Alaska (116 page)

The newspapers of the time gave his expedition such great publicity that when he reached Boston, he found scores of women eager to try their luck out west. A girl named Lydia Dart working in a factory was especially eager to escape from that drudgery.

'Mercer did succeed in convincing hundreds of young women to undertake this adventure, and found much moral

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support for his plan but had difficulty getting funds for the ship. He finally found a willing financier who agreed to back the venture and provide passage for five hundred passengers at a minimal fee. Well, everything was working fine. Looked like a perfect operation.' He stopped, smiled at his wife, and seemed hesitant to continue.

'What happened?' Tom asked.

'Some evil-minded newspaper reporters, they were bastards, really, they started the rumor that Mr. Mercer ran a chain of whorehouses on the West Coast, and that when the girls reached Seattle, he was going to shove them into these brothels. A great scandal exploded. Tears. Recriminations. Fathers and brothers locking young women in their rooms to keep them from sailing. Before Mercer could answer these nasty accusations, more than two-thirds of his potential travelers had changed their minds and refused to reconsider.

'In January 1866 the ship sailed with only a hundred passengers, and of those, fewer than thirty were young unmarried women. Satisfied that Mr. Mercer was honest, they stayed with him, suffered the Victorian scorn of their neighbors, and sailed around the Horn of South America to make their homes in the Northwest. Lydia Dart became their leader. Watched after them. Fended off reporters seeking to create more scandalous stories. And sort of mothered the younger girls when they reached Seattle.'

'What happened to them then?'

'They became the soul of the city. These were refined, educated women who had come to the frontier. Many of them became teachers, and within the year they were married to the best young men of Seattle. One, who never married, opened the city's first public school. All of them represented the very best of this city, and four of them are alive today, the grand old ladies of Seattle.'

'How was Mrs. Ross connected with them?'

'Aha! The young woman Lydia Dart was the last to marry. She wanted to study the field, and in the end she chose a promising young lawyer named Henderson. And their first child is the gracious lady with whom you're dining tonight.'

A huge smile spread across his face as Tom looked at Mrs. Ross and said: 'Then you're the daughter of one of those young women?'

'The Mercer Girls they're known as in Seattle history. Yes, I'm the daughter of one of them, and a finer group of women never hit a Western city.'

'If you had known Lydia Dart Henderson,' Mr. Ross said, 'you'd understand why my wife could never be pompous or 706

lacking in a sense of humor. Tell him about the letter she wrote to the Boston newspaper.'

Mrs. Ross laughed at the outrageous thing her mother had done, but in relating the incident she obviously took delight in it: 'About ten years after the Mercer Girls had descended on Seattle, my mother convened a meeting of them. I remember it well, I was about seven years old, and here came these two dozen women, wives of doctors and lawyers and businessmen, and I listened to their stories. Not a bad marriage in the lot. And that night my mother posted her letter to the newspaper in Boston which had been foremost in creating the scandal about the houses of prostitution.'

'What did the letter say?' Tom asked, and Mr. Ross pointed to the wall behind Tom's head where a framed piece of newsprint held a place of honor. Indicating that Tom should take it down, Ross said: 'You'll find it amusing. I did when I first saw it.'

The editors of this journal have recently received an interesting correspondence from one Lydia Dart, formerly of this city, who ventured out to Seattle in 1866.

We thought our readers might find it instructive.

To the Editor:

Last night twenty-five young women who braved public censure to emigrate to Seattle as the Mercer Girls celebrated the tenth anniversary of their adventure. Twenty-four of us are married to the civic leaders of the community and we have nearly ninety children among us. Lizzie Ordway chose not to marry, and she heads the biggest school in the city. All of us own our own homes and all our children of school age are doing quite well. Thirteen of our husbands either are or have been elected officials of our beautiful city.

We invite twenty-five of the young women who refused to come with us in 1866 to meet and send us a letter describing what they have been doing in the meantime.

Lydia Dart Henderson

'That's some letter!' Tom said as he rehung the document, and Mr. Ross said: 'My mother-in-law kept writing letters like that till she died. Much of what's good about this city grew out of her Mercer Girls.'

'Somebody ought to organize another ship like that for the men in Alaska,' Tom suggested.

'And they could use a couple 707

of Lydia Darts in Juneau right now.' Mrs. Ross smiled and said: 'On Friday afternoon, Tom, you'll meet the newest Lydia Dart, except that she's added Ross to her name.'

At first Tom failed to catch the significance of what had been said, but when Mr.

Ross nodded, it dawned on him that his hosts were speaking of their daughter, whereupon Mrs. Ross said: 'She's at school during the week. A convent school, where she's been doing rather well.'

'Was the original Lydia Dart a Catholic?'

'As a matter of fact, she was,' Mrs. Ross said. 'But when her church tried to prevent her from coming to Seattle, she more or less broke away. Then she married this strict Presbyterian from Scotland, and I was raised believing that I was both a papist and a John Knox Presbyterian. Never bothered me a bit, but I've always liked Catholic schools. They teach children something, and our Lydia can profit from their discipline too.'

So Tom Venn spent Thursday and Friday in a state of considerable excitement, wondering what Lydia would be like and how he was going to react to the granddaughter of the woman who had written that letter. He feared that he might make a fool of himself, but when he returned from the office late Friday his apprehensions vanished, because Lydia Ross, aged seventeen, was a slender, vivacious girl whose happy life encouraged her to meet everyone with a disarming frankness. Not for her were the torments of adolescence; she supposed that both her famous grandmother and her well adjusted mother had enjoyed similar girlhoods, and she intended becoming a grown woman much like them. She also adored her father and was at ease with her younger brother, who was developing similar attitudes. When Tom Venn first saw her come swinging in the front door, her blond hair coiled about her head so that her strong neck was revealed, he sensed immediately that she was an extension of the happy family which had so impressed him during his visit.

'Hello!' she said easily as she stretched out her hand. 'I'm Lydia. Father has told me about how good you were in handling the murders at the cannery.'

'He told you about that?' Tom asked, showing his surprise that Mr. Ross should have discussed such an unpleasant fact with his daughter.

'He tells us everything,' she replied, tossing a strapful of books onto a hall table, where she intended leaving them till Monday morning. 'And he told me about your run-in with the grizzly bear.'

'It wasn't really a fight. You won't believe this, but an Indian girl told the bear to go back, and it went.'

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'How big can a grizzly be? Our geography book said they're twice as big as ordinary bears.'

'This one was so-so. But a hotel in Juneau has one about ten feet tall. Stuffed, of course.'

'He would be quite an attraction if he wasn't.'

She was seriously interested in Alaska, emphasizing that she had not yet been allowed to visit there on her father's ships: 'What I want to see are the glaciers he tells us about. Are they as big as he says?'

'It seems that everything in Alaska is big. Bigger than you imagine,' and he told of the huge iceberg that had floated right to the doorstep of the Ross & Raglan store in Juneau.

'You mean right onto the main street?'

'In the water, of course. But yes, you could reach out and touch it with a pole.'

'What happened to it?'

'A fellow with a little tug threw a rope around one part and easily towed it away.'

'You mean a tug this little and an iceberg this big?' And the way she moved her hands was so expressive that Tom fell under the spell of her liveliness, her quick reaction to spoken words and her ingratiating smile.

Dinner with the Rosses now became a treasured ritual, and on Saturday night Lydia regaled the table with a burlesque description of how two of the Catholic sisters at her school hoodwinked the young priest who served as principal: 'He looked quite simple when they were through with him, so foolish, in fact, that we were sorry for him.'

'Did he know what was happening?' Tom asked, and she said: 'No. Actually, he never knows what's happening.'

Her brother, who was in a public grammar school, asked what kind of school Tom had attended, and Tom said apologetically: 'Just an ordinary school, in Chicago. But I had to drop out.'

'Tom has learned in the best school there is,' Mr. Ross interrupted. 'The kind my father attended. The school of actually doing it.' He asked for his son's attention, and said: 'The young man sitting across from you, Jake, was practically in charge of our store in Dawson before he was Lydia's age. And a year later he was head of everything in Nome.'

'You mean the gold fields?' the boy asked, and when Tom nodded, both the younger Rosses viewed him with more respect.

That weekend was the richest in human experience that Tom Venn had known up to this moment, for he witnessed how a well-organized family interacted, how children were allowed great freedom if they attended to the basic courtesies, 709

and he was especially impressed by the fact that Mrs. Ross, who was obviously proud of her lively daughter, refused Lydia permission to go out on Sunday afternoon until she had finished her weekend homework. Down the books came from the table where Lydia had tossed them, but two hours later she was ready to take a walk over the wooded hills in back of the castle.

It was a walk Tom would never forget. The air was wintry but the sun was warm. Puget Sound glistened at first, then grew somber as a rain squall drifted in from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and at one point Tom said: 'Look down there. It's almost as if the heart of the city lay exposed.'

'You use words well,' Lydia said, and Tom explained how, in both Dawson and Nome, he had studied books which Missy Peckham had provided.

'Who was she?' Lydia asked, and he replied: 'My mother, sort of,' and when she asked what that meant, for heaven's sake, he laughed uneasily and explained: 'My real mother...

well, she ran away with another man . . . and my father sort of married Missy. She was a wonderful woman ... is, I'd better say. She lives in Nome now.' He stopped, overcome by the contrast between Missy's chaotic life and the orderliness of the Ross household. He wanted to tell her how this good woman Missy Peckham had been unable to marry his father and was now unable to marry Mr. Murphy, and for much the same reason, but it was too complicated to unravel.

'Father thinks I ought to go on to college,' Lydia said, tactfully changing the subject.

'Mother has doubts.'

'Where would you go?'

'Here in Seattle. The university maybe.'

'That would be nice.'

'But Grandmother always remembered the Boston area with affection, and she told me before she died ...”

'I thought she was fed up with Boston.'

'No! She wrote that letter to tease them. She loved the place, said it was the lighthouse of America. She wanted me to go back there to school.' Then Lydia stopped speaking, for powerful thoughts were coursing through her mind, and after a while she said: 'I want to be like my grandmother. I want always to be brave enough to try things.

I think I'll need an education to achieve what I want to do.'

'And what is that?'

'I don't know. There are so many possibilities, I really can't decide.'

Tom had to laugh, because he faced the same quandary: 'Just like me. I love the work in Alaska. And I can see

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unbroken years of it ahead. But I feel more at home in Seattle and I can't see how I'm ever going to find a position here.'

'I should think that if you do a good job for Father up in Alaska, it would be only natural for him to bring you down here sooner or later. He has a very high opinion of you, Tom, and so does Mother.'

'But he also has a lot of work for me to do in Alaska.' He halted that line of talk: 'Have you ever met this Marvin Hoxey?'

'He's an awful man. Real slimy. Father knows it, but he says that sometimes you have to use whatever tool's at hand.' She kicked at a stone: 'Hoxey doesn't fool my father one bit.'

They had now swung around to the eastern side of the small hill; Puget Sound was no longer visible, but in its place stood the lakes and waterways which defined this segment of Seattle, and they were as attractive in their more subdued way as the more dramatic sound to the west. 'I've always liked this view,' Lydia said, 'less powerful but safer.'

'I don't think of you as someone looking for safety,' Tom said, and she corrected him: 'I'm not afraid of challenges, but I do appreciate safe havens at the close of day. My grandmother said the same. She told me once: ”I didn't come west for adventure alone. I came to find a good man and build a solid home.”Adventure and a safe haven, that's a good mix.'

On Monday morning she told Tom: 'Father says you'll be gone before I come back. It's been real fun talking to you. I can see why Father thinks so much of you, Tom.' And off she went, her hair down her back this time, her strapped books bouncing against her right l
eg.

On Tuesday, Mr. Ross said at dinner: 'I want you to supervise delivery and installation of the equipment for making tin cans. Our boat sails Thursday, and after Juneau it will lay over at the cannery. The men from the factory will help you with the machines and the new welding device.'