She lives to become a wife and mother, a pioneer woman in the flesh of my history.
In the first storm of January 1847, a rider came up the road, bundled against the wind and hunched in the saddle. It was not George, who always sat tall with his hat pulled low, so I stood in the doorway close to my hunting knife. But I knew Dolly when I saw her, the bay mare that matched Molly. She was trudging up the hill like a saint with a pitiful load of mankind. I wondered for a moment if Pa had come home after all these years. But no, it was my brother-in-law, Richard Fowler, ready to fall off the horse with cold and hunger and years of dissipation.
Image: Going Home (Pioneers Braving a Storm) 1878 by Carl Wilhelm Hahn via Wikipedia commons [PD]
The last chapter of The Compromise begins with a snowstorm. It does not sound like a romantic encounter. The wooing of Mariah is slow and crosses through an entire landscape, its memories and desires, its chills and losses. Richie, my ancestor Richard Fowler, tells his future wife Mariah a series of four stories, a series of worsening storms. The first one she anticipated.
“Your foolish sister and my wicked brother.”
“Yes, Richie, I know. They were always bound to each other, and not us.”
This emotional complexity I accepted from the start. Do people follow their destiny or do they seek complications through which to mature? The heart grows through dilemmas such as this. The characters are on a mission of human love and another of national destiny. The stories unravel in the chapter I’m working on, “The Blizzard.”
The pioneer spirit is strong and enduring, an “irresistible destiny to accomplish an essential duty.”
Manifest Destiny
A single story is not a human story. Culture in a democratic society might give us the skills to bow our heads to feel our way through, to make or find peace. This hope moves me forward each day I write.
Manifest Destiny as a movement was deeply Romantic as well as Nationalistic. Historian Robert Miller describes manifest destiny as an “irresistible destiny to accomplish an essential duty.” I want to explore this real history in fiction. Wikipedia offers a list of events, 1846 in the United States, the backdrop to the story of Eliza and George.
The foolish lovers George and Eliza escape their lives in Missouri separately through a vast territory. George leaves his unhappy marriage. He enlists in the Mexican-American War in the Spring of 1846 and joins the movement of troops to California. He writes letters that call his lover Eliza, his brother’s wife, to his side. He says it is their destiny to be together.
- May 14 – Mexican–American War: The United States declares war on Mexico.
- June 14 – Mexican–American War: The California Republic declares independence from Mexico.
- June 15 – Bear Flag Revolt: American settlers in Sonoma, California start a rebellion against Mexico and proclaim the California Republic.
- July 8 – Battle of Monterey: Acting on instructions from Washington, D.C., Commodore John Drake Sloat orders his troops to occupy Monterey and Yerba Buena thus beginning the United States annexation of California.
- November 31 – The Donner Party becomes snowbound.
I sniffed the paper. “Could be gunpowder and dirt. Says here it's from Sonoma California.” He had written C-A-L-I-F-O-R-N-I-A. I read over the scrawling handwriting that Gerorge used for better occasions and looked up. “They were stealing horses and holding hostages, and he wants Eliza to come be at his side?” I said my words slowly so I could take aim between the eyes. “What a fool.”
There was more in that letter. He said that California had land free for the taking. He said over and over that he loved her and that it was for her that he sought riches in the land of plenty. Together they would make heaven on hearth. She made him strong and brave and so forth.
“He loved her, “ Richie said simply.
I folded the letter. The snow fell thicker and whiter than ever. Then I said, “Eliza got her babies with your brother. So help me, Richard, I am sorry. She’d follow him wherever he went. I hope he deserves her.”
When Mariah folds the letter, she resists her anger with reason. There is more than one story tangled up in their relationships. This is family and this is life. There are no evil doers or evil empires to blame. They have to live with ambiguity for the rest of their lives.
This is family and this is life. There are no evil doers or evil empires to blame.
When I want to understand sectarian violence, I try to imagine conversations around the kitchen table. These conversations are among husbands and wives, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters. Their habits of thought, like beliefs in destiny, religious purity, or racial superiority, could divert anger into violence. Their special virtues could magnify the insults. Revenge festers in those wounds. The military, as chilling as it is, changes the conversation and the psychological genesis of violence.
The Escape
Snow piles up steadily through the telling of the second story. In the previous Spring of 1846, Eliza fled her uncle’s St. Louis brothel with a child born out of wedlock. The establishment offered her wealth and security, but she is desperate to run from a way of life she abhors.
Trying for a life with George, she leaves Missouri with the Donner Party. We know that by November of that year the travelers were snowbound in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
“You ready to hear the truth about your sister?”
“Of course I’m ready if you are.”
“Back in May, your sister hopped on a covered wagon with a family named Donner and headed over land to California. She left everything that she couldn’t carry, but she took a child named Georgie and a belly showing George’s second baby.”
“Why were you riding Dolly?” I interrupted. Richie pulled up and looked scared, so I leaned in on him. “She needed her horse. Why’d you ride all the way up here on my sister’s horse? You look like you did wrong. What’d you do?”
“I hid her horse, so she wouldn’t leave.”
I knocked over the chair when I stood up. I shouted. “She walked loaded up with babies? Wearing silk slippers because you hid her boots, too? She expects to find that man somewhere west of the Rocky Mountains and set up housekeeping in a tent!”
Eliza would rather be a frontier woman than a woman of commerce. In January 1847, it’s too soon to know the facts, but Mariah hopes for her sister’s survival while Richard prepares for the worst. In the same month, the United States was preparing to annex the California Territory. Wikipedia’s list, 1847 in the United States begins.
- January 16 – John C. Fremont is appointed Governor of the new California Territory.
- January 30 – Yerba Buena, California is renamed San Francisco, California.
- February 5 – A rescue effort, called the First Relief, leaves Johnson’s Ranch to save the ill-fated Donner Party. These California bound emigrants became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846–1847, and some had resorted to cannibalism to survive.
Then I lifted my pride and said, “My sister is brave and true!”
“Brave maybe,” he said and closed his eyes.
“She’s coming home, and home is here where we got raised. I could catch her babies and help her raise them the way mother raised us! Maybe Otis will come home and we could be a family again.”
Richie looked at me like I was dim-witted. “They gone, Mariah, and never coming home, not to me, and not to you. Living in these hills is your dream Mariah, not theirs.”
George and Eliza meet their fate in this part of history. I’d like to think that George volunteered for the First Relief, and that he reached for Eliza’s hand in the storm. If the story runs true to historical record, and if facts hold up, George Fowler died at the hands of the Patwin tribe soon after the Bear Flag Revolt.
Pioneer Spirit
In the final story of “The Blizzard,” Mariah is disoriented by hypothermia. Eliza’s voice in the wind nearly pulls her to her death. Multiple forces come to preserve her, the dead and the living, the past and the future. She lives to become a wife and mother, a pioneer woman in the flesh of my history.
With all my strength, I backed away from the cliff. The sleep of death felt welcome. Under a coverlet of snow, I would get warm and dream of those who loved me. The cold had made me equal to it. I bowed my head, tucked up my hands, and rested on the soft white around me. There was no pain, just a low hum and the last crackles of fire far below.
She does not give up. She crawls towards a moving light. Richard, my great-great grandfather is there with his natural strength and kindness.
An insistent noise muffled the white air. My unfettered mind rose to see from high above where the sound came from. It was howling, wailing, long as human breath. At the same time, light was moving side to side as a lantern would in a person’s hand. It was Richie come after me. He stood on those stones his brother George laid, yelling his head off and swinging a lantern, until he could see me inch my way up the road on my hands and knees. Then he ploughed the snow with his long legs.
The pioneer spirit is strong and enduring, like an “irresistible destiny to accomplish an essential duty.” And it can be a Christian mission, to manifest “on earth as it is in heaven.” For many of us, the mission is directed at our work. This pioneer spirit lives in the women and men of my family, in our unshakable roles as mothers and fathers, and in our resolute work as teachers and writers.
American Progress
Mariah comes of age as she confronts her envy and anger. This could be the way many Native Americans overcome their anger in order to live peacefully and honorably despite many compromises. Youth does not do this easily. The work of the heart lets us circle back to deepen integrity. And there are always compromises.
We interrogate American progress for its thefts and its arrogance.
As I see it, the tone of The Compromise is contemporary while its structure is traditional. It blends the contradictions allowed by our perspective. We interrogate American progress for its thefts and its arrogance. When our ideas of progress change freely, we enliven our creativity and American life in every domain.
I hope a kind and reasonable perspective enlivens my work on the novel. My perspective is rooted in my mid-century childhood, bouyed by prosperity and idealism, struck by 9/11, and sobered by millennial challenges like paying back what is due.
Columbia
The brave image of Columbia was active in my ancestors’ imaginations. “The Spirit of the Frontier” is hanging telegraph lines and carrying a book of knowledge. In fact, my grandmother drove the first Model-T in her rural county. My father installed electric lines in small western towns only 60 years after this engraving was distributed. Certainly, there are different images to change our measurements of progress. This Columbia is not universally appreciated in our time, but she is among the mothers of our Liberty.
“An irresistible destiny to accomplish an essential duty.”