From This Day Forward by Cokie Roberts

Author:Cokie Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

A posse of men rode into the camp from the west, warning about attacks, and some in the party started agitating to go back home. “In the next wagon behind ours a man and wife are quarreling. She wants to turn back and he won’t, so she says she will go and leave him—that these men will furnish her a horse and she will leave him with the children and he will have a good time with that crying baby. Then he used some very bad words and said he would put it out of the way. Just then I heard a muffled cry and a heavy thud as though something was thrown against the wagon box and she said, ‘Oh, you’ve killed it’ and he swore some more and told her to keep her mouth shut or he would give her some of the same.” Just then the man was summoned to take his turn keeping guard, “so he and his wife were parted for the night. The baby was not killed. I write this to show how easy we can be deceived.”

As they journeyed on, Keturah’s diary petered out. “For want of space, I must cut these notes down and will pass over some interesting things. Watts and the sheep pulled out and fell behind…. The old mother Watts said after they got through, ‘Yes, George Belknap’s wife is a little woman but she wore the pants on that train.’ So I came into notoriety before I knew it.” Her last entry from the trail is about her boy, Jesse, who was very sick with “mountain fever”: “I have held the little boy in my lap on a pillow and tended him as best I could. I thought in the night we would have to leave him here and I thought if we did, I would be likely to stay with him. But at day light we seemed to get fresh courage.”

The Belknaps reached Oregon and the men set off for the California gold mines. In April 1849, Keturah, once again keeping a journal, wrote, “We women folks began to realize that we were the providers for our families…we had to rustle for our families and also for the church.” When the men returned with little to show for their adventure, they started serious farming. But George Belknap couldn’t stay put. Though Keturah was a respected personage in the settlement, acting as nurse and midwife to the immigrants, and friend to the Indians, he uprooted the family again, moving in Oregon, and then, in 1879, to Washington. Ten years later, they celebrated in style their golden wedding anniversary, but still they weren’t settled. They lost the farm in 1895 and moved in with their children. George died in 1897, but Keturah lived until 1913. Her grandfather had fought in the Revolutionary War, her parents had been some of the early settlers of the first frontier, then she and her husband moved with the nation ever west. She buried six children in the course of her journeys; five others survived her.

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