They rose in the gloaming, at first a faint whine barely audible above the snickering horses, the clatter of pans and the quiet conversations around a crackling fire, followed by an ominous mounting drone that spoke of numbers beyond counting or imagining, numbers sufficient to eclipse the stars. They massed in the gathering … More XVII. Fort Scott

     October 17, 1912, campfires smoldering to ashes with a few red coals glowing in the dark, a low undercurrent of cricketsong rising and falling and rising again in a lullaby as old as time and something tugging at Sadie’s hair. Her eyes shot open taking in the canvas rigging and beyond the opening … More XVIII. Lanterns along the creek

     In the night the lights of a smelter glowed like a fallen comet throbbing and pulsing beyond the crenated ranks of silhouetted trees. Looking from the wagon Sadie saw inky shadows stretching from the woods and their own tripartite assembly, the pallid bowed canvases so graceful above their blocky undercarriages, the horses with … More XIX. Misery

     Up at dawn and gone. The night had passed blessedly uneventful minus ruffians, raccoons, foundering horses or caterwauling whistles leaving them refreshed and encouraged what with Arkansas now within their reach. Crossing a border however intangible never fails to create a sense of unequivocal progress as anyone who’s traversed eastern Colorado, the Texas … More XX. Whereupon we part ways

     Odd, the town. Mansfield, final abode of Laura Ingalls Wilder who followed much of Sadie’s route through eastern Kansas including a potential resting spot at a spring not far from our house. It seemed unusually contemporary with a fondness toward steel siding construction and few hints of antiquity, mostly in the downtown area … More XXI. Interlude

     We left Mansfield with the sun lifting from the hazy east as did Sadie from the outskirts of Joplin though our modes of transport were so very different, and the roads, too, ours smooth and relatively level to facilitate speed and hers a latticework of straight lines and ninety-degree bends and the Center … More XXII. Fish crows and the opening of the South

     All night their sleep was punctuated by the shrill clatter of rails and the foghorn bellowing of trains blasting through Pierce City’s innards, the reverberant echoes rebounding off the rocky ridge at their backs so that the sounds fully and inescapably enveloped them before slowly trailing away down the Clear Creek Valley. By … More XXIII. Are we there yet

     The night of October 21-22 would be a long ordeal for Sadie, Fred and Lucile. In their little grove of timber with torrential rain lashing the canvas and running like a river down the rutted road, the horses took umbrage at each other and screamed and fought like the wild animals they were. … More XXIV. Wherever we are, we’re here

     So not a plateau. So something else, here on the western fringe where topography becomes scrambled and nothing is as it seems, where valleys are hollows and streams are cricks and the land is riven and sundered and smoothed over with a carpet of green, green beyond belief and imagination, and turning now … More XXV. Water from stone

       October 24 dawned cool and cloudy. On either side of their encampment trees blazed as if on fire, their colors luminous in the soft even light of early morning. The smoke of small fire rose straight into the heavens where it slowly dispersed on a soft breeze wafting high above the valley, … More XXVI. The City of Magical Waters