Evanston: a love story
Evanston: a love story
One thing leads to another, which is life, although not as good a definition as John Lennon’s, “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”
In this instance, watching Ken Burns THE CIVIL WAR led me to watch THE WEST, which he produced but was directed by Stephen Ives.
Woven into the last two episodes is a true love story of people whose name happened to be Love, which I am relating simply because I like it.
In 1905, Ethel Waxham, an attractive twenty-three year old graduate of Wellesley College, accepted her first paid job as a teacher in a one-room school house on a Wyoming ranch.
During the seven months she spent there, she was increasingly visited by John Galloway Love, a thirty-four year old sheep rancher, born of Scots parents in Wisconsin, who had managed to get himself expelled from the University of Nebraska for reasons lost in time.
Upon expulsion, he spent what little money he had on a wagon, mules and supplies, and started for Wyoming to raise sheep. When the wagon bogged down, he left everything except what he could carry and walked the last twenty miles to a deserted part of the state near Muskrat Creek.
Tending sheep and cattle for others, he saved to start his own ranch; and by the time he met Ethel Waxham he had done well enough to afford to marry. There were few women in the area, and even fewer who were educated. As his son said, “It was natural that he would fall in love with the beautiful schoolmarm.” Unfortunately she did not fall in love with him, and when he asked her to marry him, she refused.
Leaving Wyoming, she returned to Colorado, where she had been raised in Denver, and studied for a master’s degree in literature at the University of Colorado.
John G. Love wrote to her regularly. When he signed one letter, “with love and kisses,” Ethel Waxham rebuked him and said that any more such endearments would result in a termination of correspondence. He apologized, and continued to write.
Obtaining her M.A., Ethel taught literature; but she remembered the open beauty of Wyoming, and John Love, fondly. Finally, in 1909, she concluded a letter, “P.S. I like you very much.” And the next year she married him.
They lived at Muskrat Creek in a house he had built for her from logs brought from a hundred miles away, a journey that took two weeks.
Their first winter there was severe. Of his herd of 11,000 sheep, 8,000 died.
The next winter was even worse. And when spring came, Muskrat Creek flooded the property and ran three feet deep through the house.
Receding flood waters were followed by an infestation of bankers, who looked around and immediately foreclosed on John Love’s stock loans.
The Loves, who by then had two small children, watched as almost everything they owned, except the land, was sold at auction.
As he was leaving one of the bankers asked Mrs. Love what she was going to do with the baby in her arms. She replied, “I think I’ll keep him.”
They moved into a wagon on a hill. John was devastated. He told Ethel that he would not blame her if she left him. She replied, “I will never leave you.”
They started rebuilding the herds and their lives, overcoming fires, diseases to both animals and men, a bank failure that wiped out their savings.
For irrigation and flood control, John built a dam across Muskrat Creek. Under pressure after a severe storm, it burst. John said that was “Love’s Labors Lost.”
They remained on the ranch for thirty-seven years, raised three children, who became a chemist, an engineer, and a geologist, before age and failing health finally forced them to sell.
When she left, Ethel said, “Well, at least I left it clean for the next owners.”
During the winter of 1918-19, John, then fifty, and his son, Adam, five, both were bed ridden for months with influenza. They were ill so long that they had to learn to walk again.
Standing for the first time, weak, leaning against one another for support, John said, “That’s all right, laddie. We’ll make it.”
And as Adam related when himself an old man, “So, of course, we did.”
Monday, May 27, 2013