An excerpt from “a Profitable wife”

FOREWORD

The first time I bore witness to this infamous family lore I was about nine years old. I was sitting on a footstool next to my grandmother’s rocking chair. Her tone was hushed and secretive. Her head tilted to one side with a coy smile. This particular story was not shared until you were trusted not to broadcast it – a promise requested and given. My Grandmother nodded knowingly while she recited the brutal account, as told by her Grandmother who was the ancestor’s daughter. At the close of her story this fair-skinned, red-headed, elderly woman of Irish descent imparted her tantalizing finale: this ancestor was of mixed Native American heritage.

While many others are mere holding places in our ancestral tree this ancestor, Esther “Easter” Malinda Hackley, has been notoriously remembered by many of her progeny, my grandmother included. It is such a scandalous tale that generations still tell it and wonder of the circumstances. Not only do her many offspring share this lore, a historian, one James Whitcomb Ellis, immortalized this and other nefarious events in his Iowan “History of Jackson County”, thus confirming the family word-famed myth.

Regardless of family lore historical facts show us this ancestor, Easter Malinda Hackley, was a scrappy pioneer, a survivor, and a very successful human being. Amidst wild adventures in the mid-west she gave birth to fourteen children and raised thirteen to adulthood. Each went on to life-partner their own countless progeny with a few nefarious life-stories of their own. “The branch does not fall far from the tree” as they say.

Easter was born in 1812 during the toddler years of American History. Our country was only thirty-six years old. Her grandparents participated in the revolutionary war. The nation was new. To say the least, politics was pivotal in architecting our nation. Each president was a greenhorn attempting to lead a nation archetype which had never before existed. These presidents resided over Easter’s America, molding where her family would settle, whether or not they would prosper, and what they thought of the world. Her progenies’ survival was predicated on each individual that held the Presidential office as well as significant congressional actors. These founding fathers forged proclamations, presidential vetoes, war declarations and treaties with indigenous tribes. All of this fed the collective American hunger for Manifest Destiny[i].

Easter’s generation was on the move. The legislative powers of President Thomas Jefferson and his like-minded colleagues had decided this cohort would be autonomous and agrarian[ii] self-sustaining farmers with the potential for commodity farming. This they would do by populating new lands across the continent as the United States expanded west.

Their gateway of opportunity was the most modern mode of transportation ever envisioned at that time – the Erie Canal. This innovative creation swept travelers west through locks, over hills valleys at an unheard of constant pace.

As New York enlarged and expanded successful canal routes to link with the massive rivers in this young country, it enabled early settlers easier routes to pioneer the Northwest Territory[iii] (aka todays states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan), as well as to participate in a reverse flow of goods back to the Atlantic economy. This low cost, low risk way to get goods back to the nation’s eastern ports via the accesses provided by the Erie, was unprecedented.

Travelers and freight no longer had to brave the Atlantic Ocean or steep, rugged, Appalachian mountain roads. Safe, calm, interior waters would now get them from East to West and South. Small individual farm families could build wealth. The massive success of freight travel created boom towns along waterways. It changed where people lived and inflamed dreams of fortunes that could be earned by the common man, including Easter and her chosen life partner. Compare this to their European roots, where only wealthy elites owned land and mastered the average person’s destiny…

‘A Profitable Wife,’ is now available on Amazon and other online book retailers.

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[i] Manifest Destiny – a belief that the destiny of the United States borders and its people was to stretch from coast to coast, which fueled western settlement, Search for: Manifest Destiny

[ii] Agrarian Society – A society based on Agriculture, Search for: Agrarian Society, Thomas Jefferson

[iii] First Northwest – Early US territory prior to US expansion west of the Rockies, Search for: Northwest Territory, history