them down as if they were riding bread dough and looked up at the sound of my footsteps.

“Sally, will you sit on the lid, so that I can close the latch?”

“Yes, Ma,” I answered. I did so, and Ma snapped the latches closed.

“You look sad, like you’ve been crying,” she said, and I nodded, still sitting on the trunk.

“It was … I wanted to take one of Cally’s kittens, and Pa told me why we couldn’t and then I was so sad to think of leaving… I don’t know why I felt like that, all of a sudden. It’s such a long way, Ma. So far from Grandpa Reverend and Aunt Rachael … even Granny Eliza in heaven, but her grave is here and…” I began to feel the tears coming on again, and Ma patted my cheek.

“It’s all right, Sally-child,” she said. “It is a very long way; so very much farther than it was from Pennsylvania to here, when I was a little girl and my ma and pa decided to come to the Ohio country. I cried then too, for leaving my friends and all the kinfolk around Downingtown. And oh, it was a wild frontier then, even more than California might be. The wars with the Indians were just barely over, back then. But there was something new to see, every day. So many curious and marvelous sights, and so many strange people! My ma – your Granny Sarah that you are named for – she told me that I should always look ahead.  I should think of it all as a wonderful adventure, like in the old storybooks. A new story, a new page, every single day.”

“But what about Indians? And wild beasts – wolves and lions and such?” I asked. From what Jon and I had overheard the grownups talking, there were such dangerous things out along the long trail to California. Ma laughed.

“Oh, the stories that men do tell! I wouldn’t pay them too much mind, Sally-child. Men will say such things to each other, boasting how brave they are for facing such perils! Besides,” Ma added, “Your Pa will have his long hunting rifle, and I am certain that other men in our company will have such rifles and blunderbusses as they have thought to bring with them. I am certain that they will be the equal of any wild beasts or Indians that we might encounter! Now, help me carry this out to the wagon … I do believe that Father Kettering will be expecting us in time for supper tonight, and it has already gone past four…”

Ma and I carried the small trunk between us, until Pa came around from the barn with Jon, to help load it into the wagon, all hitched to three yoke of oxen, waiting in the farm yard, with Daisy the milk cow and the two extra oxen hitched to the wagon tail by long halters. The sky was grey overhead, with a scent of snow in it; spring seemed as if a faraway dream.

Pa lifted Jon up to the wagon seat, but I scrambled up by myself, up and over a wagon wheel nearly as tall as myself. Ma came up with a boost from Pa, and we all squeezed together on the wagon seat, huddled against the cold. Pa strode with his big stock whip in hand and gave a quiet command to the lead pair. The wagon lurched once, and then rolled steady, lurching as the wheels turned. Out of the farmyard, past the blank windows of our house, the house that wasn’t ours any longer but belonged to Mr. Roberts, and onto the winter-rutted road that led to town.

I didn’t look back. Ma had said, always to look ahead.

the notes from the end of That Fateful Lightning, which is now available for pre-release order in Kindle.

Like the story told in my previous series of books, The Adelsverein Trilogy, a lot of the background to this story was new to me. I wasn’t raised in the South, and the ancestors of my one American-born grandparent was a fire-eating abolitionist. Frankly, all I knew about the chattel slavery in the South was what there was contained in generalist history books pertaining to the Civil War and articles in my mothers’ issues of American Heritage. There was nothing much in my store of knowledge about the nuts and bolts of actual practice, as it was in the time in which the first half of this book takes place, so a deep dive into contemporary accounts of travels in the South were required.

Richmond, Virginia, was the second-largest wholesale and retail market in the South: I have tried to describe what Minnie would have seen and experienced in that visit to Shockoe Bottom and create conversations that she would have had with Southerners like Pres Devereaux and Levi Chaffin, Susan Edmonds and with slaves like Hepzibah – all of whom would in real life in that period would have said something like the dialog which I wrote for them. There is a word for readers who will assume that such words are my own thoughts on the matter of chattel slavery, as they are very much counter to contemporary mores. That word is “idiot.” That term also extends to writers who bolt conventional contemporary attitudes onto characters set in another place and time. It is a disservice to readers who honestly want to explore other places, times, and situations, and a grim transgression against the art of building a story, in that it basically puts 21^st century characters in unconvincing costumes.

Details are taken from contemporary accounts. Minnie would not have witnessed a slave auction first-hand; so far, all the accounts and pictures that I have found have only men attending the auctions.   For most Southerners, a slave was a luxury good. A first-rate young field hand was worth $1,500-2,000; something on the order of $25,000 to $30,000 in today’s dollars. A slave trained in a particular skill might command an even higher price.

The escape by rail travel of Miss Bonnie Beauchamp and her servant/husband was based on a similar occurrence; that of William and Ellen Craft from Macon, Georgia in 1848. Ellen Craft, who appeared sufficiently white to pass as such, dressed in male clothing, bandages, and spectacles, claiming that injuries prevented her from signing hotel registries and deafness as an excuse to not chat with fellow passengers. They posed a wealthy young planter and his manservant, and gained safety in Philadelphia, Boston and eventually England, after many close calls and fraught moments.

Boston was practically the epicenter of the American abolitionist movement, a movement which roiled the political world in the U.S. for more than two decades, finally culminating in open war. Whether it was slavery, or economics which served as the touchpaper to war is a matter still disputed by historians, but to the real-life contemporaries of Minne Vining, there was no question at all: slavery was the issue.

The existing pre-Civil War US Army was a small one as national armies of the times counted, with a correspondingly tiny medical corp. All of that went out the window when the fighting began. Congress authorized the creation of the Sanitary Commission in June, 1861. The Sanitary Commission served the Union Army much as the combined military medical commands, the Morale, Recreation and Welfare offices and the Red Cross serve our armed forces today.

Although the national leadership of the Commission at the upper levels were male, women made up an extraordinarily large number of mid-level workers, fund-raisers, administrators, nurses, and general support personnel. Being also proud of their contribution, many of those women contributed memoirs written after the war. Those accounts make for stirring reading and I have depended on several of them, especially a memoir left by Rebecca Pomroy to fill out Minnie’s experiences. The account of Minnie’s daily routine at the Columbia College Hospital was taken from Mrs. Pomroy’s memoir. There was a lot of overlap between abolitionists, temperance activists and women’s rights advocates during that period. Many of the best-known women volunteers were active on all three fronts, as well as being friends with each other. Minnie’s friend, Mary Ashton Livermore was one in real life. She also served as reporter and editor for a newspaper which her Universalist minister husband owned.

As related, Mary Jane Bickerdyke was an early volunteer nurse in the western theater. Perhaps we do not realize today how much of a woman’s domestic duties then involved caring for the sick and invalid, before sanitation, sterile surgery, and vaccination for common childhood diseases. Both Mary Bickerdyke and Rebecca Pomroy had cared for invalid husbands for years; they and other volunteer nurses had already done a lot of practical nursing, without the benefit of formal medical training. General Grant endorsed her presence and actions as Union forces advanced down the Mississippi. It was the peppery-tempered General Sherman who responded one of his subordinates complaining about her, demanding that he do something about that ‘damned bossy woman’ by saying, “I can’t – she ranks me.” Mary Bickerdyke was, for all intents and purposes, the head of the Western Army’s medical command. She participated in Grand Review of the Armies in Washington, DC, at General Sherman’s express request.

Mary Jane Safford, the nurse at the Cairo Army hospital when Mrs. Bickerdyke and Minnie arrived, was a real person also – who later studied medicine herself and became a one of the very first female gynecologists to practice in the United States, and a professor of gynecology at the Boston University School of Medicine.

Elizabeth Van Lew of Richmond, Virginia, was indeed a spy for the Union all throughout the war, and upon defeat of the Confederacy, was the first in Richmond to hang the US flag from her house. It has been claimed that one member of her spy ring, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, a former slave freed by her family, was placed in the household of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Her spying and philanthropic activities eventually drained her family fortune, and in later life she was supported by the families of former POWs held in Libby Prison during the war.

The character of Colonel Levi Chaffin is based on the experience of General George Henry Thomas, known as “The Rock of Chickamauga” – born in Virginia to a plantation-owning, slave-holding family, but married to a woman from upstate New York. Like Grant and Sherman, he was a graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Mexican War … and he broke with his family in remaining with the Union. His family never forgave him for that disloyalty to his native state. They burned all of his letters, never mentioned his name again, and did not attend his funeral when he died prematurely of a stroke, barely five years after the end of the war. A modest and competent man, he may have been the only Civil War general on either side who never wrote a post-war memoir and burned his private papers.

Finally – this account of the experiences of a 19^th century American woman who was not all that unusual as an activist and campaigner for all kinds of causes – fills in or provides a background to certain stories and characters in my other historical novels. Minnie’s deceased younger brother Horace, husband to her dear friend Annabelle, is the bigamous husband of Margaret Becker, of Daughter of Texas and Deep In the Heart. Unknown to Minnie, the unconscious Confederate soldier in her field hospital in the final chapter is Horace Vining’s youngest son, Peter Vining. In the opening chapter of Adelsverein: The Harvesting, Peter Vining returns alone and on foot to his family home in Texas, after the defeat of the Confederacy, and tries to figure out a new life for himself. An octogenarian Minnie herself appears in the first chapters of Sunset and Steel Rails, belatedly providing her grandniece, Sophie Brewer, with the means of escaping Boston and the machinations of her lamentably sociopathic brother. And finally, Minnie’s experiences after the battle at Shiloh are briefly referred to in My Dear Cousin, with Sophie Brewer’s granddaughter Vennie Stoneman as an Army nurse in WWII.

Yes, the work in progress is humming along – I hope to have it all done and ready by late November, and launch officially at Miss Ruby’s Author Corral at Giddings, the first Saturday in December. In this excerpt, Minnie Vining and Mrs. Mary Bickerdyke have a good look at the Army hospital at Cairo, Illinois, in the first summer of the War Between the States.

At the same instant that Colonel Ennis bid them good evening, and took his departure, a very young woman in a calico dress which drooped hoop-less and looked by the hem of it to have been dragged through mud and other unclean matter, emerged from the nearest tent. Her apron was also similarly stained. She carried a bucket, which she set down as soon as she saw the other two women.

“Oh, merciful heavens, Mrs. Bickerdyke – you are here!” She was a very pretty, slender young woman, worn down to a thread and very near tears. “There is so much… and so many! I have done all that I can, and the contraband women and some ladies from Cairo are helping me, but there is only so much we can do with what little the Army can spare!”

“We are here now, Miss Vining and I,” Mary Bickerdyke enfolded the younger woman in a comforting embrace. “And four boxcar-loads of supplies – linens, food, spare cots and blankets and much else as well – which are on their way this very minute from the railyard. Colonel Ennis was good enough to put a trusty sergeant and a work party at our disposal. I do not wish to waste any time; show me the hospital, so that we may make plans to remedy the dire situation as soon as we are able. We may not be able to make improvements tonight,” Mary Bickerdyke added, with particularly resolute determination, “But at least, we will have a notion of what needs to be done.”

“Everything,” Miss Safford sniffed, and rubbed her eyes. “Everything … the poor souls lie in their own filthy bedding for hours, for lack of anything clean… It is all that I can do to bring them beef tea and a concoction of willow bark, steeped in hot water, or Peruvian bark for those poor souls with the ague and chills.”

“I have sufficient funds to hire laundresses,” Mary Bickerdyke replied. “And indeed – I do suppose that the contrabands in the camp that we passed would be happy enough to be hired for that task. Now show me the hospital.”

“All right,” Miss Safford gulped back her tears with a commendable effort. “This way … the convalescents are here, those who are still ill and not cleared by Surgeon-Major Frost to return to duty with their company. They help as much as they can, but they are hardly well themselves…”

The first tent was not so awful; filled with cots and bedrolls, most occupied by men, most in a state of dishevelment, or indeed, undress. At least half of them immediately dived for the cover of blankets or those garments they had set aside in the interests of comfort within the sweltering canvas roof, as the three women entered the tent.

“They are … unclothed!” Minnie hissed in a startled undertone. It was not that she had been completely unaccustomed to the sight of naked or near-naked males – after all, when she was a girl, her brothers and their friends would swim in the Charles, when the summer heat was particularly oppressive.

“They are,” Miss Safford acknowledged, in a welter of embarrassment and fanned her flushed face with her hand. “They are still recovering, and the heat is so pernicious. I … try to think of them in the same manner as creatures in the barnyard.”

“I was married to my husband Mr. Bickerdyke for twenty years, and have two sons,” Mrs. Bickerdyke replied, serenely. “I’m not seeing a particle of anything that I didn’t already know about.”

Minnie felt the same flush of embarrassment rising in her face. Well, she would have to get used to this. It was one thing to minister to her brothers when they were ill, and when they were dying – it would be another matter entirely to see to the needs of strange men; boys, really. Perhaps she would do her best to think of them as infants and small boys, in need of sisterly or motherly care. Miss Safford, so very young and unmarried, seemed to have found a means of coping by thinking of their patients as horses and cows.

Conditions in the other tents were … abominable. Hot, filled with the stench of vomit and feces, of unclean bodies and pungent male perspiration, stale air, and the indefinable odor of sickness. Minnie tried to hold her breath as much as possible. Mary Bickerdyke’s expression remained stern and resolute, even as Miss Safford’s expression reflected a degree of shamed embarrassment. But Mary Bickerdyke was unmoved, even serene.

“Rest easy, dear boys,” she said several times, as she leaned over a cot or a bedroll, smoothing the ragged, stained covering over the shivering form underneath. “Rest easy, for in the morning, we will fix things. You will be cared for as tenderly as if you were home with your dear mother. Rest easy, boys.”

It was fully evening when their tour of the hospital tents ended. The sun had gone down in the west, well below the edge of the levee, but the sky still retained the color of a bleached sea-shell in it, edged with pale apricot shreds of cloud. The distant sounds of drill and stamping feet echoed from the distant parade ground – a sound which had become so very familiar to Minnie, as familiar as the regular ticking of the old clock in Papa-the-Judge’s study, far away in Boston. Minnie took a deep breath of relatively fresher air. The compound of tents stretched away before the three women, many lit within by oil lamps, which gave the effect of a collection of Chinese paper lanterns. A scattering of campfires sent golden sparks up into the evening air, as ephemeral as golden fireflies. A bugle on the far side of camp sent a melancholy thread of music into the air. Minnie shivered a little, half in dread, half in anticipation – this would be her life for the foreseeable future, the regular tramp of marching feet, harsh male voices, the discordant music of drum and bugle.

In the open quadrant by the hospital tents a pile of crates and trunks steadily grew, as they were unloaded from Army wagons, under the profane direction of Sgt. Sullivan – at least, profane until he noted the presence of the three women.

“God save the mark, Ma’am.” He came to them, after bawling his last set of orders and commands over his shoulder to the half-dozen soldiers laboring to unload the last wagon. “Here we have all of your traps and treasure brought from the railway … was there anything more that you wish us to do?”

“There is,” Mary Bickerdyke studied the stack of barrels and scrap-wood crates, piled next to the nearest cook tent. “Those hogshead barrels … I would like eight or ten of the soundest and least damaged to be sawn in half, and the bungs stopped with plugs. Can you do that for me by tomorrow.”

“Of course, ma’am,” Sgt. Sullivan appeared to be mildly nonplussed. After a short hesitation, he ventured a question. “May I ask, ma’am – for what purpose?”

Mary Bickerdyke looked up at him as if this were the most obvious thing in the world, although even Minnie and Miss Safford were puzzled. “For bathing the sick, of course. Those barrels will make admirable tubs. Cleanliness is essential for these poor lads – and they are filthy-dirty. We’ll start on the morrow, ladies,” she added, with a look over her shoulder at the other two women. “Miss Safford, dear – have we a place to lay our heads down tonight, and perhaps have a bite of supper? Miss Vining and I are fatigued after a long day’s journey, and tomorrow will be very busy for all of us.”

“Oh, but of course,” Miss Safford replied, somewhat relieved that the tour of the dreadful ward tents was completed. “Colonel Prentiss very kindly allotted me a tent to myself and Free Mary … she is one of the contrabands who has been assisting me … we have been issued some camp cots, and Free Mary has been friends with the cook in the nearest camp kitchen. Besides, she brings me some good cornbread that her mother bakes … she and her sister and mother all escaped together and took refuge with the Army. Free Mary will have brought us all something to eat, I am certain.”

“Good,” Minnie replied, mildly relieved that she and Mary did have a place to sleep that night – as well as the prospect of a meal, although whether it would be edible or not was a matter of conjecture. She had a packet of food in the valise which she had brought with her from Galesburg; some slabs of bread and cheese, hardboiled eggs, and some cold fried chicken, in the event of the Army cook not being anywhere near as gifted as Mrs. Norris. She was as exhausted as she had ever been, after a long train journey, and contemplating the prospect of sorting out the hospital and it’s suffering patients on the morrow. She was so tired that she thought she could have lain down and slept soundly on a bare pallet, just as the soldiers did.