Rabbit Creek Country: Three Ranching Lives in the Heart of the Mountain West

2: Ida Meyer

z 29 z • T WO • Ida Meyer [C]haracter forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars. —James Hillman, The Soul’s Code n When Ida Meyer was twenty-four, she shot a bobcat. One of the earliest photos of her in the West records that event, which took place in Livermore in 1898. Whoever snapped the picture probably used Ida’s Eastman Kodak camera. It seems she took it with her everywhere, and she was as good at shooting pictures as bobcats. Miss Meyer came to Livermore in 1897, two years after the Elliotts had moved to Westlake. This chapter surveys her early life up to age thirty-four and looks closely at her work as an amateur photographer. Early life is a relative term. The average life expectancy of white men and women born in 1874 was forty-three years. At thirty-four, Ida would have been considered middle-aged, if not old. Yet she lived to be ninety-three. Given her longevity, the first thirty-four years were indeed her early life, a part that presented a striking contrast to the sixty years that followed. In the bobcat photo, Ida Meyer stands next to Elmer Keach, the son of early settlers in the Rabbit Creek district of Livermore. He was not married at the time of the photo. His early biography illustrates the fragility of life in the second half of the nineteenth century. Keach’s chapter two 30 Ida Meyer and bobcat, with Elmer Keach, 1898. Courtesy of Phil Elliott. mother died when he was six. In 1896, his first wife died in childbirth. She was in her twenties, and they had been married less than a year. In 1901, Keach remarried, but his second wife also died in childbirth (though the baby girl named after her survived). To become pregnant was to court death. Ida holds the rifle with ease. We know she carried a pistol. She and Elmer stand on a verandah. He is holding the bobcat: it would have been unladylike for Ida to do so. She wears a well-tailored dress, the Ida Meyer 31 waist tightly drawn in by a corset that is perhaps stiffened by whalebone. There is something wry in her half-smile. With slightly raised brows, she seems to be telling us: “I have bagged this bobcat. I am pleased to be such a woman and glad you are looking at me in my fine hunting costume.” z She imbibed the spirit of adventure from hearing the itinerant early life of her mother, Lizzie. Ida’s parents were Nebraskan, though not by birth. Lizzie, born Louise Heidenreich, and Ida’s father, William Meyer, were from Prussia, but they met in Wisconsin. Both had immigrated to North America in the 1850s. Like countless other German pioneers in this period, their families left home with the intent of acquiring free or cheap farmland on the Midwest settlement frontier. Some came for political reasons, but the majority were driven by land hunger. Lizzie was around seven when she made the long Atlantic crossing to New York with her parents and two siblings. The family then came overland to Dane County, Wisconsin, around 1860, where Lizzie’s father, Charles, and mother, Sophie, settled on a timber holding near Hope, Wisconsin. Her father cleared the land. Not long after, Lizzie’s mother died at age thirty-six. Lizzie was about ten. In 1867, Lizzie’s father married again, to another Prussian-born woman, Wilhelmina Meyer, called Minnie. A widow in her fifties with seven children, she was also farming in Dane County. That year—Lizzie was seventeen—the family moved again, this time to Nebraska. They came out by covered wagon, “carrying with them their provisions, cooking and camping by the wayside.” Along with Lizzie, Charles brought two other children, Charles Jr., age nine, and Minnie, six. Wilhelmina brought two of hers, William, twenty-three, and Herman, fifteen, her youngest. The Heidenreich-Meyers bought land northwest of what would become Lincoln. Lizzie’s family were among the early settlers of eastern Nebraska. The 1860s were years of intensive white settlement east of the ninetyeighth meridian—that is, in the wetter part of the state where the land could be reliably farmed. On the unimproved holding that Lizzie’s father bought, only a few acres of prairie had been...