You can imagine that her comfortably well-to-do family thought he took a very queer way to show it, and with Yankee out-spokenness told them both so, as cuttingly as Yankee tongues can speak. Without a hesitation she flung her family ties away along with her love of home, her woman’s love for stability, her mother’s anxiety about her little girls. Not till long after his death did she again resume relations with her family.
Her little girls, never having known any other life, saw nothing unusual in the one they led, especially as their mother, her personality doubled and trebled by the exigencies of her life, stood, somehow, miraculously between them and the most impossible of the hardships to which their father so light-heartedly condemned them. They were always dressed in well-mended garments, they had shoes and stockings, they were clean and cherished, there was always cheer and loving-kindness between their father and mother, and when there was only corn-meal mush for supper, they scarcely noticed it, because of the old songs and stories of which their mother had such a store. My mother sang them to me, and I now sing them to my children, those old folk-songs with which my grandmother charmed away hunger from her little children. They adored their great, rollicking father, always in high spirits, and they preferred the deer-steaks and squirrel stews which were the results of his wonderful marksmanship, to the tough, stringy beef and salt pork which was the diet of the other frontier children. One of my mother’s vivid recollections is of looking out of the window on a snowy day and seeing her stalwart father emerge from the woods into the clearing, carrying ... a very Robin Hood ... a whole deer’s carcass on his broad shoulders. He cast it down before the door and called, like a great boy, for his women-folk to come and admire him! She says she can close her eyes now, see the blood ruddy on the snow, and her father’s thrown-back head and bright, laughing face.
Of course, when the news of gold in California came, burning-hot like wild-fire from the west, he was one of the first to go. He would be. A distant, uncertain, and dangerous expedition, into unknown country; could he resist such an alluring combination? Of course, he could have resisted it if he had tried; but he did not try. He never tried.
Also, of course, it was really out of the question to transport a wife and five little girls across an untracked continent, full of Indians. He was to go alone, make a brief stay, get the lay of the land, and come back, his pockets full of gold, to take the family out in a ship around the Horn. It was all settled in his mind as if the gold were heavy in his pockets. The separation would be short ... he was sure of it, as he was always sure of whatever would ensure his being free of the slightest constraint.... He moved his family into the nearest settlement, cashed in on everything saleable, added a small sum that had just come to him as his share of his father’s small property, and got together enough to support his family for a year. It took little enough, as they had always lived. And he would be back before the year was out, rolling in gold.
With empty pockets and a high heart he took his gun and his ax, kissed his family good-by and went away planning to live off the country as he traveled, as he always had.
One letter came back from California, the only one he ever wrote, since he had never before been separated from the one human being he had loved. He had had a gloriously adventurous time in getting out there, Indians, drought, snow, heat, grizzly bears—all the regulation accompaniments of the transcontinental trip in 1849. He struck it rich at once, and as one of the first on the ground had a wonderful claim of his own. They would all be rich in no time.
In no time he was dead.
For an interminable period his wife heard nothing, and then, very vaguely, that he had died of “mountain fever.” He had been dead and buried for months before she learned that she was a widow at thirty-two with five helpless little girls and not a penny in the world.