The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [44]
Everyone present clucked sympathetically, and later Susannah confided to me that her father had built a nice twelve-by-twelve cabin on their claim outside of town, only to be sued by another claimant for the same bit of property. "We ended up losing the cabin and twenty rods of fencing, and that did set my father back, you know. Kind of took the wind out of his sails."
"How could you lose your claim?" I asked. "I thought if you claimed it, it was yours. And who is Reeder?"
"Oh, my dear," caroled Mrs. Bush. "Here you are just arrived, and we talk to you as if you know everything there is to know! We’ve been here a little over a month ourselves, and we feel like old settlers! Reeder was the territorial governor, but they drove him out. You must get to know Dr. Robinson. He is our Winthrop, you know. He seems to have come out here a hundred years ago, but really, he only claimed Lawrence a year ago July. Isn’t that something? Look how far along we are after only a year and a month!"
Indeed, events moved with considerably more swiftness in K.T. than ever they did in Quincy. Already the territory had finished up one governor (Reeder, the one the Missourians apparently didn’t like) and had just received the second (Shannon, the one the Missourians apparently did like). Already an election had been held (the previous March), and already a scandal had ensued from it. Most of the voters had come over, or been brought over, from Missouri, and they had elected their own slate of nonresident officials, who had, already, made a mess of things, according to Mrs. Bush and the Jenkins ladies. "Those who can read," claimed Mrs. Bush, "are generally too drunk to do so, and they made a terrible botch of the territorial constitution—"
"It’s not a botch, Helen, it’s a crime!" said Mrs. Jenkins. She turned to me. "My dear, it is a constitution written in the H— of slavery for the imposition of that H— upon others! A sane person cannot read it, simply cannot! Mr. Jenkins tried four times to get through it. It gave him a fever, and he was down for three days. My true feeling is that if he had not tried to read that constitution when he did, we wouldn’t have lost our claim!"
Mrs. Bush gave me a skeptical glance, but said, "Perhaps not, my dear."
But the Free-Soil party, to which all my new acquaintances belonged, and which had been surprised and overwhelmed in the spring, was stronger now. "Look at us!" said Mrs. Bush. "We swell the ranks. My own opinion is that Dr. Robinson is far too kind a man, and far too good. He was unprepared by his own virtues for the sheer malice of the other side. And Eli Thayer! Well, he is a cousin of Mr. Jenkins’s mother’s cousin, and I’ve met him, and say what you will about this money and that money, and how much he has and how he got it, he is an innocent babe!"
I said, "Thomas mentioned Mr. Thayer."
"He’s our benefactor!" said Susannah. "He founded the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company. He’s a terrific abolitionist!"
"Such an inspiration," added Mrs. Bush.
I didn’t know what to think. These people were all so friendly and warm and welcoming, and the leaning house was breezy and quaint, and the corncakes were hot and delicious, but every word that they spoke amazed me. It wasn’t just what they reported—I didn’t doubt for a minute that the men who had challenged us the night before were full of menace and hatred, and that wherever they came from, there were plenty more like them. I didn’t know why the three Missourians had threatened us and then ridden away. But the strangest thing