Autumn
September to November 1893
Caldwell, Kansas
Boundary Line of Oklahoma Territory
September 16, 1893
almost high noon
It begins with the earth.
She says,
Once, they listened for my voice. With the crash of dawn over the horizon, they’d press their palms against my skin, wet me with their tears. A swipe of soil across the brow, a crumble of my body in their palms, my cinnamon-red hue as sacred as blood. Once, I was cherished. But that was longago.
Today, I scream, and you do not hear.
Today, I’m brittle and fragmented and so thirsty I spit out coughs of despair and ash. You call it dust storm, drought, famine. Today, your storytellers speak of a hunt. I feel your wheels scrape into my skin, wagons collapsing my throat, hoofbeats stomping along my spine. Then—alone in the wild distances something begins. Across my body, women speak. Memories intertwine, forward and backward, across eons, the reality of one ancestor blending with the truth of another: a new history of women arriving.
Once, the prairie was quiet and I was alone. But that was longago.
Time continues to turn, around and around I spin. Today, I will tell you such tales. Of women who drove cattle dressed as men and women who swallowed thunderbolts as newborns. Women determined, women lost. Women seemingly ordinary, women larger than life. Some women recorded in the annals of history, others told as fireside lore.
Settle in, listen. I have stories to tell.
Chapter One
Sometimes I wondered if I was too comfortable with the dark passageways within me. If I knew those secret, unlit spaces too well. But shadows don’t bother me overmuch. And sakes alive, no one was honest with themselves anyhow, everyone creating their own aliases. The Kid, Wild Bill, Bitter Creek, Rose of Cimarron. I didn’t have a summer name yet—but perhaps by sundown.
I jerked my wrist, checked my watch. Ten minutes till high noon.
The crowd was the colors of black, smoke, fire. The prairie gingerroot, ash, clay. Fifteen thousand souls vibrating in their skin, bodies sweat slicked with anticipation. In moments, gunshots would blast, and the race would begin.
I wrought Cricket’s reins and leaned forward in my saddle. Soon we’d gallop into the unknown frontier—I’d flee past and grasp something new. One hundred and fifteen thousand pioneers had registered for forty-two thousand homesteads, at least that’s the tale that went round twilight bonfires. Wretched grum odds. It was told this race tempted the darkest of humanity, those with the most greed, with the most chilling stories, and come nightfall, half would drag north again, dismissed back to their haunted, hungry lives, their daisy-printed skirts trawling behind them in the red dirt. Today the quickest, the harshest, the most lawless would win. But today, women had a chance.
How much longer? Seven minutes.
The cowboy beside me gnawed tobacco, hips slouched in his saddle, stallion’s shoulders bony. I didn’t believe his nonchalance: His fists twitched with anxiety. Blistering sunbeams struck through the clouds of dust to burnish the wooden handle of his Winchester. Like me, he’d tied his supplies about his racehorse: a tin pail clanging against a frying pan, a Colt revolver strapped beside a sack of oats, a white claim flag snapping in the wind. I paid little mind to what his flag said. But mine was stamped, in red the hue of paintbrush wildflowers, with my name: Minnie Hoopes.
The cowboy spit. Curled his lip at me.
I winked back.
“Where’s your husband, doll?”
“Buried that mouthy feller in the ground. Dug the hole myself,” I said.
He sneered and looked away.
Wasn’t true. I’d never had a husband nor murdered him, but I didn’t have patience for such an attitude. Cowboys like him bullied women like me, those who sought their own homestead, those unmarried or widowed, divorced or deserted. And, on that matter, I wouldn’t be marrying anytime soon. As I’d then forfeit my land to my husband.
Maybe the cowboy was a bank robber or horse thief. Or perhaps a cattleman looking to gobble up some land to sell before the summer roundup. And he was one ofthousands. I’d never seen anything like this swarming crowd of coal and umber before. There were blacksmiths and bankers, gospel preachers and tight-jawed widows, formerly enslaved folks and even one dapper gentleman wobbling over the cracked earth on a bicycle. And of course—criminals of every kind.
It’d been a fiery, impatient summer. Water had run dry a while ago. Supplies had dwindled. We were hot, thirsty, barbaric. A drought and an economic depression, the Panic of 1893, swept across our country. And true enough, panic hovered over the crowd like a fog. But as for me, I’d experienced desolation. There was no way in all-fired creation I’d go back to Kansas. What actually terrified me, those nights underthe starlit sky waiting for the Strip to open, was myself. Whatwouldn’tI do to grasp my own future?
Storytellers prophesied that today began a new age. An era unlike any before: desperate, wrathy, full of havoc and ruin. Plain speaking? Today would be an all-overish disaster. And yet, in the mayhem, I didn’t observe disorder and brutality. I saw possibility. I’d always relished the annihilation of control. I’m not saying I approved, just saying what was.
