East to the Dawn Read Online Free Page B

lawyer of note and wealthy, and most important, never married. Alfred was a thin man with a strikingly broad skull, a spade beard, thick brows, and heavy-lidded eyes. He didn’t have the gentle sense of humor or the friendly mien of his brother-in-law William, but he was honest, upstanding, and a very hard worker. He was thirty-five; it was time for him to settle down and raise a family—he would have been looking for a wife. Amelia came out for a visit.
    Cold and remote are the words family members use to describe him. He was respected but not loved. Still, he certainly evinced the normal interest in girls as he wrote to his brother. (The part of going to church he liked best when he was an impecunious law school student in Kentucky, he had written George, had been shaking hands with the “many pretty young sisters whom of course none should slight.”) Now he had amassed sufficient fortune to marry. Alfred knew that for a wife, he couldn’t do better than shy, well-brought-up, well-connected Amelia. His new bride would even look up to him—being ten years his junior, she would consider him a man of the world.
    It was in the spring of 1862 that Amelia Otis took up life on the shores of the Missouri River. Atchison was still a raw, ugly frontier town. “It presents a very fine appearance from the river, having a thrifty, flourishing look, rising gradually from the levee to the grassy horizon. Nearness dissipates the illusion, and entry destroys it,” observe John Ingalls, another transplanted easterner who put down roots in the first years and became one of the Otises’ best friends as well as one of Atchison’s most illustrious citizens.
    There was a railroad line, the first in Kansas, but it only went upriver as far as St. Joseph, Missouri; and a telegraph office, also the first in Kansas. But instead of the beautiful Philadelphia stalls where food was
carefully displayed on snow-white napkins, Amelia shopped at Atchison’s general store, owned by the Challisses, shelves stocked with a hodgepodge—everything from gunpowder to coal oil, white sugar, soda crackers, St. Louis nails, oolong tea, grain, dried buffalo meat, and more often than not fresh antelope, turkey, quail, and prairie chickens. Next door on Commercial Street was the coffee-roasting plant.
    The streets were dismal, a far cry from the paved streets and brick sidewalks of Philadelphia. They were dirt—dusty until it rained, muddy afterward, so muddy that after a really heavy rain, pigs would sometimes rout in the middle. Nor were there sidewalks where walkers could take refuge. “In winter time the mud was very deep. I am sure if all the rubber overshoes that were lost in those tramps up the hill could be recovered, it would be easy to break the rubber trust,” wrote a friend of Amelia Otis’s of their Sunday trudges to church services on North Fifth. Still, Amelia had it easier than any other young bride arriving in Atchison to live. Alfred had chosen as his land the widest and choicest part of the bluff overlooking the Missouri, and there, finished and waiting for Amelia, stood the large white clapboard two-story house Alfred had commissioned. Although not as big as Mary Ann’s house, it was a gracious design in the manner of the popular architect Andrew Jackson Downing, with such details as Gothic fretwork, a triple-paned Gothic window centered over the front door, and a wide veranda that stretched across the front of the house. From the windows could be seen all of the river. Her elder sister Mary Ann Challiss and Bill were right next door to welcome and help her. There, side by side, Amelia and Mary Ann would live out their lives.
    Amelia had the misfortune to arrive during the darkest period in Atchison history. Many of the town’s able-bodied men had left to join the army. The streets were periodically thronged with soldiers on their way to the front, some of whom pillaged as they