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

12: Three Lives

z 319 z • T W E LV E • Three Lives She had long hair and I braided it. She tied three strings on a door knob to teach me how to braid, and she let me braid her hair. —Mary Wetzler, speaking of Mrs. Elliott n A life trajectory is the trail that forms in our wake when we are thrown into time. At birth, we are cast into some region of the planet. Certain beliefs and customs fall to our lot. We are born to this mother and this father. We are a girl or a boy, and we did not choose. The place we land is determined by chance, yet in the course of time the motion of our trajectory becomes less random. A distinctive line emerges from our decisions, from how we respond to our condition. The axis of choice overlays the axis of chance and begins to affect the course of life. Trajectory then becomes the expression of character. We are sometimes drawn to a certain place, a landscape where we feel at home, where we sense that our being will find its full expression. Ida Meyer and Josephine Lamb decided to move to Livermore. John Elliott decided to stay there rather than go with his parents to South Dakota. John and Ida’s trajectories were woven together in marriage. Through the early twentieth century, the central event in most lives was conjugal union. That is what the popular narratives of the era tell us. chapter twelve 320 Less often do these stories explore the twists and turns of married life itself. Josephine, however, remained single, at least from a legal standpoint . This status was something of an anomaly. In a culture in which marriage was the norm, staying single made a person exceptional, statistically and otherwise. In the retrospect of time, I watch Ida’s, John’s, and Josephine’s trajectories join together and form a braid, each one bound to the other two, yet distinct. This convergence appears as the single most important event in each of their lives. It affected how Livermore treated the three settlers and in turn how they related to other people. Their unusual living arrangement captured the small community’s attention and imagination. One old landowner told me, “It got to be the Livermore story” (JW). In ranching country of that time, distance slowed communication, news arrived late, and gossip took up the slack. The community story about the triangle depicted a human drama, and not only did its retelling add spice to people’s everyday lives, it also provided a forum for Livermore’s unwritten moral code. One function of storytelling is to forge a sense of community. Narratives of transgression do this by reinforcing the dominant values, by defining a group by what the group rejects. Story exercises power in a community, but its effects can be divisive , for it may induce a community to treat some of its members as scapegoats. In the case of the Elliotts and Jo Lamb, story did in fact lower their reputation and social standing. A principal conduit of community story is gossip. It is a fundamental agent of reputation, yet it is, for its own part, held in bad repute because of its associations with rumor and spite. But this estimation is not entirely fair, for gossip is also a medium of genuine curiosity. Phyllis Rose, a writer of lives, defends gossip along these lines when she observes: “we are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves, yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying.” Nor is gossip always groundless, one reason that the writer of lives cannot ignore it. Another reason is that gossip, whatever its truth value, remains a fact of community life. It is a crucial source for understanding how a community perceives and judges its members. By projecting on its subjects a particular image, gossip affects the course of a person’s trajectory. Three Lives 321 z Livermore firmly believed that the Elliotts and Jo Lamb were involved in a domestic triangle. A few doubters pointed out there was no smoking gun, nothing proven. Unmarried mountain teachers, after all, did board with families and sometimes stayed on. The teacher and wife were usually friends. In the case of the Rabbit Creek threesome, however, it was well known that...