The first was an encounter I shall never forget with a young woman of astonishing mien, of deep but laughing eyes and a smile as wide as the Missouri River, who hailed from upstream, a place called Marthasville. Jemima Callaway had been invited to the Governor's house during one of her rare visits to Saint Louis, and I had been asked to fill out the seating arrangement, and I had obliged, to please the Governor's wife. The evening might have been a waste of my time as far as personal enjoyment is concerned, had things been otherwise. But Jemima Callaway was what I can only say was a transcendent experience. She laughed like the winds in distant pines, and her eyes missed nothing. She told me of her father, who had been most disgruntled when he was not accepted by the Army during the War with England that had occurred in 1812. He was most put out and could not believe their explanation that the problem was his age, which was only 78 at the time.

Her father had taken to making long treks up the Missouri, and Jemima regaled us with the conspiracies his many descendants had to resort to to ensure he was accompanied by someone a bit younger to watch over him, for he would go every Spring even when his eyes began to be too weak for hunting and his rheumatism suited him better for a rocking chair. He had, she insisted, had a fine cherrywood coffin made for him after his wife, Jemima's mother, had passed on, shortly after the British had been defeated without his aid, and he kept it in his attic and would occasionally have some of the boys bring it down so he could try it on for size.

She told me what he had told her about the far hills beyond Charette's Creek and out past Femme Osage, where one of his sons lived, the wild hills along the Missouri and the tributaries upstream from there, and of the amazing prices he used to get for his beaver pelts. She described him coming down into Saint Louis in his 70's steering a rickety flatboat, standing at the tiller like a man half his age, and she knew, although she was less than twenty when it happened, that he had come back with a fine load of furs. I asked her how she could tell, and she explained to me that the flatboat had had a small house built on the forward end of it, which meant for sure they were protecting a good cargo. She told me of their farm out by Teuque Creek, where Lewis and Clark had paid a call of honor before starting on their great trip upriver for President Jefferson, and the family's occasional retreats to Fort Boonesborugh, which Jemima said he had helped build and was in fact named after him. And about her husbamd Flanders Callaway, whom she had loved since she was four because he had helped her father rescue her when she was kidnapped from a canoe by Indians. Is it any wonder I was entranced with her lyrical voice and her wealth of tales? A woman who been kidnapped by Indians, had fought them off in battles at Fort Boone, and was still as beautiful as any morning?

I have forgotten many of the names and faces I strived to learn when I was first making my way in St Louis Society, but I have never forgotten Jemima, and the pictures she painted of life up the long river. But, I digress.

The visions Jemima passed to me from her father of life beyond the edges of civilization would not have moved me out of my comfortable path, building a practice of law in Saint Louis, had it not been for another beautiful woman from an entirely different part of the city, a woman of Color named Celeste, daughter of an Indian woman named Scyion, and the courage she showed me. And that, perhaps is another piece of the puzzle of why I am sleeping tonight under cottonowoods instead of muslin.