The pioneer life was often nothing short of impossible.
One, for instance, need only examine the brief lifespans of pregnant women and children during this time, to get a sense for the difficulty of merely existing in a world where science, medicine and communication were fledgling in comparison to today.
There is so much we take for granted.
Along these lines, one of the saddest tales in the early history of Woodson County sends one hurtling backward in time, to a moment when every birth brought with it the distinct possibility of death. Of non-survival. Of blood.
And it begins and ends with a woman named Rebecca Mitchell.
Rebecca, or “Becky,” as some still lovingly refer to her 150 years later, was pregnant with twins and living in a cabin with her husband Lewis, along Owl Creek northwest of what was becoming the town of Yates Center.
They had first settled in the Verdigris Valley south of Toronto, though for whatever reason, decided to sell their claim to the village’s founder, Enoch Reeves.
The new, more easterly claim was coming along, growing it seemed in tandem with Rebecca’s pregnancy, and preparations had been made with the local midwife, Elizabeth Cook, for when the appointed time came.
Cook, incidentally, is this writer’s great-great-great grandmother, and she made a name for herself as both a female physician and medicine woman to the native people of the area. Most folks, though, simply knew her as “Aunt Toddy.”
As fortune would have it, however, when Rebecca Mitchell was to give birth one fateful night in May 1869, Toddy was on another assignment.
Mitchell would have to birth her babies alone.
By the time Lewis Mitchell returned to their cabin from running north to the Cook’s, it was already too late.
In a nightmarish scene, one dreams him breathlessly throwing open the door to their home only to find a terrible, creeping silence.
Rebecca was dead. The children were dead.
Crying out and throwing his arms around them, he fruitlessly shook his wife, calling her name in the blistering darkness.
Yet blood-soaked sheets and placental remains still contrasted against angelic blue faces, and in that moment Lewis also died, inside.
