Dark Valley Destiny by Unknown Read Free Book Online

practiced. Few operating areas were "Listerized," that is, organized to minimize contamination in recognition of the "germ theory." Certainly no delivery rooms were so protected, and childbed fever was far from unusual on the frontier. Infant mortality was high. Women were known to have made their own shrouds along with their layettes and to have set them aside together while waiting. All too often the shroud was used. The risk was compounded for a woman with tuberculosis, as Hester Jane well knew. Her knowledge of her own mother's exhaustion and death must have added to her apprehension.
    Tuberculosis is a strange disease. Relatively rare today, in 1900 it was second only to pneumonia as a major cause of death. Whenever people move about a lot, whenever there is crowding, unhygienic living conditions, poverty, or privation, tuberculosis becomes epidemic. In spite of the rarity of the disease in the United States today, for example, in 1960, in Alaska, it was as prevalent as it was through our entire country at the turn of the century.
    The experts agree that, while the tuberculosis bacillus is a necessary condition for the onset of the disease, its development depends in large part on personal unhappiness and conflict and afflicts people who lack adequate techniques for coping with their environment. William Menninger, of the famed Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, thought that a predisposition for the disease was established early in life as a kind of infantile despair, which resulted in a flight from adult responsibilities. As the disease develops, to the tubercular person's feelings of helplessness is added the real helplessness and dependency of illness. "The patients refuse to believe they are tuberculous and at the same time cling to the illness . . . and indulge in indiscretions which serve to give the disease a better hold." 18
    During her pregnancy, Hessie was all smiles and laughter, forever joking with her neighbors, but she never left her husband's side. She traveled with Dr. Howard wherever he went. 19 Her fear, and the dependency it generated, must have been enormous and unquestionably carried over into her relationship with her son.
    Although Hester Howard seemed determined to see that her baby did not lack the love and nurturance that she had been deprived of, the conflict between her needs and her infant's added anxiety and depression to her ill health. Mrs. Howard later recalled a time when little Robert was ill and cried continuously unless she sat beside him and rocked his bed. When she grew too tired to push down on the mattress any longer, she lay on the floor and pushed up on the springs from below. 20 Such an intense investment in a relationship leads to high expectations of compensation from the relationship. Fiercely protective in all her responses to her son's needs, real or fancied, Hester Howard expected his grateful devotion in return. And Robert did not fail her.
    "Texas is all right for men and dogs but hell for women and oxen," said an unknown but knowing pioneer woman, and there was nothing in Hester Howard's experience the winter following Robert's birth to gainsay it. In Dark Valley the isolation was great; so were the physical hardships. Although the Howards' two-room house was new when they moved into it a few months after their marriage, their circumstances were far from idyllic. There was no electricity, only kerosene lamps. There was no plumbing. Water was drawn from a well or carried from the creek— when there was water in it—for dishwashing and baths. Wood had to be chopped for the cookstove. The only heat for the house came from the stove in the kitchen or from the drafty fireplace at the far end of the main room.
    The Howards' house, like that of the Greens', was so built that the interior and exterior walls were constructed of the same wide planks, which were nailed vertically to simple upright framing timbers to form two small rooms separated by a breezeway, referred to