Sharing Blankets

It was Friday, August 21st, 1863 when it happened, and that date would be forever burned into Elizabeth Orley's mind.

The sun was just above the horizon and Elizabeth was in the process of making breakfast for her and her father when she heard the first shots. Her father slammed down his cup of coffee and raced to the widow overlooking the main street of Lawrence, Kansas where his general store was located. From the vantagepoint of their living quarters over the store, he saw the street was filled with riders and they were all carrying guns.

There were few people on the street at that time of morning, but Mason Brown recognized Emerson Sidley and his son Abraham. They would have come to town from their farm to buy supplies at Mason's General Store. Now, they lay on the ground in the middle of the street, shot by the men now spreading out to the various businesses on the street.

He turned to Elizabeth with fear on his face.

"Bushwhackers! Elizabeth, come with me. Now!"

They went down the stairs to the back of the general store. Mason took a double-barreled shotgun from the rack behind the counter and handed it to Elizabeth along with a box of shells, then opened the trap door to the cellar.

"Go to the cellar and stay there until this is over. If anybody comes down there besides me, don't wait to see who it is. Shoot them."

As Elizabeth took the stairs down to the cellar where her father stored shovels and other tools, Mason pulled a folded up wagon cover over the trap door to hide it, picked up another shotgun from the rack and a box of shells, and went outside to defend his store.

Elizabeth hid in the darkest corner of the dark cellar and listened to the sound of continuous gunfire and the screams of men and boys, and then cowered as she heard the heavy clunk of boots on the floor above her. She heard the crash of breaking glass and then the laughs of men.

"Needed me a new Colt. This'un'll do me just fine. Think I'll take me another un and a holster to make me a pair."

"Sam, you couldn't hit a bull in the ass with a ax handle if you was two feet away from him. Them new Colts ain't gonna make you no better shot. Me, I want me them bottles of whiskey over there."

"Jackson, you'll be sharin' that whiskey won't ya?"

"Hell no, but you can buy it off me. Havta be gold though. Them Mexican whores down in Texas don't take no Confederate graybacks."

After another two hours, Elizabeth still heard a few shots, but louder were the sounds over her head. She heard the crash of racks hitting the floor and the hard stomping of heavy boots. Then, suddenly, there were no men in boots overhead and no more gunshots.

Still, she did not venture out of the cellar. Her father was usually a soft-spoken man who always asked her to do something. He had never raised his voice to her. This time, his voice had been loud and harsh and instead of asking, he'd ordered her to the cellar.

Only when she heard the wailing of women did Elizabeth cautiously climb up the stairs and open the trap door. When it opened a crack, she looked all around and didn't see anything except that some of the store items were either broken or had been trampled on the floor. After throwing the trapdoor back and climbing up, she stood there staring at what was the nearly complete loss of everything her father had for sale.

Gone was most of the canned food from the rack and the hams and sides of bacon that had hung on hooks from the ceiling. Gone were the bottles of whiskey in their wood crates behind the counter where she crouched. All the rifles, pistols, balls, powder, and caps were gone except for one tin of caps that had been dropped on the floor.

Her father had just received a shipment of yard goods, the bolts of wool and cotton material the women of Lawrence would have used to make clothing for their families. Those now lay in a pile, crumpled and filthy from the boots that had trod on them. So too were the other sewing items like thread and trim.

Elizabeth heard a woman scream then and she went out the door to the store to see what had happened. What she saw first was Mrs. Ellington cradling her husband's head to her bosom. Then she saw her father lying in the dirt of the street with his shirt covered with blood. She didn't need to check to see if he was alive. His lifeless eyes stared at the sky until she closed them.

There had been little time for mourning that day. Eleanor Williams, the wife of the pastor of the Methodist church in Lawrence, had survived the attack by running into a cornfield behind the church. Pastor Williams had stayed in the church in hopes of protecting it.

Once the bushwackers had ridden out of town, she and the other people, mostly women and children, had ventured out of their hiding places in the tall, green stalks. The women and children had run to their homes and when their husbands and sons weren't there, into the main street of Lawrence. There, they found their husbands and older sons lying dead. That was the wailing Elizabeth had heard from her hiding place in the cellar of the store.

Pastor Williams was among those lying dead in the streets of Lawrence. Eleanor sobbed over her husband's dead body, but being a practical woman, she soon realized there was no time for mourning the dead. That time would come tomorrow. The reason was the sun beating down on the broken city of Lawrence.

Eleanor covered her husband's body with her shawl, and then began to console the other women. She found the total number of the dead to be a few over a hundred and fifty men and boys. Eleanor could see that most had not been killed outright. Most had been shot two or more times and often it looked as if they had been trying to crawl to safety when the shots were fired. It was as if the bushwhackers wanted to cause them as much pain and suffering as possible before ending their lives.

Once she had seen the extent of the carnage, Eleanor had called all the women to leave their dead husbands and dead sons and meet in the church. When the women had all filed inside, still crying into their handkerchiefs, she told them what they must do.

"The undertaker is among the dead, but even if he were still alive, the number of the dead is so many. We will have to do the best we can, but I am certain the Lord will understand. Go to your homes and bring shovels to dig and blankets to wrap the dead in. We will have to bury them as quickly as possible."

The rest of that day, soft hands that had held cooking spoons and sewing needles, soft hands that had cradled babies to their breasts, those soft hands picked up the hard, polished handles of shovels and picks and dug graves in the church cemetery for the fallen. Each woman and her daughters carefully wrapped their dead men and boys in blankets and then helped other women and girls to lift the bodies into wagons for the trip to the cemetery. The wagons were driven by the few old men who had survived the attack by hiding in the same cornfields.

When all the men and boys were lying in the ground and their graves were temporarily marked with stakes, Eleanor stood in front of the women and said a prayer for the dead.

"Dear Lord, I am but a pastor's wife, but I know that you, being an all merciful God who watches over all his children, will hear me. Take these brave men and boys into your hands and give them the gift of eternal life with you in heaven. Grant those of us left the understanding that though this seems as if it was a horrible tragedy that has befallen us, it was your will that our loved ones should join you today. Grant us the strength to go on with our lives, grieving for the men and boys who lie here in this place of rest, but knowing that you still watch over us. Amen."

With that, she looked up.

"What has happened can not be the end of Lawrence. My husband, were he still alive, would tell us the same thing. We must work to rebuild the town. Only in this way can we show the people who wish Kansas to be a slave state that we will not allow that to happen. When others hear of this attack, they will come to help us. Until then, we must be strong and work hard. God will give us the strength of mind and body to do so."

Elizabeth had stood by the grave of her father and listened, but she had doubts. Why would a merciful God take everything she held dear to her heart? She was just fourteen and in the first stages of becoming a woman when her father had said that there must be no more areas in America where one man could legally own another. He said if the wealthy slave-owners from Missouri were able to buy up enough land and start businesses in Kansas Territory, they would also have enough political strength to steer Kansas Territory in that direction.

To help stop that from happening, he had sold his store in Indianapolis and made the trip to Lawrence. Elizabeth had been forced to say goodbye to all her friends with the certain knowledge that she would never see them again.

Life in Lawrence was a lot different that life in Indianapolis. There were few girls her age in Lawrence because the town was small. Life there was also frightening sometimes, like when the bushwhackers had descended on Lawrence in 1856 when Elizabeth was sixteen.

The bushwackers had demanded that the people of Lawrence give up all their firearms. The owner of the hotel told the leader of the bushwhackers he could not order the people of Lawrence to do that, but offered up the cannon that Lawrence had mounted on a hill to defend the town.

The leader of the bushwhackers accepted the offer, but once he had the cannon, he turned it on the hotel and destroyed it. Also destroyed was the newspaper office. Elizabeth had been terrified at the blasts of the cannon, and even more afraid when the bushwhackers began ransacking the other businesses. When the bushwhackers left, not one business in Lawrence was left without some damage or losses from looting.

Once she was eighteen and thinking about her future as a wife and mother, her own mother, the only woman who could give her guidance about marriage and childbirth, died of pneumonia during that winter. Instead of looking for a husband, Elizabeth had become the woman of the family and did all the chores her mother had done.

Elizabeth hadn't been thinking about a husband, but fate had put a man into her life who brought those thoughts back into her head. James Orley, the son of a local farmer, had taken an interest in her. After a year of meeting after church for a walk and then later for a picnic lunch under the trees near the church, he had asked her to be his wife.

Elizabeth had been overjoyed, but hesitant. If she married James, her father would be alone. Her father had just laughed and said he was old enough to take care of himself and that her happiness was more important than having her fix his meals and wash his clothes. Elizabeth and James were married in June of 1861.

Elizabeth was happy that God had decided to give something back after taking away so much from her life. That feeling lasted for a week. It was a week after they were man and wife that James told her he was going away to fight in the war against the states that had broken away from the Union. With tears in her eyes, she had begged him not to go. James had just stroked her cheek and smiled.

"Elizabeth, I will be gone only the few weeks it will take to stop the rebellion. You'll see. The South doesn't have the wherewithal to do much except fight a few battles that they will lose. I'll be home before you know it and then we'll start life together."

Though she missed him terribly, Elizabeth had been proud of James once he left Lawrence. She thought him a man with high principles and the bravery to defend those principles, just like her father. Once again, though, what she loved had been taken from her.

James had not come home to start a life with her. Elizabeth read his name in the list of casualties of the Battle of Fort Henry in Tennessee printed in the Lawrence newspaper. He'd been buried there, so far away she could not even go stand over his grave and tell him that she missed him.

It had been hard to move back in with her father, but over time, her grief lessened and she again became the woman of the house. She also spent some time working in the store. It was difficult for the women of Lawrence to discuss certain things they needed with a man. They welcomed Elizabeth's presence because she understood their needs and was very discrete when she filled those needs.

Elizabeth had settled down into that life and assumed she would remain in that life for a long time. Many of the unmarried young men in Lawrence had gone to join the Union Army, and the few who remained were not to her liking. She thought that any man who believed in freedom for all people should be willing to fight for that freedom, just as had James. In her estimation, a man who would not fight for what he said he believed in was either a liar about his beliefs or a coward.

Her grief over her father's death lasted longer, but Elizabeth vowed to honor his memory by continuing to operate the store. Her father had kept most of his money in the bank which the bushwhackers had robbed, but he kept what he called his "working money" in a hidden compartment in their living quarters.

The bushwhackers had gone up the stairs as evidenced by the broken crockery she found there, but had not discovered the hidden compartment. The money there was enough for her to have the damage to the general store repaired and to buy a small amount of inventory.

By the spring of 1865, Elizabeth had returned the general store to almost the same state as before the bushwhacker's raid. The war ended in April of that year, and the men and boys who had left to fight the Confederacy slowly made their way back to Lawrence. There were fewer than had left, and some were disabled by horrible injuries, but Lawrence again became a town of families instead of a town of women and children.

Lawrence also became a stop on the Kansas Pacific Railroad. The railroad primarily served to transport Texas cattle driven up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene through Kansas City, Missouri and then east, but once silver was discovered in Colorado, many people traveled the railroad west on their way to the silver mines. When the train stopped in Lawrence to unload cargo, many of its passengers would come to the general store and purchase food or things they discovered they'd left behind.

Elizabeth's store, still named Mason's General Store, began to do enough business that she needed help. She could manage the ordering and the counter, but found it very difficult to bring in crates of items from the freight wagon that delivered them to the back of the store. When her business was getting on its feet after the raid, the crates were smaller and came only once every month. Now, they were heavy and were delivered every week, sometimes twice in a week.

She had tried putting up a sign on the door of the store that said she was looking for a man to help, but no men applied. The reason was that fewer men had come back from the war and most were working their family farms or like Elizabeth, had picked up the pieces of the businesses their fathers had operated.

She had little faith that putting up a sign at the railroad station would help. The men riding the train were going to the silver mines and weren't interested in working for the wages she could afford to pay. She'd heard them talking about making as much money in a day as they could make in a month back home, wherever back home was.

Elizabeth had taken to paying the freight men to bring her merchandise into the store. Once it was in the back room, she would open the crate and carry the items into the store proper. That worked, but required her to work from dawn until the store opened, and then after the store closed until late in the evening.

Some weeks, she even had to work on Sunday afternoon, something her father would never have done. He said that after creating the world, God rested on Sunday, and he couldn't think of a better way to rest than to spend Sunday afternoon studying the big Bible he kept on his desk upstairs where they lived.

He had been proud of his Bible. It was a thick book, bound in leather and in addition to the text of the both the Old Testament and the New Testament, was filled with pictures of the various stories the text told. In the back, he kept small notes he wrote about passages he particularly liked. Also in the back was his hand-written record of the Brown family dating back to 1701, the year the first Brown had crossed the Atlantic to settle in America.

Elizabeth had studied along with her father up until the day he had been killed by the bushwhackers. After that, she couldn't make herself open the pages of the Bible again. God had taken so much from her in her short life. She still went to church on Sunday, but that was only because that was what the town expected. In her heart, she couldn't believe in a God that caused her so much anguish.

It was one such Sunday afternoon in May of 1868. The shipment of merchandise that week had contained hoes, scythes, and other tools the farmers of the community would need in order to plant and harvest their fields and their family gardens. The crates were too heavy for even one man to move. It took two freight men to take them off the wagon and bring them into the back room of the store. That Sunday, Elizabeth was taking each tool, one by one, and putting them in the front of the store.

In the back of the general store was a platform her father had built. The floor of the platform served as an unloading platform for the freight wagons that delivered things to the store. Her father had built a roof over the platform so it could also serve as storage for a few items that were too big and heavy to bring inside. One of those items was a large crate that contained a new John Deere self-scouring plow that Elizabeth had ordered for a local farmer. The crate was as long as a man was tall, about three feet high, and about two feet wide.

After an hour of transporting shovels and hoes to the front of the store, Elizabeth needed a short rest, so she walked out of the store and onto the loading platform. She'd taken only two steps when she saw a man sleeping on top of the John Deere crate.

Since the bushwhacker raid on Lawrence, Elizabeth had been wary of any strangers. The people who left the train to buy goods at her store didn't concern her too much. They were usually just men traveling through. That this man was still there on Sunday afternoon did concern her. She turned around and went out the front door of the store to the Marshal's office.

Marshal Davies went back to the store with Elizabeth and then out onto the loading platform. The man was still there and still asleep, so Marshal Davies walked up to the crate and after checking to see if the man had any weapons, shook him awake. When the man woke up, Marshal Davies told him to stand up.

Marshal Davies turned to Elizabeth then.

"Did he steal anything?"

Elizabeth shook her head.

Marshal Davies then smiled.

"No need to worry then. He's just still drunk from last night. Probably some miner who figured out there's no money in digging in the ground and is headed back home. Seen several over the last couple weeks. I'll take him to the jail so he can sleep it off and send him on his way tomorrow."

The man didn't resist as Marshal Davies took him by the arm and led him around the store and off to the jail. He just walked, albeit somewhat clumsily, as they went around the corner of the store. Elizabeth went back to carrying shovels and hoes from the back room to the front of the store, happy that nothing had happened.

The next morning, Elizabeth opened the store and was waiting on a woman when the same man walked through the front door. He stood patiently until Elizabeth had taken the woman's money for ten pounds of flour. Once the woman left, he approached Elizabeth.