MILLICENT BELL
641
"K.T."
She does not quite take in the meaning of one of his pieces of
luggage-a trunk full of the new breech-loading Sharps rifles.
Her political interest is minimal although she remembers affectionate–
ly a half-sister who ran a school for the children of escaped slaves and had
been thought "very strange, and offensive, too, for purporting to live by her
conscience." Lidie is slow to come to radicalism, slow to see things in
Thomas' general terms. "Abolitionists won't let anyone alone," she says.
She had not come to Kansas to fight slavery. "Thomas, of course, had made
it attractive, so perhaps I had taken it up as a way of being courted," she
later admits. "And then, in
K.T.,
we abolitionists had been so hated, so stu–
pidly, venally, cruelly, and ridiculously hated, that there was honor in being
an abolitionist."
Her narrative lacks the historical awareness of Owen Brown's in
Cloudsplitter.
But it is thus more true to an average person's experience of
general events in a time unlike our own in which the news media, espe–
cially television, offer an instant interpretation of everything deemed
significant (and, by implication, render everything else insignificant), and
make everyone a self-conscious historian. Instead of a coherent account of
history, Lidie gives us fragmentary reports and rumors. The names of
major actors occur from time to time-names like that of the leader of the
conservative free-soilers, Charles Robinson, and of the more controversial
James Lane, of first governors Reed and "Shambling" Shannon, of Senator
Atchison, a pro-slaver, and others known to the history books besides John
Brown. We gather, confusedly, a sense of the progress of territorial politics
from the summer of 1854 when pro-slavery Missouri squatters began to
post claims to border lands and Free Staters began to arrive from the
North, when the settlement of Free State centers like Lawrence and
Topeka and pro-slavery towns like Leavenworth, Lecompton, and Atchison
took place. The first election, which resulted in a victory for the pro–
slavers, had been won by an invasion of Missourians and the stuffing of
ballot boxes, and Free Staters independently elected their own representa–
tive body. The nearly bloodless "Wakarusa War" was followed in 1856 by
the sacking of Lawrence. But all this is only a background to Lidie's live–
ly local impressions.
Thomas and Lidie move out to their claim and build their mud–
chinked cabin, where they endure the brutal Kansas winter cold but read
Emerson and Mrs. Stowe in the evenings. Their family unit includes Lidie's
nephew, Frank, who masters the
arts
of survival as a boy scrounger and
trader, aged twelve.
It
also includes a charming horse,Jeremiah, whose gifts
are revealed when Frank sneaks him into a horse race and who, when
stolen, finds his way back to them. Friendships are formed and friends drop
out of view. Susannah Jenkins finds Kansas too coarse and wild, and returns
