Walk on Earth a Stranger (34 page)

Mr. Hoffman steps up, crossing his arms. “Try it,” he says. My uncle suddenly doesn't seem so large.

“It would be a strategic error,” Major Craven adds.

Jefferson sets the rear trigger.

We stare one another down: Hiram and his two men, me and my traveling companions. A few passersby stop to see what the fuss is about.

Becky is the one to break the silence. “You see, Mr. Westfall, sir,” she says, bobbing her unnamed daughter in her arms. “Leah is
ours
now.”

Hiram deliberates, his eyes roving our small company, resting for the space of a moment on every single face. “I see,” he drawls, slow and Southern and altogether false. “You realize, don't you, that you're harboring a runaway? She belongs with her family.”

Becky laughs. “I knew she was a runaway the first time I laid eyes on her! But I'll thank you to leave us alone, regardless.”

“She's with her family now,” Jasper amends.

Hiram holds my gaze, and I hold his right back. It gives me an ache to see him; he's so like my daddy, except straight and strong and healthy. But he's half the man my daddy was. Less than half.

He seems to come to a decision, and his face darkens with determination. At last, he tips his hat to me. “I'll be seeing you again, my Leah. Very soon.”

He means to scare me, but my breathing is just fine, thank you, and the hands on my rifle are steady enough to take him
at two hundred paces. “For sure and certain,” I reply.

Uncle Hiram turns his back and strides off, the other two men at his heels. He still wants what I can do, and he won't stop trying to get it. Mama and Daddy never saw him coming, but my new family knows what kind of man he is. We'll be ready.

I'm about to say thank you, and maybe hug someone, but everyone has already turned away like my uncle isn't worth another moment's attention.

“I still think you should call her Therese,” Olive says to her mother as we resume our walk to the fort. It's a game everyone has been playing, trying to find a name for the Joyner baby.

“Or Lee,” Andy says, with a shy glance at me.

“Or California!” Hampton says. “You can call her Cali for short.”

“Elizabeth is a fine name,” I put in. “It was my mother's name.”

We continue to throw names out until we reach the gates, where we pause a moment.

Jefferson drapes an arm across my shoulders. “We made it,” he says, gazing up at the walls. “We actually made it.”

I'm smiling, fit to burst. Feeling richer than a king, I say, “Let's go find us some gold.”

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E
ight years before the publication of this book, I moved from California to Ohio to marry the man of my dreams, a reverse migration, if you will. We loaded all my possessions into my car and drove across the United States, making the trip in six days—one day for every month it took a covered wagon to trek the same distance. The landscape we traveled was sometimes inspiring, sometimes tedious, always vast. I spent hours gazing out the window, already missing my home state desperately, even as I thrilled at the adventure of starting a new life in a new place.

It was then that the idea for
Walk on Earth a Stranger
germinated, but it would be years before I felt ready to write it. Sure enough, combining history and fiction is its own fraught adventure, and in order to best tell Lee's story, I took a few minor liberties. For instance, Dr. M. F. Stephenson's famous speech in Dahlonega's town square really took place in the summer of 1849, not in early winter as portrayed in the book.
And it's likely that the real-life citizens of Dahlonega would have received word of gold's discovery in California some months before Lee and Jefferson do. Occasionally, I allowed them to use words that probably hadn't found popular usage in the eastern United States, such as “nugget” and “mother lode” and “palomino.”

Most significantly, I allowed Jefferson to propose to Lee when she was not yet sixteen, even though the average age of first marriage for women was twenty to twenty-two at that time. I allowed this because there is anecdotal evidence that women on the California trail married early, often out of necessity. Lee's circumstances seem to me to qualify.

I wanted the flexibility of choosing and directing my own characters, so very few historical personages appear in
Walk on Earth a Stranger
, and then only in cameo roles. The one character I couldn't resist, however, was James “Free Jim” Boisclair, an entrepreneur from Dahlonega, Georgia. Not much is known about him, though he probably set off for California in 1850, rather than 1849 as portrayed in the book. By all limited accounts, he was well respected, ambitious, and full of conviction. I hope I have done him justice.

Lee, Jefferson, and their contemporaries refer to Jim and other African-Americans as Negroes, as that was the polite term of the day. Likewise, they refer to Native Americans as Indians. I choose to use “African-American” and “Native American” in general conversation, but I will always honor someone's personal preference when informed of it.

There is some controversy over whether the term
“confirmed bachelor” was used during Victorian times to refer to a gay man. While this euphemism may not be the phrase's only meaning, there are enough examples in the academic literature and within the LGBTQ community that I chose to use it with this implication. For more insight into specific terminology of the day, as well as some delightfully subjective commentary, I highly recommend the
Dictionary of Americanisms
, by John Russell Bartlett (New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1848).

No book is written in isolation. I am grateful to the following people for their many insights and expertise: Angela Thornton of the American Indian Library Association, who read an early draft; Marlena Montagna, an accomplished equestrian, who provided expert advice on horses and horseback riding; Jaime Lee Moyer, a critically acclaimed author of historical fiction, who helped me identify and sort through an avalanche of primary sources—diaries, lithographs, newspaper articles, daguerreotypes, etc.

For readers interested in learning more about the journey to California from the emigrants themselves, I recommend the following books, which I found invaluable:

Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, 1840–1849
, edited and compiled by Kenneth L. Holmes, with an introduction by Anne M. Butler (Lincoln, Nebraska: Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, 1995)

Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey
, edited by Lillian
Schlissel, with a forward by Mary Clearman Blew (New York: Schocken Books, 2004 edition)

Most of all, I am grateful to my husband, C. C. Finlay, for reading this book multiple times, for applying his training as both editor and historian to key portions of text, and for listening patiently as his displaced Californian spouse waxed endlessly about her native state's many wonders and the Gold Rush that shaped it.

Walk on Earth a Stranger
is so much better for these contributions; any errors that remain are mine alone.

Today, you can hardly visit any place in California without seeing evidence of the Gold Rush. I've rafted down the Tuolumne River through steep cliffs of layered sediment—the result of dredging. I've chanced upon ancient wagon wheels, half-buried in sod, while backpacking through Emigrant Wilderness. I've cheered the 49ers on to multiple Super Bowl wins, toured the mines and orchards of the Sierra Nevada foothills with my friends, spent days wandering the Golden Gate. Though this book deals primarily with the overland journey in 1849, there is much more of Lee's story—and California's—yet to be told.

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RAE CARSON
is the author of the New York Times best-selling Girl of Fire and Thorns series, as well as three novellas set in the same world. She lives with her husband in Arizona.

www.raecarson.com

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Cover design by Neil Swaab

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This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.

WALK ON EARTH A STRANGER
. Copyright © 2015 by Rae Carson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

www.epicreads.com

The text of this book is set in 11-point Hoefler.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

978-0-06-224291-4 (hardcover)

“Greenwillow Books”.

EPub Edition April 2015 ISBN 9780062242938

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