Wedding Train Bride

Wedding Train Bride

By Sandy Grissom

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 by S.K.G. Haag

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the author.

Cover image by: Steve F licensed under Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike License 2.0

About The Author

[i]Sandy Grissom[i] has loved books all her life. That love began by listening to her older sister read when she was still too young to discover the magic for herself. She’s read everything from history to the phone book but her favorite authors are James Michener, Agatha Christie and the mystic William Blake.

Over the years, romantic novels became a favorite. The top of that list is Pride and Prejudice. When she retired she had too much time on her hands and spent too much money and trips to the library to get books in order to satisfy her restless soul. It was then she began to write herself.

As an adult she held a variety of jobs, all of them grist for her imaginative mind. A widow, Sandy recently moved to southern Indiana where she lives near the younger of her two beloved sisters.

I dedicate this book to all of you who like me have a fascination with the settling of the west. We would not be here but for those brave souls who went west in hope of a better life. Men moved west to find opportunities not available in the east. Single women and Civil War widows in the east were ill trained for anything but being a wife. This was an era that afforded them few other opportunities to support themselves. They needed a man, a father or a husband.

Without a family’s protection, many women signed marriage contracts never having seen their future husbands and travelled west in groups. They were the Wedding Train Brides. They took a chance leaving all they knew hoping for a better future, much like the men who had gone before them. These weren’t starry eyed women. They were practical women looking to survive. And survive they did. For many of them, so much more. They found real, honest true love.

Oh to have such courage! Both the women in this story had that kind of courage.

Chapter 1

Jesse Pines set his coffee cup down on the table and leaned back against the wall. He was seated on a bench that ran along the side of the table. Bob Blakeley sat across from him on a similar bench. He was sipping strong coffee from a mug. Jesse and his uncle built the two pine benches along with the table that resided between them years earlier. The two men sat in the kitchen on the land that had been Jesse’s home for the past twenty years, since he was eight years old.

Almost too low for it to be heard he whispered, Wow, a brother. And then a little bit louder, It’s still so hard to believe. A month ago, I was certain that I was all alone in the world.

As did I, Bob Blakeley replied, It blows me away, too. I sure didn’t expect to find a brother when I came out here looking for an uncle. If I hadn’t run across that old letter I found in father’s things, it would never have happened. I would not have had a reason to come out here and then we’d never have met at all. And that would have been a downright shame.

The two men stared across at each other and both shook their heads at the incongruity of actually finding each other. They were in Jesse’s house on his land. The house was larger now than the one room log cabin it used to be. It was still small by city standards but larger than many of the homesteads in this part of the Nebraska territory. From the kitchen where they sat, you could see the parlor adjoining it. There was a short hallway leading off from the parlor to Jesse’s bedroom on one side and a storage room on the other side.

Like the table, benches and all the rest of the furniture, Jesse and his uncle built the cabin too. When they took up the homestead, it was just bare land. At first the cabin was one large room. It was later on that they put up a wall to separate the kitchen from the parlor. A few years after that, they added on the two back rooms. In the beginning, the two of them slept in what became the parlor. Then after the addition, each had their own bedroom.

Jesse had related to Bob on his arrival, how his uncle died from an infected wound. He’d gotten a small scratch from a dirty animal trap. The wound festered and all that poison went through his system killing him. It was an awful way to die. That had been five years earlier. Jesse had been alone on the place ever since. After Jake’s death Jesse moved into his uncle’s larger bedroom and began to use the smaller room that had been his bedroom for storage. He kept some of his tools in there along with leather reins and the like. It wouldn’t do to let those things weather outside during the harsh winters. Possessions were hard earned and way too precious not to take care of them.

Outside the cabin and a ways back from it, Jesse and his Uncle Jake built a small barn. They also put up a shed to hang meat in and they dug a root cellar for vegetables. Even farther back was the outhouse with a beaten down path leading up to it.

Jesse kept a vegetable garden. It was situated between the house and the stream that ran along the west side of his property. The stream ran all the way back behind his land having originated somewhere up into the hills. The stream was why Jesse’s uncle had settled them here on this land. There was enough water all year round for their needs and a lot more besides. It might freeze over but it never ran dry.

Building the cabin had been time consuming. First he and Uncle Jake had to build a sling similar to a travois like the Indians used. They downed a couple of right sized branches and cleaned off the leaves and small twigs. They dragged out the canvas that had been atop the covered wagon they used to travel to their land. They stretched the canvas across the logs and secured it with a ropelike material they twisted together from fiber strands they got from vines they found growing near the stream. It took a full day to prepare the sling. Then they had to make a number of trips almost half a day away to find trees large enough to create walls for the cabin. Jake used a razor sharp ax to chop the trees down and Jesse used a hatchet to knock off the branches.

The two males loaded the wood onto the sling they’d brought with them. When they had as many logs as the horses could pull, the man and boy walked the long way back home alongside the two horses pulling the sling behind them. A week’s work, two trips a day, provided them with the logs for the first room. There would be many more trips to expand the cabin but that would be later on.

Once they had the logs on site, the real work began. Jesse was still a boy when they took up the land, only eight years old and not anywhere near as strong as his uncle. But he wouldn’t allow himself to give any less than everything he possibly could to the task. By the time they had finished the one room cabin, Jesse’s body had grown strong and hard and so had his uncle’s.

It was several years later that they added onto the cabin. Even after that, it had a dirt floor but Jesse slowly gathered wood over a number of years. In the evenings he would split the logs, strip the bark and smooth what was left into rough boards. He used an ax to plane off the ends and sides so that he would have a tight fit when he joined the boards side to side or end to end. He piled the almost finished pieces up along one wall in his room

Then one winter when he had enough planks, he installed the floor in all four rooms doing all the work himself. First he had to install a number of sturdy crosspieces to hold the boards. Then he nailed the wood in place atop them going the opposite direction. He fit the separate pieces one at a time. After that, he sanded the boards where they met to make sure the floor was smooth to walk on and all the boards fit together tightly and evenly. He was proud of the cabin and all his other accomplishments since coming to his new home. The land along with Uncle Jesse had made a man out of the boy he’d once been.

Jesse’s hand moved unconsciously to his coffee cup. The warmth when he touched it brought him back to the present. He’d been reminiscing for quite a while but apparently so had Bob for he started when Jesse spoke.

Tell me again more slowly. I’m even now just taking it all in, Jesse told his half brother. I know you’ve been here almost a month now, but it seems like you just walked in the door and we discovered each other. It’s like a dream to me to have a brother, even a half brother.

Bob answered him. "I know what you mean. I wake up in the place I bought next door and for a minute I’m sure myself that it’s all a dream. I have to shake my head until I remember that it’s real. It often makes me wonder about fate. I mean, the odds that we would ever meet are just so astronomical. There was only that one letter left between our father and his brother, Uncle Jake. And for it to have survived all this time seems remarkable to me.

I know what you mean about fate. If I believed in miracles….anyway, tell me the story again.

Well, Bob said, from what I’ve been able to find out and then piece together this is what must have happened all those years ago when you were just a kid.

He took a sip of the strong coffee before he continued.

It seems our father took your mother back to her home in Savannah to visit her parents. From what I’ve been told, she was a delicate Southern Belle and had become more and more overwrought trying to care for a small child. I suppose our father thought a trip home to her parents’ house would allow her to relax from the strain. Perhaps relatives might talk to her about being a mother and that might help her adjust to being married and having a child. Who knows for sure what exactly he intended.

I can see how that could have happened, Jesse interrupted, and the reasons he might have thought a trip home might have helped her.

Bob nodded his agreement and then went on with the story.

You must have been left behind in the boarding house where they lived. I discovered that an older couple ran the place back then and Father must have known them pretty well. Otherwise he would never have left you with them. I figured this much out from things in the letter, talking to an old man still living at the boarding house and then later I went to Savannah and looked up your mother’s family.

Amazing, Jesse said. It was remarkable that you found any of my mother’s relatives after so much time had passed.

"Your mother’s family is firmly entrenched in Savannah society. It makes sense that the family is still living there. They’d be out of place anywhere else. I rather imagine that was part of why it was difficult for your mother to adjust to any other way of life.

Anyway, it seems likely that our father ended up staying longer in Savannah than he expected to. I learned from a niece of your mother’s that she kept delaying the return until eventually she told him outright that she had no intention of returning to Chicago at all.

Bob took another sip of the hot coffee.

I think I remember her, Jesse said. "I couldn’t sleep the other night and was lying in bed brooding about my early life. I couldn’t have been more than five years old at the time, but I do remember. Not what she looked like or anything, but I recall the crying. It seemed like she must have cried all the time because that’s all I do remember about that time in my life. I don’t recall them leaving or who it was that I stayed with so I must not have been with that couple for too long. But I do remember going to Uncle Jake’s. Not the trip on the train so much, but I remember arriving in St. Louis.

Uncle Jake must have been expecting me because he was at the train station when I got there. I recall that he ran up to me and I got the biggest hug when I got off the train. It was the first time I remember getting a hug like that and knowing that someone was truly glad to see me. I was thinking the other night that my father must have been so busy taking care of my mother’s needs that there was little time to take care of mine. The only feeling I can bring to mind of that time is one of being alone all the time. Before Uncle Jake, that is. I never felt alone again after that.

You were sent to St. Louis then. It wasn’t here that you were sent?

No, Jesse answered. "Trains didn’t even come this far west back then and Uncle Jake was living in St. Louis at the time. So that’s where he met me at the train station. I do recall a lady handing me over to him. Uncle Jake and I stayed in St. Louis for three years before coming out here. He told me once that he tried to get hold of my father a few times. I’m guessing it was probably the first year or so I was with him. But after that with no response from him, Uncle Jake may have simply quit trying. Anyway, Jake came to think of me as his son, just as I came to think of him as my father. He was the