Authors: Rose Jenster
15. Lonesome miner seeks wife to treasure. Must be Christian, no soiled doves.
Leah grimaced. Despite her own unsullied status, she didn’t like the play on miner and treasure nor the judgmental reference to unchaste ladies. Moving down the page, she found scads of homesteading farmers but she didn’t mark a single one.
“Any luck?” Jane inquired. “It’s all farms in this one and I don’t see you as a milkmaid,” Leah shook her head gratefully.
As a shopkeeper's daughter with a well-educated mother, Leah was used to life in a city. She couldn’t imagine living in the middle of nowhere and seeing other people at church only on Sundays when they drove into town. She’d prefer a shopkeeper if she had her choice, someone who liked pretty things and books and reading, having intelligent conversations. She knew the chances were a bit slim in any case—she’d seen no one of that description in the populous city, yet she hoped to locate one out on the range.
54. Good Christian farmer seeks virtuous wife to share prosperity.
107. Spry widowed farmer, 42, seeks mother for his brood of six children in Idaho. No consumptives or suffragettes.
119. Godly minister, 25, would have a virtuous wife fond of good works and reading the Bible.
120. Upstanding miner, 31, six ft tall with some success wants a pretty wife in Helena.
133. Pretty and proper wife sought by Wyoming dairy farmer who is fond of fun.
139. Farmer, strong and tall, plays fiddle and fond of dancing. Seeks pretty young wife, good with children as am a widower with eight.
140. Helena homesteader with trees seeks handsome wife.
With trees? She thought. How were trees a recommendation for his character, his interests, or virtues? Six children? Eight children?
More farmers. It seemed there were pages and pages of bachelor farmers out west, and miner after miner who would forever track mud into the house and never stir from his doze in the rocking chair of an evening due to a bad back from stooping over all day to dig. She read on. Occasionally her sister-in-law would point out a likely advertisement, but it was always a miner or a farmer.
In such a confined society as the frontier, she’d like a cultured husband to share ideas with, a man whose eyes weren’t trained entirely on gold he could gouge from the dirt. Still, she was twenty-four years old, painfully shy, and barely on the pleasant side of plain.
157. Billings Innkeeper seeks well-read lady for honorable matrimony and conversation.
Leah took notes furiously, analyzing each word. She knew that every seven words cost five cents, so most of them were brief. This man, this innkeeper, had spent an extra five cents to include “conversation” and “well-read”. She felt her pulse flutter with excitement. If one could judge a man on nine words, he was exactly what she was looking for.
Here was a man who lived in town, who liked books, who would talk to her and share thoughts. She shut her eyes, a secret smile playing at her lips, as she imagined sitting by a warm cook stove with her embroidery after supper was done, talking about Shakespeare’s plays with her husband while a baby slumbered in the cradle. It seemed like heaven itself.
She looked through the rest of the edition obediently, making herself consider other options, but again and again she read his advertisement until she could have said it off by heart like a lesson. This, number one-five-seven, was the one to which she would craft a reply.
“What have you found?” Jane inquired. Shyly, Leah passed her the paper and pointed with her pencil to indicate the nine words she was hanging all her hopes upon. Jane perused it with a decisive nod. “That sounds just like someone who would like you,” she pronounced.
The very thought gave Leah pause. She had considered whether she would like him, forgetting for a moment that many women up and down the East Coast were likely reading the same ad and dreaming the same dreams of him and the life he promised. Other old-maid schoolteachers, prettier and more vivacious, cleverer and courageous, might have already written to him.
The paper was ten days past its edition date. The mail deliveries took three weeks most times, but even now, love letters (she blushed even to think the phrase) could be on a stagecoach headed for his inn. That nearly set her into a panic. She washed the newsprint from her hands and smoothed her modest cotton day dress.
“If you’ll excuse me, Jane, I’ve a letter to write,” she said with as much boldness as she could muster.
Leah retired to the spare room where she stayed and took out the small rosewood box in which she kept her correspondence. Selecting fine vellum of her mother’s, Leah set pen to paper, working slowly and thoughtfully. She wished to make a good impression without being too forward. Already she felt a kinship with him, a claim on him almost. As if she were the homesteader and he the patch of Montana earth she had chosen for herself.
Dear Sir,
I am called Leah because my late mother, who had been a teacher of literature, wished Ophelia to be my given name but my father would not brook such nonsense and insisted on a Biblical alternative. As a result, I am a person of contradictions, the poetic and the practical. I am a schoolteacher in Albany, New York, bookish and quiet, who wishes for a family and home of my own. Your advertisement for a well-read lady to be your wife interests me. My wish is that we might exchange letters to see if we would suit in temperament and character. What are your interests? Your tastes? I hope for a reply and I shall keep you in my prayers that your lonesomeness may not be of long duration, that you might soon have a suitable wife even if she be not myself.
Sincerely,
Leah Weaver
She considered asking Jane to check it over but she felt oddly private about it, as if her words were just between the two of them—herself and Mr. One-Five-Seven. She sealed the letter and stamped it, placing it in her satchel to post on Monday morning. Her thoughts turned sadly to the final clearing of her father’s shop, but she took some schoolwork out to occupy her mind until time to do the washing.
For nineteen days, Leah checked arithmetic sums and heard recitations about Columbus and the conquest of the New World and coaxed the littlest ones through the McGuffey’s reader. She did the washing up and swept the floors at Walter and Jane’s house and read aloud to her ailing father. They were halfway through
David Copperfield
, although she was sadly sure the man had no idea of the story or characters.
She prayed he at least found comfort in the sound of her voice, in the tender way she cut up his meat at the evening meal and helped him to a cup of milk as if he were a child. Each day, she checked the post for a letter addressed to herself. On the nineteenth day, a small missive on cream paper, folded and sealed up plainly, came to her.
Dear Miss Weaver,
I am called Henry, though my full given name is Josiah Henry Rogers, because I am in a plain-dealing business out West and these frontiersmen brook less nonsense even than your father. As we’re on the topic of names, I’ve a sister called Opal, which ought to tell you that my father, a symphony conductor, who named her, is the impractical one with the head for poetry in my clan.
I hail from Philadelphia and came West in my youth to find my own way. I have a way with horses and break pairs for driving in my spare time. I am an avid rider and judge of horseflesh, of which my stable has much. Do you ride? Would you learn to ride a horse if you have not had opportunity with your city upbringing?
While I’ve made my inn and stable a prosperous concern, I’ve not found much in the way of human companionship out here. It seems my subscription to the lending library is not enough of culture or amusement, but it is all that is on offer here. I am fond of music but there is little opportunity to indulge that interest outside of church hymns, though our congregation has a piano now, a bit out of tune but a piano all the same.
You say that you are bookish and shy—I am as well, though the people of the town would not know it. My business requires me to know all the news, to be friendly and sociable, but it is not my nature, I believe. I’m of a retiring temperament in that respect and would much prefer a book. I have read Dickens but find his novels a bit sentimental. Do you know Goethe? What sort of poetry do you enjoy? I confess I do not care for William Blake, and I was a recalcitrant student of Marlowe as a boy as well.
If the ramblings of a lonesome innkeeper have not alarmed you, do reply to my letter. I would know more of your interests. I do not mind if you call yourself an old maid as I suppose, at 29 years of age, I am a bit of one myself. That is a joke, although on paper it looks odd now. Forgive the familiarity of my making a joke in a letter of introduction. I find I would rather write to you than talk to the men at my inn just now, and I may have let my words run away with me. When you write to me, if you write to me, you may address me as Henry. May I call you “Leah,” or at least “not-Ophelia” as it seems strange to have confided so much in a person I must write to as Miss Weaver?
With hope,
Josiah Henry Rogers
Leah was smiling as she folded the letter and pressed it to her heart, shutting her eyes. For nineteen nights as she'd said her prayers, she had asked her mother to send her a husband. She hoped it was not blasphemy to pray to her mother after she prayed to Jesus, but she knew that good, devoted woman was an angel and would be watching over her only daughter. She hoped her mother could see her now; how happy, how hopeful she felt. Leah told herself to be calm, as her father always had when she was carried away by enthusiasm.
A serious child, she had indulged in occasional flights of fancy that he felt it his duty to curb. Once she had asked him for a hundred composition books from the shop and he’d asked her what they were for…she told him, at age nine, that she intended to copy out the Bible by hand and post the composition books to little children in far-off countries who didn’t know about Jesus. She’d been deeply disappointed when he told her that those little children couldn’t read English and she’d be better off saving her weekly pennies for the missionary collection.
Leah composed herself, reread the letter, and set to pen a reply.
Dear Henry,
Now that we are introduced by your letter, I may call you that. I received your response in my hands less than an hour ago and here I sit, replying already. I confess that everything you say gives me the utmost hope that we might suit one another well.
I do not ride and I confess a bit of a fear of horses. They are so very large and I am small. I will trust you to teach me to ride if ever we meet.
I have read some Goethe. My favorite is the sonnets of Mr. Shakespeare, but it may shock you to know that one of my most precious possessions is my mother’s copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. She persuaded my father to buy it for her when it the 1867 edition came out, and years later, as she lay dying, she had me read it out to her again. That is how I became acquainted with his very powerful and natural poetry. Much of it is shocking, of course, but you must permit at least my sentimental attachment to the volume.
Of our contemporary writers, I like the works of Robert Browning and I have read a bit of Longfellow. The novels of Sir Walter Scott were the solace of my youth and I have read Gulliver’s Travels every spring since my eleventh birthday. It seems such a springlike novel, so perfect for new beginnings. Now that is fanciful, though if I can forgive your odd jokes, I suppose you might forgive my odd fancies in kind.
I have never seen the mountains and I find myself dreaming of them now, though Montana must be as a foreign land to a girl bred in the bustle and stir of the city. Did you find it very different when you moved from Philadelphia?
You wrote that your own father is an orchestral conductor. How fascinating! Did you have opportunity to hear many symphonies and concertos as a child? I went once to the opera as a birthday treat and saw a performance of “Lohengrin,” which I mention because it was, I have read, first staged by Liszt in Weimar, Germany as an honor to Goethe whom you referenced. I found the production to be grand and otherworldly and the Bridal Chorus was very moving indeed. My mother taught me some piano when I was a child and I learned a bit of Beethoven. I could pick out a fair “Für Elise” and a few hymns before she was too ill to teach me any longer.
My dear mother succumbed to consumption when I was a girl but I am quite healthy myself. Her loss has been the great sadness in my otherwise fortunate life. My father kept a stationery shop and I went to school until my mother’s illness made her unable to keep the house. At that time, my father brought over an Irish girl to clean and cook for us and I cared for my mother, eventually withdrawing from school until after her passing to tend her. She liked to be read to and I became acquainted with Evelina and the novels of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen in this way.
Books were our retreat together, a happy place inhabited by us two and free from worry and sickness. It is for this reason that I escape in a story when I am overcome by real life. A student of mine has given me considerable worry and has stopped attending class. Instead of fretting over it or even (Lord forgive me) praying for him, I am reading Dickens, which is like an old friend to me now. I may live in a busy city but I have no more confidantes, no more like-minded friends than you have in the wilds of Montana.
Forgive my long letter. It is easier for me to write than to talk, although I am perfectly happy to converse with those who know me. Are you—is it forward to ask how many other ladies have answered your advertisement and with how many others you correspond? I do not ask for gossip’s sake, only to know what I may reasonably hope. If you have many correspondents, I mustn’t expect a letter very often, whereas if only a few of us are writing you, I might look in the post every few weeks with the promise of a new letter.