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•——— Prologue ———• xi At seven o’clock sharp on Sunday evening, December 8, 1889, a young lady recently graduated from Vassar College stepped down onto the platform of Chicago’s La Salle Street Station, gripping a small valise in one hand. Taller than most, she scanned the crowd of arriving passengers . The freezing platform was jammed with bowler-hatted businessmen , and ladies in silk jostled with exhausted immigrant parents clutching infants and children. A scout from the Dakota plains in buckskins , escorting two Indians dressed in robes and feathers who had a large yellow dog, gestured to a porter. Jets of steam hissed impatiently from the waiting train behind. Cold weather and a stiff eastern breeze barely blunted the odors seeping into the concourse from the nearby Chicago River, fouled by carrion from the Union Stockyards. The strangers pushed past, pouring through the exits out onto the streets of America’s second largest city, famous for its toughness and its brazen appetites. Buffeted by the mob, the young woman stood alone, watching anxiously as the platform emptied. Cora Keck was the daughter of Mrs. Dr. Rebecca J. Keck, the selfdescribed Greatest Lady Physician of the West and proprietress of Mrs. Dr. Keck’s Palatial Infirmary for All Chronic Diseases (Established Permanently since 1865) at the corner of Sixth and Brady streets in Davenport , Iowa, and she was eloping with a man she had decided was the love of her life. This headstrong young adventurer was my great-grandmother, and the sixty-three-year-old coconspirator for whom she was waiting, John Cook, would eventually become my great-grandfather. The driving motive for the adventure was that Cora’s mother was against the match. Cora’s mother called all the shots for the Keck family. In her opinion, although rich and socially prominent, the man was just too old. For a bride, Cora Keck was no ingénue, either. She was already twentyfour , dangerously close to being an old maid by the social standards of Prologue [ xi ] xii •——— prologue ———• her day. Age made Miss Keck experienced and independent; she staged her decisive escape via the Davenport train depot with practiced precision , using technical skills she had developed at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie , New York, where she was accustomed to entertaining herself off campus without permission and getting back undetected by college authorities on a regular basis. This was a feat that she repeated over and over, alone and with friends, sometimes returning to campus and climbing in through her dormitory window after drinking champagne and playing roller-skate polo with townie boys as late as three in the morning . Cora was a romantic, a girl of action and a compulsive flirt whose young life was shaped by her struggle to become a serious, independent person free of the crushing influence of her formidable and highly controlling mother. She was also a passionate and talented musician, stifled in her ambitions by the customs of her era. She flung herself into love with courage and charisma as beautifully as she had in performing virtuoso piano solos on the concert stage at college. I first met Cora Keck in the pages of a diary that she started in late March 1885 and kept during most of that year while she was studying piano at Vassar’s School of Music. The diary was a “philopena,” which in Victorian times was a gift of friendship, usually given as a forfeit in a memory game. Cora received her diary on March 22, 1885, from one of her closest friends, Marian Austin, a fellow Vassar student from Honolulu , Hawaii; Marian may have forgotten to shout out “Philopena!” after the two shared two halves of a nut and would then have had to fork over the penalty gift. How lucky for me that she did. For months, Cora wrote daily and with enthusiasm. I grew up knowing almost nothing about Cora or her family until 121 years after she set her pen to paper. In the spring of 2006, at the age of forty-nine, besieged by a sense of personal disconnection, I decided to look into my family genealogy via the diary to see whether I could locate any long-lost cousins in the Midwest. On the second page, dated Sunday, January 4, 1885 (the diary began retroactively, with the new year), Cora caught my attention when she described a party she attended with her friend Kitty Rogers during her first outing in New York City: “Arrived home at...

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