Wilderness: 1853

These were the years of the great westward movement. Adventure, hope, need were driving increasing numbers into the wilderness to face the unknown, to subdue or be subdued by it. A new Children of Israel pushed across new deserts to a new Promised Land. America’s most remarkable religious phenomenon of the first half of the century—the great Mormon migration to Illinois, to Utah—had been part of the westward surge.

It was all manifest destiny, people said—what in an earlier generation had been called America’s errand into the wilderness. And many a man or woman was swallowed up in the loneliness of the continent and never heard of again.

Yet there were lonely and dangerous wilds closer to home for those who stayed in New England. Henry Thoreau, who had traveled widely in Concord, knew them. So did Emily Dickinson, who wrote that to make a prairie it takes only one clover and a bee and revery, and who found that revery alone could lead one into a silent, trackless, terrifying land.

Mary Baker Patterson stood on the verge of such a wilderness. For two or three years we almost lose sight of her—a slight figure disappearing among the darkening trees. We know that she and Dr. Patterson moved to Franklin and, after a few months in a boarding-house, lived on the first floor of a small house on the side of the Pemigewasset River,  ● ● ●