On the 16th of March, 1856, her second child was born in Fort Decatur.
With this infant and the elder of two years and three months, they journeyed back again into the wilderness, where she took up the toilsome and uncertain life of the frontier. “There was nothing,” she has said, “that was too hard or disagreeable for me to undertake.”
All the work of the house and even lending a hand at digging and delving, piling and burning brush outside, and the work was done without questioning the limits of her “spere.”
They removed again to the edge of the settlement and lived for a number of years in a rose-embowered cottage on Seneca Street.
Accumulating cares filled the years, but she met them with the same high courage throughout. Her sons and daughters were carefully brought up and given every available advantage even though it cost her additional sacrifice.
Her half of the old donation claim became very valuable in time as city property, but the enormous taxation robbed her to a considerable extent of its benefits.
The manner of life of this heroic mother, type of her race, was such as to develop the noblest traits of character. The patience, steadfastness, courage, hopefulness and the consideration for the needs and trials of others, wrought out in her and others like her, during the pioneer days, challenge the admiration of the world.
I have seen the busy toil, the anxious brow, the falling tears of the pioneer woman as she tended her sick or fretful child, hurried the dinner for the growing family and the hired Indians who were clearing, grubbing or ditching, bent over the washtub to cleanse the garments of the household, or up at a late hour to mend little stockings for restless feet, meanwhile helping the young students of the family to conquer the difficulties that lay before them.
The separation from dearly loved friends, left far behind, wrought upon the mind of the pioneer woman to make her sad to melancholy, but after a few years new ties were formed and new interests grasped to partially wear this away, but never entirely, it is my opinion.
She traveled on foot many a weary mile or rode over the roughest roads in a jolting, springless wagon; in calm or stormy weather in the tip-tilting Indian canoes, or on the back of the treacherous cayuse, carrying her babes with her through dangerous places, where to care for one’s self would seem too great a burden to most people, patient, calm, uncomplaining.