Tisha

  Tisha is a trae love story you will never forget, a thrilling adventure full of all the struggles and joys of a young, attractive woman in the Alaskan wilderness, battling for the half-breed man she loved and the two half-Indian children who had become her own.

  TISHA

  “The memoir reads like an old-fashioned novel, a heartwarming love story with the added interest of frontier hardships and vividly portrayed characters.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  For

  Judith, Raphael, and Allegra

  author’s note

  and acknowledgments

  Throughout this work I’ve tried to keep as close to actual occurrences and facts as I could, adding to them or altering them only when I deemed it dramatically necessary.

  Many Alaskans, particularly those who live in the Forty Mile country, will note that I’ve taken some license with geography. For instance, the Indian village in these pages is described as being located on the Forty Mile River. The actual Indian village from which Chuck and Ethel came was, and still is, located on the Yukon. Today there is a modern, well-equipped school there. In 1927, however, it was pretty much as I described it.

  There are many who helped in the creation of this book, both in Alaska and in the Lower 48:

  To Charles Bloch go my deepest thanks both professionally and personally. More than an advisor and supporter, he has been a friend and a guide. Without him this book would not have been completed.

  To Linda Price, my editor at Bantam Books, I owe a special debt of appreciation. Her patience and judgment were indispensable.

  Nor could I fail to mention Julie Garriott of St. Martin’s Press for her incisive criticism and enthusiastic support. She is a gifted editor.

  Among others who helped in different and important ways are: Grace Bechtold, Orrin Borsten, Leonard Brean, Jackie Carr, Everett Chambers, Van Dempsey, Julia Fenderson, John and Dora Funk, “Dean” Galloway, Jack Guss, Borgil Hansen, Lynne Specht Klein, Martin Lowenheim, Charles Mayse, Sanford and Patricia Mock, Isabelle Purdy, Michael and Georgina Ritchie, Marjori Rogers, Zelma Rose, Walter Schmidt, Dee Sclar, Beulah Thornburg, Norman and Erna Toback, Vernon and Beth Weaver, Marguerite Wilson, Jack Young.

  I am grateful to them all.

  —R.S.

  I’ve lived in the Forty Mile country of Alaska for a long time, but even now, every so often when I’m out rock-hunting or looking for fossils, I get lost. Sometimes I’ll have to wander around for a while before I get my bearings. That’s what happened to me when I first started to think about telling this story. I wasn’t sure which direction to take, until I finally realized that the only way to tell it was the way I might have told it when I first came to Alaska.

  That was back in 1927, when I was a prim and proper young lady of nineteen. From the time I’d been a girl I’d been thrilled with the idea of living on a frontier, so when I was offered the job of teaching school in a gold-mining settlement called Chicken I accepted right away.

  The first time I heard the name Chicken I laughed. I didn’t believe there could really be such a place. Sure enough, though, when I looked at a map of Alaska there it was (and still is), right up near the Yukon Territory.

  Green as goose grass and full of lofty ideals, off I went, thinking of myself as a lamp unto the wilderness. The last thing I expected was that the residents of Chicken weren’t going to think of me in that way at all. Far from it: before my first year of teaching was over half the population wanted to blue-ticket me out of the place.

  All that was forty-eight years ago, yet I can still remember how excited I was on the day I set off for Chicken by pack train. For me it was the final leg of a long journey, and the pack train left from a village called Eagle …

  September 4, 1927

  I

  Even though it was barely eight o’clock and the sun had just come up, practically the whole town of Eagle had turned out to see the pack train off. Counting the Indians, who’d come down from their fish camp for the dance the previous night, there must have been close to a hundred people gathered around—miners in hip-length boots, old sourdoughs in battered Stetsons, even women and children. In a few minutes I’d be leaving, going off into the wilderness, and I was kind of excited. I was scared too, and I must have showed it, because Mrs. Rooney asked me if I was feeling well.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I feel just fine.”

  “You look a little pale. You’re not afraid of the trip, I hope.”

  “No. I guess I just didn’t expect there’d be all these people,” I said.

  Mrs. Rooney dismissed them with a wave of her hand. “One thing you’ll learn is that it doesn’t take much to collect a crowd in Alaska. As for the trip, you don’t have a thing to worry about. It’s only ninety miles and you’ll be perfectly safe. Mr. Strong will take good care of you.”

  But it really wasn’t the crowd that was bothering me. Hardly anybody was paying any attention to me. To the people here this was just a little event, nothing like the riverboat coming in, which was really exciting to them. And I wasn’t afraid of the trip, either. It was the horse I’d be riding for the next four days that was scaring me. I’d have felt silly admitting it, but he was making me so nervous I could hardly concentrate on what Mrs. Rooney was saying. It wasn’t as if I’d never been on a horse before. Eight years ago, when I was living with my grandmother on her farm, I used to ride around on old Tom bareback. I was only eleven then, and Tom was a pretty big horse, but he always moved so slow and he was so gentle that you could almost curl up on his broad back and go to sleep and you wouldn’t fall off. This one was mean.

  He was called Blossom, but where he got that name I would never know. Maybe he looked like a blossom when he was a colt, but it was the last thing he looked like now. He was so huge that even if I stood on my toes I wouldn’t have been able to see over the saddle, and he was scarred and wild-looking. From the minute Mr. Strong handed his reins over to me I’d been afraid of him. And Blossom knew it. He started rolling his eyes at me right away and tried to nip me a couple of times. After he caught the sleeve of my jacket once I made sure to hold the reins close to the bit and keep him at arm’s length. But every time I thought he’d settled down, he’d jerk his head up and nearly pull my arm out of its socket.

  From the corner of my eye I could see Mr. Strong moving toward me down the line of horses and mules that were tethered together.

  I wished I wasn’t the only passenger. In another minute I’d have to mount up, and as scared of Blossom as I was, I was sure I’d make a spectacle of myself. We weren’t getting along too well just standing side by side, so I couldn’t foresee our relations improving when I was up on top of him.

  The other animals in the train were loaded down with just about everything in creation: washboards, sacks of dried beans, bolts of canvas, even window-panes. One mule started bucking, trying to shake off his burden of shovels and stovepipes and whatnot. The load shifted and it looked as if it was going off until somebody grabbed it at the last minute. The rest of the animals stood patiently while Mr. Strong adjusted a rope here and there or tightened a cinch.

  “… And if you have any problems at all,” Mrs. Rooney was saying, “write to me and I’ll be glad to give you any advice I can.” She fingered the cameo brooch on the front of her dress. “And remember what I said—spare the rod and spoil the child. Show those kids right off that you’re the teacher and you won’t have a bit of trouble.”

  “I will.”

  “If you have to smack a couple of them do it.”

  Somebody went over to Mr. Strong’s stable and started to close the doors. I caught a glimpse of the big sled that was in there. It was the size of a hay wagon, and I wondered how many horses it took to pull it. In a couple of months from now, after the first
heavy snowfall, Mr. Strong would be bringing my trunk out on it.

  The doors slammed shut and the odor of hay and manure drifted over. And then Mr. Strong was beside us, clearing his throat. Even though it was sunny and comfortable, he was wearing a mackinaw. It was open, and I could see the top button of his long underwear under his flannel shirt.

  He was a tall, stoop-shouldered man, and he had such a courtly way about him that if he wore a beard he’d have made me think of Don Quixote. When I’d first met him yesterday his manners had seemed so out of place in this rough country that I thought he was joking and almost laughed. I was glad I didn’t, though, because he acted that way with almost everyone. I’d been waiting over two days for his pack train to come in, but when I’d asked him if he could take me to Chicken all he’d said was, “Yes, madam, I can.”

  “Will you be going soon?” I’d asked him.

  “Yes, madam. My pack train leaves for Chicken on the fourth, the fourteenth and the twenty-fourth of each month. I shall, therefore, be leaving tomorrow. Eight a.m. sharp.”

  “I’d like to go,” I’d told him.

  “The rent for your horse will be ten dollars per day. That will include your meals along the way and your lodgings. The journey will take four days. I hope that will be satisfactory.”

  I’d told him it would be fine and that was that.

  “If you are ready, madam,” he said to me now, “I shall assist you to mount.”

  Mrs. Rooney smiled up at him. “You will take good care of her, won’t you, Mr. Strong?”

  “I shall do my best.” Compared to him, President Coolidge was a nonstop talker.

  Mrs. Rooney looked at him coquettishly and brushed at the front of her dress. It had a lot of shiny spots where her corset poked against it. She’d been a widow for ten years, she’d told me, and I had a feeling she would have liked to marry him, but he wasn’t interested.

  He took the reins from me and dropped them over Blossom’s head, then he bent forward with his hands locked together. I grabbed the saddle horn and he boosted me up. Once I was in the saddle the ground looked pretty far down. Blossom started to dance around and a few people laughed. I thought they were laughing at the trouble I was having trying to get him to stand still, but as soon as he settled down I saw they were laughing at my legs. The saddle was so big and wide that they stuck out like wings.

  “Better do somethin’ about them pins a hers, Walter,” somebody called out, “or she’ll be knockin’ down every tree in the Forty Mile.”

  Mr. Strong shortened the stirrups until I could get my feet into them, but I was still spread out pretty wide. Some good-natured suggestions were offered by people close by, such as tying rocks to my feet, but Mr. Strong didn’t see anything funny about them.

  “When we stop over at my camp in Liberty tonight,” he said to me, “I will have a smaller saddle for you.” He looked at my clothes skeptically. “Are you sure, madam, you will not reconsider my offer of the coat?” A little earlier, when he saw how I was dressed, he had offered to lend me a coat, saying that the weather was very changeable. But I’d told him I didn’t think I’d need it.

  “I’m really very comfortable,” I said now. “I mean it’s such a lovely day.”

  If I was back in the States I’d have felt ridiculous, but here in Alaska nobody cared how you dressed. I was wearing the jacket of my pink Easter suit, a pair of boy’s corduroy knickers Yd bought for the ride, cotton stockings and some old sport brogues. I knew that the flowered hat I’d bought in Portland the past summer would end up crushed if it was put on the pack animals with my other things, so I wore that too. My ensemble was completed by a nickel-plated revolver that a fellow had given me at the dance last night.

  Mr. Strong was still skeptical. “Should you change your mind, let me know.”

  “Now, Walter,” an old-timer called out, “why you want to go and hide all that nice young beauty under that old army coat?”

  Mr. Strong started for the front of the pack train and I looked around, able to see the whole crowd for the first time. A few old men were sitting on the rail of the schoolhouse porch, giving encouragement to a couple of little boys on a small dogsled. The sled was outfitted with some old baby-carriage wheels and the boys were trying to teach the malamute puppy that was pulling how to gee and haw.

  Aside from Mr. Strong’s stable and the stables of a couple of other freighters, the schoolhouse was the only other building here at the edge of town. Mrs. Rooney had showed me the inside of it and I was looking forward to teaching in it when I took over from her next year. Made of squared-off logs, it was good and sturdy. I only hoped the schoolhouse I was heading for now would be as nice.

  Farther up the line of pack animals a few men were rechecking some of the loads, making sure that whatever they were sending out to mining partners or friends wouldn’t fall off. But most people were just gathered around talking.

  The Indians stood apart from the whites, and I wondered where they’d spent the night. There were about twenty-five of them, mostly men. Compared to the whites, who were laughing and joking about how much they’d drunk and danced, the Indian men were quiet, just watching what was going on or making an occasional comment to each other. They looked so serious, all of them, that if I hadn’t seen them having such a good time last night, I’d have thought they were angry or resentful. That was what I’d thought about them when I’d first seen them standing around in White Horse and Dawson. But now I knew better. They’d laughed more and danced better than almost all the whites in Eagle. And probably had more fun too. They were just different from the whites. When they didn’t have anything to say they didn’t say anything.

  I felt kind of sorry for the Indian women, especially the girls. Most of them had changed to moccasins, but a few still had on high heels and bright shawls. In the crisp morning air they looked out of place, their silk stockings full of runs and their makeup all smeared. For all the attention the white men paid them now they might just as well have not existed. It hadn’t been that way at the dance. The white men had been pretty free with them then—a little too free. The Indian women hadn’t minded it, or the Indian men either, but the white women hadn’t liked it at all. Only one or two of the white women had even danced with the Indian men. The rest looked down their nose at them or, like Mrs. Rooney, disliked them outright “Dark faces all packed full of bones,” she complained to me, “you never know what they’re thinking.” She hated the Indian women, saying that the way they carried on with white men it was no wonder the women like herself who were matrimonially inclined couldn’t find a husband.

  “How’s the weather up there, Teacher?”

  “Cabaret” Jackson’s hatchet face grinned up at me, his Adam’s apple looking as though it was going to pop through his skin. One of his eyes was closed and there was some dried blood in his nostrils, but he’d cleaned himself up pretty well and he didn’t look too bad.

  I wished I could give him a clever answer, but I never could think of the right thing when it came right down to it. “The same weather you have down there,” I told him.

  “Hate to see you leavin’ here,” he said. “Don’t suppose you’d change your mind about what I asked you last night?”

  “Thanks, Cab, but I don’t think so.”

  He was the one who’d given me the revolver, telling me that I shouldn’t be going into the wilds without a little protection. Last night, before he got too drunk and had a fight, he’d proposed to me, promising he’d give me everything under the sun. He’d been a real gentleman, but as soon as he got drunk he turned mean. In the fight he’d had, he’d beaten the other man bloody and got so wild he tried to bite the man’s ear off. The whole thing had made me sick to my stomach. He probably wasn’t a bad fellow at heart, but he wasn’t the type I’d want to keep company with.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ll be mushin’ out there to Chicken some time after the freeze-up, and I’ll just try you again when I do.” He grinned. “Take care, Teacher.”


  “Teacher?” A girl with kinky hair and close-set eyes had come up near me along with her husband. I couldn’t remember her name, but there was something so nice about her, a kind of a sweet smile she had, that I’d liked her right away. She was going to have a baby and she was a little embarrassed about her big stomach, so she kept kind of stooping over all the time. “Teacher, do me a favor, will you?”

  “Sure.” I liked that—the way everybody called me Teacher.

  “My ma runs the roadhouse out to Chicken—Maggie Carew. Tell her I’m comin’ along real good an’ that I’m expectin’ middle of December.”

  “And tell her it’ll be a boy,” her husband said. He was about as young as she was, a big stringbean. Last night he’d had to practically drag her out on the floor to fox-trot with him, but she’d been so embarrassed by her stomach she didn’t even finish.

  “You tell her it’s gonna be a girl. I know it. My name’s Jeannette,” she said to me. “Jeannette Terwilliger. And this here’s Elmer.”

  “Maggie Carew,” I said. “Middle of December. I’ll tell her.”

  At the front of the line Mr. Strong had mounted up. Holding a coiled bullwhip, he wheeled his horse and slapped a few of the animals on the rump. To the accompaniment of whoops and hollers from the crowd, the pack train slowly moved out

  “Don’t you fall in love with any a them gum-boot miners out there, Teacher,” I heard Cab yell to me, “they’d marry ya just for a grubstake.”

  “Make sure you come on back after break-up,” someone else called, “and don’t ride ol’ Blossom too hard.”

  There was no chance of that, for after all his fussing and dancing around, Blossom wasn’t moving. I kept trying to kick him in the ribs, but my feet were out too far, and he hardly felt it So all I could do was jiggle the reins and tell him to giddap.

  Then someone behind me whacked Blossom across the rump and I grabbed for the saddle horn as he plunged forward. Cries of encouragement went up from the crowd and I held onto Blossom for dear life as he caught up with the pack train and kept going. I felt my hat slowly lifting from my head, and then it was gone. But I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was stay on. By the time we passed Mr. Strong I was sliding off and I braced myself for a fall. And then miraculously Blossom slowed down and stopped just short of a corridor of birches that led into the forest.