You can imagine my enormous guilt at insisting she be born in Indian Territory. Duncan bore me no ill will, but our sorrow was considerable. I don’t know what would have happened to me then – to us – if my grandmother hadn’t had the superior good timing to die. She and I had kept up a lively correspondence from the time I could write, and it paid off abundantly. Other than some inheritance to Mother and my brother and sister, Grandma Casey left the bulk of the brewery money to me, eight thousand dollars. It was a huge sum then, and it still is.

“What are you going to do with it, Smiley?” my husband asked after he finished reading the attorney’s letter over my shoulder.

Something in the last letter from Grandmama before our baby’s death had me thinking about this eventuality, although I had breathed a word to no one. We knew a great deal about disappointment by then, Duncan and I. “Do?” I kissed him (incidentally, I taught him to kiss and he is good). “Do? I think I will buy me a ranch in Oregon.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Twenty-nine

That is why we ranch near Cove, in the Grande Ronde Valley of northeast Oregon. Our hawk brand is becoming well-known in that part of Oregon and western Idaho, paid for with tears, fire, and patience. The only blood was mine, for a baby I still miss. The scar on my arm is a reminder, as if I needed one.

As Western ranches go, it is not large, some two thousand acres of fine pasturage. In the last ten years we have added apple and cherry orchards. This region is already shipping many boxes of cherries to markets from Portland to Seattle and north to British Columbia. We run some cattle, but the pasture is mainly for the horses, children of Fair One and a sire who made that fighting retreat to the Bear Paws, too.

To answer your unasked question, no, nothing about the purchase of my ranch was simple. Until recently, it was in my name only. Now it is the property of Duncan and Elizabeth Stuart, because times are changing.

In faith, trust, and with my heartful of hope, I sent Grandma Casey’s legacy to my father, asking him to set up an account for me. Unless you lived in an enlightened, mythical part of the United States where women are allowed to do such things on their own, that’s how business was done, before the turn of the century.