The Pioneers by David McCullough

Author:David McCullough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

II.

For Ephraim and Leah Cutler it had become an extremely difficult time. Her health, a concern even before they first came west, had taken such a downward turn that to give her the help and attention needed Ephraim had ceased serving in the legislature.

The situation became such that it was decided Leah must be nearer proper medical attention. So they had leased the wilderness farm they had worked so hard to establish near Ames and in the last week of December 1806 departed in two wagons. After three days of slow-going twenty-seven miles through the woods, they reached the banks of the Ohio to settle temporarily in a rented house at Belpre in what was to become the township of Warren.

With the passing of winter Ephraim began clearing land to build a new home on high ground beside the river farther upstream six miles below Marietta.

He was far from alone in his concern about Leah, who had the “decided symptoms” of consumption. “We feel extremely anxious about her,” his father wrote from Hamilton. “We rejoice that you have left your farm so that she will be freed from so much [to] care [for]. I would recommend to her to abstain from all labor, to use an easy, generous diet and have her mind as easy and quiet as possible.”

Because of an extremely rainy spring in Ohio, progress on the new house went slowly and Leah’s condition grew worse to the point where it became clear she had little time left to live.

Leah died on November 3, 1807, at the age of forty-two. It was the worst blow of Ephraim’s life.

But in her final days, she had offered some advice. For his own good and that of their four children, she had insisted, he must remain single a short time only and remarry. She even went so far as to name the person she thought best suited for him. It was an act of genuine, selfless good intent, and of courage.

The woman she had in mind was not someone she knew, only heard about. Her name was Sally Parker and she was also unknown to Ephraim. Thirty years old, or ten years younger than he, she had been born and raised in Newburyport, Massachusetts, before coming west with her family at age eleven. They had left their home in the summer of 1788. Her father, William Parker, had a proprietor’s share in the Ohio Company of over a thousand acres, but on reaching western Pennsylvania decided he did not want, not yet at least, to risk his wife and family to the realities of life on the Ohio frontier. Instead he purchased a small farm in western Pennsylvania. Not until 1800 did they continue on to Ohio. By then Sally was twenty-three.

On March 11, 1808, a matter of only a few months after Leah’s death, Ephraim sat down to write Sally Parker a letter. “It is with great diffidence I presume to address you on a subject which to me is of the highest importance,” he began.

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