grandmothers who leave an indelible impression on her grandchildren. On winter evenings she mesmerized the boys with stories of the first years on the prairie when green-eyed wolves trailed after her whenever she ventured out after dark and Indians turned up at her door begging for food and snakes slithered out of the sod house walls in the early spring, coiling themselves on the roof and basking in the sun. Grace and Ole had finally replaced their soddie with a frame house after the Snow Winter. It had taken them seven years.
Kari was sixty-five years old in the winter of 1887-88, her daughter Grace, thirty-six. Grace and Ole had had seven children by then, though only six were alive since they had lost a daughter, Anna Marie, at fourteen months in October 1885. Peter and Charley, the two oldest, were now thirteen and ten, both handsome boys, Peter blond and thin with close-set eyes, a narrow face, and long, delicate fingers for a farm boy, Charley dark-haired and clean-featured and bigger-boned than his brother.
For some reason the boys did not go to school on the morning of January 12. Forty years later, when she wrote her “Recollections from the Old Days” in Norwegian, Grace recorded everything about that day except why the boys were not in school. Possibly the English school had already closed for the season. Or possibly Grace and Ole kept the boys home to work on the farm since it was the first day in weeks that they could get the cattle out to the springs and bring in the hay they had cut and stacked in the fall. By midday both parents and the two boys had been working outside for hours. Working fast. For Grace and Ole had been in this country long enough now to know that such weather would not last long.
Not in January.
The Shattucks lived in Holt County, Nebraska, for two years after leaving Seward behind, but they never really got used to it. For one thing, the people were different—Irish most of them, with names like O’Hara and Murphy and O’Donnel. A wild-eyed dreamer named John J. O’Neill—a captain of an African-American infantry unit in the Civil War and later the ringleader of the doomed Fenian invasion of Canada—had planted an Irish Catholic colony here on the Protestant prairie and named the principal town for himself: O’Neill, Nebraska. Even Emmet, the little railroad town north of Etta Shattuck’s school, was named for an Irishman, bold Robert Emmet, the darling of Ireland, an early martyr in the struggle against England. The soil was different in Holt County, too—or what passed for soil. Sandy and porous, it hardly held what little rain fell. The prairie grass was shorter than that in Seward, the farms farther apart and poor and wind-bitten. Brown most of the year except in a good spring—brown and crusted white most of the winter.
Considering the thin soil and the sparse summer rain, it’s not surprising that Ben Shattuck failed to make a go of his Holt County farm. The second summer he didn’t even plant a crop. The only money the family could look forward to was the twenty-five dollars a month that Etta brought in from teaching school, and that wasn’t enough to support the seven of them. So before the cold weather set in, Ben and Sarah Shattuck packed up and moved with their younger children back to Seward.
Etta stayed on alone to teach her country school, district 141, the Bright Hope school district. She boarded with a local family and walked to the schoolhouse every morning. Etta could stand outside the schoolhouse and count the features on one hand. A couple of sod houses and barns silhouetted against the low horizon; a rounded pile of dry prairie grass by each house; and way off to the east the bare limbs of willows and cottonwoods outlining the bed of the Elkhorn River. Between school and the river, the frozen grass and snow extended flat as paper; to the west the ground undulated just perceptibly as it rose to meet the Sand Hills. That was the Bright Hope school
Kari was sixty-five years old in the winter of 1887-88, her daughter Grace, thirty-six. Grace and Ole had had seven children by then, though only six were alive since they had lost a daughter, Anna Marie, at fourteen months in October 1885. Peter and Charley, the two oldest, were now thirteen and ten, both handsome boys, Peter blond and thin with close-set eyes, a narrow face, and long, delicate fingers for a farm boy, Charley dark-haired and clean-featured and bigger-boned than his brother.
For some reason the boys did not go to school on the morning of January 12. Forty years later, when she wrote her “Recollections from the Old Days” in Norwegian, Grace recorded everything about that day except why the boys were not in school. Possibly the English school had already closed for the season. Or possibly Grace and Ole kept the boys home to work on the farm since it was the first day in weeks that they could get the cattle out to the springs and bring in the hay they had cut and stacked in the fall. By midday both parents and the two boys had been working outside for hours. Working fast. For Grace and Ole had been in this country long enough now to know that such weather would not last long.
Not in January.
The Shattucks lived in Holt County, Nebraska, for two years after leaving Seward behind, but they never really got used to it. For one thing, the people were different—Irish most of them, with names like O’Hara and Murphy and O’Donnel. A wild-eyed dreamer named John J. O’Neill—a captain of an African-American infantry unit in the Civil War and later the ringleader of the doomed Fenian invasion of Canada—had planted an Irish Catholic colony here on the Protestant prairie and named the principal town for himself: O’Neill, Nebraska. Even Emmet, the little railroad town north of Etta Shattuck’s school, was named for an Irishman, bold Robert Emmet, the darling of Ireland, an early martyr in the struggle against England. The soil was different in Holt County, too—or what passed for soil. Sandy and porous, it hardly held what little rain fell. The prairie grass was shorter than that in Seward, the farms farther apart and poor and wind-bitten. Brown most of the year except in a good spring—brown and crusted white most of the winter.
Considering the thin soil and the sparse summer rain, it’s not surprising that Ben Shattuck failed to make a go of his Holt County farm. The second summer he didn’t even plant a crop. The only money the family could look forward to was the twenty-five dollars a month that Etta brought in from teaching school, and that wasn’t enough to support the seven of them. So before the cold weather set in, Ben and Sarah Shattuck packed up and moved with their younger children back to Seward.
Etta stayed on alone to teach her country school, district 141, the Bright Hope school district. She boarded with a local family and walked to the schoolhouse every morning. Etta could stand outside the schoolhouse and count the features on one hand. A couple of sod houses and barns silhouetted against the low horizon; a rounded pile of dry prairie grass by each house; and way off to the east the bare limbs of willows and cottonwoods outlining the bed of the Elkhorn River. Between school and the river, the frozen grass and snow extended flat as paper; to the west the ground undulated just perceptibly as it rose to meet the Sand Hills. That was the Bright Hope school
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