This is the cover for my next book. What's neat about it is that the couple on the cover are celebrating their 60th anniversary—the year was 1910—and they are Galen's great grandparents. They almost made it to 75 years.
This was another fun book for me to compile. As always, I love the strange and funny stories but I also enjoyed the historical stories of newlywed couples who came here from other countries or loaded up a wagon and headed west. Like this one:
Papers full of domestic scandals. Statisticians pouring forth awful figures about the increase of divorce. Theorists gloomily announcing the downfall of the American home. Children with from two to four sets of parents. Plenty of such things. But let’s tell a story that’s different.
Fifty years ago a young fellow named Eph Hastings married a comely girl in the little town of Keokuk, Iowa. Of a $500,000 pearl necklace, tapestries, silverware, automobiles, banknotes and things like that they hadn’t much but they had courage and each other’s hearts, and you may be sure that there’s not much “water” in that sort of stock when love’s merger is successfully promoted.
Well, Eph and his young wife turned their backs on Keokuk society and, with their little all of worldly goods, joined a mule train to cross the great plains to the land where the setting sun paints glory on land and sea and in its rising from behind majestic mountains makes praise of God spring from the heart of man.
Then, for weeks and weeks the train crept across prairie and desert, through the cold shadows of valleys that cleft the mountains, across streams too deep to wade. Water was scarce very often, too. Food sometimes ran low. And at night the wolves howled while campfires on distant hills made the women and children crowd close to the men who sat with men with loaded guns on their knees. Indians butchered men, women and children of a train that was following them. Two days later came news that Indians had knifed, scalped, and horribly tortured to the last human being a big train that was ahead of them.
One evening Buffalo Jim, notorious as the most bloodthirsty chief of all Indians, visited their camp. All the people of the train prayed that night and Eph sat with one arm around his bride and the other around his rifle for Buffalo Jim meant horrible death. But something pleased Jim and there was no massacre and so through more hardships and terrors the train went creeping into the west and it was altogether such a honeymoon trip for Eph and his wife as few couples ever pass through.
What a freak this thing named love is! Often it seems to refuse to live with people who have everything. Then again, it forever abides with and grows strong and everlasting with couples who have little, who go through hardships, misery, terrors and even shame together and is, in joy and sorrow, in pleasure and pain, in success and defeat, up to—nay, beyond—the very doors of death the glory of glories of human life.
But we mustn’t leave Eph honeymooning out back there in that mule train. We’re going to life him out of that mule train fifty years forward, fifty years of loyalty, struggle and triumph over the trials of life. At San Diego last Christmas day, Mr. Eph Hastings and the wife who crossed the plains with him celebrated their golden wedding anniversary. He was very gray and bewhiskered but still sturdy. She couldn’t hide all her wrinkles but her face was still round and sweet, and in her eyes was the light of Christmas 1861. Yes sir, they stood up before Rev. C.J. Harris and were married all over again before a crowd of children and grandchildren. Eph took the dear old lady in his arms, kissed her and swore to cherish and protect her until death. It was just beautiful. And the light on their faces proved that there are such things as loyalty and love that do not die. The Chicago Day Book, January 2, 1912.
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