My Father's World Read online

  © 1990 by Michael Phillips and Judith Pella

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948378

  ISBN 978-1-4412-3075-1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.

  Judith Pella is represented by The Steve Laube Agency

  To

  Patrick Jeremy Phillips

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  1. Getting to California in 1852

  2. Why We Came West

  3. Sacramento

  4. Miracle Springs

  5. In Front of the Gold Nugget

  6. The Town Business Woman

  7. Mrs. Parrish Talks to Us

  8. Picnic in the Wilderness

  9. A Surprise for Us All

  10. Another Wagon Ride

  11. Our New Home

  12. The First Few Days Together

  13. My Idea

  14. The Indians

  15. An Eventful Day in Town

  16. The Horses

  17. Alone at the Cabin

  18. Breakfast with Marcus Weber

  19. An Unexpected Visitor

  20. The Sheriff Pays a Visit

  21. Miracle Springs’ Big Day

  22. Dinner with Alkali Jones

  23. Some Time Alone

  24. A Talk With Uncle Nick

  25. The Argument

  26. A New Beginning

  27. A Talk Over Breakfast

  28. The Gold Nugget Church

  29. A Surprise

  30. Christmas Dinner

  31. New Dresses

  32. A Talk with Mrs. Parrish

  33. Trouble at the Mine

  34. Later That Same Night

  35. Overheard Conversation

  36. A Revelation of Family Ties

  37. The Cave

  38. The Newspaper Man

  39. A Family Talk

  40. Spring in the California Foothills

  About the Authors

  Books by Michael Phillips

  Books by Judith Pella

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  Prologue

  A few months back, Uncle Nick said to me, “You oughta make that diary of yours into a book.”

  “Who would read it?” I said. “No one cares what a little girl wrote when she first came West.”

  “You ain’t a little girl now, Corrie Belle Hollister,” he answered. “No, siree. You done a mite lot of growin' since you came to California ten years ago. Why, I remember that day I walked into ol’ Drum’s place and saw you standin’ there—”

  He paused for a minute with a smile on his face.

  “Besides,” he went on, “I think a whole lot of folks back East would read anything you wrote, now that you’re a famous reporter from one of the Union’s newest states.”

  “Aw shucks, Uncle Nick,” I said. “I’m not famous, and you know it!”

  “That ain’t what Drum says.”

  “He doesn’t count,” I said back. “He’s prejudiced!”

  “Your name’s in all the big papers in Chicago and St. Louis and New York. If that don’t make a body famous, then I reckon there’s no gold in them hills, neither.”

  “There really is about none left, Uncle Nick,” I said.

  “Well, the gold may be gone, but they’re still readin’ what you’re tellin’ ’em, and that’s a fact, Corrie.”

  “Nobody cares about a reporter’s name,” I told him. “They only read the story, that’s all.”

  “Your ma taught you not to lie, Cornelia.” His voice was stern, but that little twinkle in his eye said he was just teasing me. “Lord knows our pa taught us both better’n that, though your ma kept to it a mite straighter than I did. But, Cornelia,” he said again, “You know people are interested in you, not just what you write. A young lady reporter, sendin’ stories all ’round the country from the rough and wild gold fields and minin’ towns of California’s mother lode—why to them city folks, somebody like you makes the wild West a romantic and interesting place. I reckon you’re just about one of California’s most famous young women.”

  “It ain’t so,” I argued, and I tried to make my voice stern, but he saw right through my act. He always does. He’s still kid enough himself to understand me, even though he’s seventeen or eighteen years older than me. He’s just like my ma. She was always a step ahead of me, and Uncle Nick’s got that same Belle blood and quick eye.

  I wouldn’t talk any more about it to him right then. But he kept badgering me about the idea, and pretty soon I found myself getting used to it. I still couldn’t see why anybody would want to read my diary. But seeing a book with my name on it was a thought I couldn’t get rid of.

  I asked my editor at the Alta about the notion of a book.

  “That’s the most fool idea I’ve ever heard,” Mr. Kemble said. “You’re a reporter, Corrie . . . a hack. You’re no book author.”

  “And you reported in 1848 that there was no gold in California,” I said quietly.

  “What’s that got to do with it?” he shouted, not liking to be reminded of his infamous story in the California Star.

  “Maybe your prediction about me’ll be the same way,” I said timidly.

  “Come on, Corrie, we’ve got real news to cover! Here the country’s in the middle of a war with itself. People pouring into California by the thousands. Folks back East are interested in what kind of place this is out here. They don’t want to read the reminiscences of some runny-nosed kid.”

  I guess Kemble’s words riled me some. Pretty soon I found myself taking Uncle Nick’s side on the idea of a book.

  By that time, though, I suppose I should have known my editor better than I did. He may have put up a blustery front, but he wasn’t one to turn his nose up at an idea that might be good. The day after our talk he fired off a letter to a friend of his who worked for a publisher in Chicago.

  Then two months ago the friend wrote back and said that his company wanted to make a book based on my diary. Mr. Kemble brought up the subject again, and told me what he’d done.

  “The narrative portion of the story will be edited, of course,” said his friend in the letter that came addressed to both of us. “But we want you to retain the colorful phrasing and homespun flavor of the language in the dialogue. We feel it will add realism and authenticity to what you say.”

  I was so happy I threw my arms around Mr. Kemble and hugged him.

  We got right to work on it. I was only fifteen when I came to Miracle Springs, and my writing was pretty rough. But we worked on the sentences, trying to correct the grammar without losing any of the “homespun flavor,” as Mr. Kemble’s friend Mr. MacPherson put it. He did say, after all, that he didn’t want me to try to make every single word into high-sounding bo
ok English.

  But until then, here’s what happened, every so often in just the words I used in my diary, with a few things added here and there so you can make some sense out of it.

  Uncle Nick says you will like reading it. Mr. Kemble still says he think’s the whole notion’s foolhardy, though down inside I think he’s just as excited about it as I am.

  I don’t quite know which one to believe. I reckon you’ll have to make up your own mind.

  Corrie Belle Hollister

  Miracle Springs, California

  1862

  Chapter 1

  Getting to California in 1852

  Ma always told me I should keep a diary.

  “Corrie,” she’d say, “when a young woman’s not of the marryin’ sort, she needs to think of somethin’ besides a man to get her through life.”

  I think she was making a roundabout comment about my looks, though she never came right out and said I wasn’t comely enough to snag a husband. I guess she figured a diary would be a good idea, too, since I had my nose in a book all the time, and I ought to get some practical use from all that reading.

  “It sure ain’t gonna get you no feller though,” she’d say, “any more’n that nose full of freckles!”

  “What’s keepin’ a diary got to do with marryin’?” I asked her.

  “No man wants a wife that’s smarter’n him—” She paused, then added with a sly wink, “Leastways, not so’s it’s obvious!”

  Then she took my chin in her rough, work-worn hand, and smiled down on me with that loving look that was almost as good as a hug, and said—as if to make up for saying I wasn’t a marrying kind of girl—“I reckon you’ll do okay though, Corrie.”

  I was just a kid then, probably not more than ten, though I can’t exactly remember. I didn’t know what all the fuss was about. The last thing I wanted back then was to marry some ornery, dirty-faced boy. So what she said didn’t bother me. I was perfectly content with my books.

  “You could be a teacher, Corrie,” Ma said more than once. Then she’d go on to speculate, “Teachin’s a right respectable way for a spinster to get by in this world.”

  She talked a lot about women getting on in the world alone, probably on account of Pa’s leaving like he did. It was hard on Ma, being left with the farm to tend, and four kids and another on the way. I suspect more than once she wished she’d been a spinster herself!

  Back then, when I remember her first talking to me about what I ought to do, I didn’t have the faintest notion what a spinster was, and I was hardly of a mind to start preparing for my future. But whatever spinster meant, I did know what a teacher was, because I liked our Miss Boyd. As for teaching myself, I’d have to wait and see.

  “If you’re going to know book learnin’ and all that, Corrie,” Ma said, “you gotta do more’n just read. You gotta learn how to write good, too. And I figure there ain’t much better a way than to keep a diary.”

  Well, maybe Ma was right. Though I never did much about her advice after that.

  Until I got to be fifteen, that is. By then I knew what a spinster was, and I knew about plain-looking girls. And I knew why the two always went together. So I began to see what it might be like to be alone in the world, and to figure maybe Ma’s idea about me teachin’ was a good one, though I was still a mite young to be going to a teacher’s school or college to learn how. Besides, Miracle Springs doesn’t even have a school for kids, much less a college.

  Once Ma was gone, I knew I had to get thinkin’ mighty fast about something. She was right about that. The kids were looking to me for tending, right out there in the middle of nowhere. And it sure wasn’t likely to be any different once we got to where we were going. Even if we found Uncle Nick, they were still going to be looking to me to be a kind of ma to them—and a teacher, too. Even if it was only little Tad, and Becky, Emily, and Zack, I was bound to be teaching them a thing or two since Ma couldn’t.

  So I figured it was time I started that diary.

  Of course I didn’t know how. I knew how to write, and that was about it. So I just started to put down what happened, though it didn’t seem there was much exciting in it.

  I sure did miss Ma. She’d have told me what a diary was supposed to be like. I wish I’d started back when she first told me to do it. Or even last spring when we left our little patch of ground in upstate New York to come out West. Then I would have written about the wagon crossing after leaving St. Louis, about the plains of Kansas, the grand herds of buffalo, the scare with the Sioux near Ft. Laramie, the day Emily and I almost got left behind picking berries, and the snow that was still on the mountains in Utah in July. Most of all, I wish Ma could have been there to show me how to do it right.

  But even if I had started back then, I probably wouldn’t have written about the desert and what happened to Ma. I never want to remember that, though I’ll never forget it.

  So by the time I got started writing things down, we were in California, and the long trip was mostly behind us, just like Ma wanted. But she’d never get to see it.

  “We gotta get over them mountains before the snows come,” she kept saying, telling the wagon-master every day to hurry us along.

  He always just smiled and said, “Not to worry, Mrs. Hollister. We’ll be past them Sierras by the first weeks of October. You’ll be relaxin’ in front of your brother’s warm stove long before the snow ever comes.”

  Ma couldn’t help worrying. She had some terrible foreboding about the winter. It didn’t help that folks were still talking about the Donners, who had so much trouble crossing the mountains seven years before. All through the summer, hot as it was, she kept thinking about the snows getting ready, someplace up by the North Pole, I reckon, to sweep down and kill us all at the California border. I wish we’d had a few handfuls of that snow when Ma took her fever. Captain Dixon called that awful stretch of desert the Humboldt Sink. I thought the ground was hot till I laid my hand on Ma’s flaming cheek. I wanted to cry, but Ma was always so strong, and I decided it would help her to think that maybe I was learning to be strong, too.

  So I didn’t cry. I didn’t pray either, though I tried once or twice. But no words would come. It felt like trying to coax water from that horrible dry sand. I wish I’d tried a mite harder. Sometimes I wonder if God would have let her live if I just could’ve gotten those words out.

  We finally did get to California. Captain Dixon was right. He got us over the Sierras before the snows. But the mountains were getting cold, and I was glad when we reached the Feather River and Captain Dixon said it would only be a few more days before we’d be able to see the Sacramento Valley. He said when we got there, it would feel like summer by comparison.

  Not long after that, we neared Sacramento City. Several of the wagons took off on their own, but Captain Dixon stuck with those few of us that were still together, because he said he was paid to go all the way to Sacramento and there he would go. I don’t know how we’d have made it without him and some of the other men helping us drive the wagon and tend the team. I figured he was just about as fine a man as there could be.

  As good as it felt to get to California, I don’t mind confessing I was beginning to feel a little scared, too. The wagon train had become kind of a family, especially after Ma died. Everyone was so kind to us. Suddenly I realized that in just a few days Captain Dixon would leave, and my brothers and sisters and I would be all alone.

  I knew we’d be with our uncle on his ranch, but seeing him for the first time was going to be a fearful moment. I was hardly more than a baby when he struck out on his own, and his visits were rare enough after that. All I knew about him is what Ma had told us.

  I supposed we’d know soon enough. When we left Independence, the Captain said it would be the middle of October when we arrived, and he wasn’t far off. Back then we thought Ma would be there to find Uncle Nick. But now we were on our own.

  “Don’t you worry none, Corrie,” the Captain told me. “If we don’t find yo
ur uncle right off, I’ll take care of you and the young’uns. There’s a nice boarding house, and there’ll be room for all of you, and a place for your wagon and horses, until I locate your uncle and tell him how things are.”

  That Mr. Dixon was a nice man.

  Chapter 2

  Why We Came West

  The hills were the color of autumn as we descended from the mountains—pretty enough, but not quite so bright with orange and red as back home.

  As I looked around, I thought that even if they hadn’t discovered gold here four years ago, I would have liked to come. Of course, it never was the gold that made Ma start talking about the West. After Pa left, she struggled to make a go of the tiny farm. It wasn’t much good before that, but Pa must have had a way of keeping it going when most men would’ve given up. Ma never talked much about Pa.

  For a few years pure stubbornness kept Ma going. She said she wasn’t going to give anyone a chance to say, “I told you so.” I think she mostly meant her own pa. But more than that, she was determined to keep the farm going for Pa’s return. Then word came to us that Pa was dead, and it seemed to take the vigor right out of her tired body.

  After that, she couldn’t keep it up so well, what with the five of us kids to tend besides. Her pa, my Grandpa Belle, offered to help, but she would have none of it. They weren’t on the best of terms. But when he died last year she took it hard—we all did, because we loved him and he was a good man even though he could be mighty stern sometimes.

  Not long after Grandpa died, Ma had a visit from a neighbor who had just returned from California. He had gone to try his hand at gold mining, but apparently it didn’t work out because he didn’t stay long. He must have seen Uncle Nick, Ma’s brother, because she started talking about going out West to see him. She had no family in New York, unless you counted a couple of cousins she hardly knew. She said it was family that mattered and she didn’t care what Uncle Nick had done—I didn’t know at the time what she meant. But he was family, she said, and they ought to be together.

  Uncle Nick left home a year before Pa did. Though he came back two or three times, he was almost a stranger to me. I could hardly remember what my own pa looked like. I’d never be able to recognize Uncle Nick.