He Said, 'I Have No Wife and Four Horses'… She Replied, 'I Have No Home and Four Children'.

Medicine Bow, Wyoming Territory, in the winter of eighteen eighty five. By one o’clock there were four women left standing against the feed store wall, and then there was one — a widow named Hannah Vance with four children and a trunk she had never once unpacked. Every man in that town counted her children out loud and walked on. Then a horse rancher who had buried his wife three years earlier came in off the street, walked the whole length of that empty wall, and stopped in front of her. What he said to her, and what she said back, was heard by everyone in the store. But the part nobody understood was why he had already written her name on the back of that feed bill before she ever gave it to him — and he would not answer her when she asked. This one took a long while to write, and it sits with me more than most. It is about what a fair price costs, about a woman who could be packed and gone in forty minutes, and about a door at the end of a hallway that had not been opened in three years. Stay with it to the end. There is a reason that little boy stops asking his question. If this story found you tonight, do me a kindness — hit subscribe and ring the bell so the next one finds you too, leave a like if Hannah earned it, and tell me down in the comments where in the world you are listening from. I read every one of them, and this fire has folks pulled up to it from more places than I would ever have guessed. Pour the coffee, put your feet up, and let’s ride. Sources used in this story: Joanna L. Stratton — Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier (1981) Glenda Riley — The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains (1988) Richard White — It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (1991)