I found this letter in a cedar chest under the kitchen floor of the old Burke cabin in the spring of 1921. The chest had been there since before I was born. The letter was inside an envelope that had never been sealed, addressed in a hand I had seen on account books and land deeds, but never on anything personal.
It said, “October the 3rd, 1876. Dear Mr. Burke, I am writing to you because the agency says you cannot write and would like a mail-order bride who can manage the correspondence for you. I hope this letter finds you well. I am Hannah Morse, 22 years of age, daughter of a Methodist minister in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I am described by those who know me as practical, which I have decided to take as a compliment.
I am told you are a mountain man somewhere in Colorado Territory, that you have been alone up there for 6 years, and that the winters are very long. I wonder if you miss people, or if you have forgotten what people are like. I have not yet decided if this letter will be entirely honest with you, or just honest enough to be convincing.
I suppose we will find out together. Yours sincerely, Hannah Morse.” Found that letter in 1921. I am their granddaughter. The story of how it got under the floorboards is the story of what happens when a mountain man and his mail-order bride build a life around a misunderstanding that turns out to be, in the end, much more honest than the truth would have been.
Here is what happened. The Bureau of Western Settlement and Matrimonial Services, operating out of Denver, Colorado, in 1876, kept detailed notes on its clients. The notes on Amos Burke of Elk Creek Valley, Colorado Territory, said the following: Former trapper, age 38, no known family, owns land, has livestock, in good health, unable to read or write.
Requires mail-order bride capable of correspondence and household management. The notation about reading and writing had come from a fur trader named Caleb Moss, who passed through Elk Creek Valley twice a year, and who had filled out the paperwork on Amos’s behalf, telling the bureau clerk that this mountain man could not do it himself.
This was incorrect. Amos Burke could read. He could read well. He had learned from a Presbyterian missionary in 1859, when he was 21 years old and had been a trapper for 3 years and had decided that being able to read might someday be more useful than being unable to. In the 17 years since, this mountain man had read every book he could find.
His cabin shelf held the collected poems of Walt Whitman, a natural history of the North American Mountain West, two volumes of agricultural science, a Bible he read for the prose rather than the theology, and a copy of McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader he used to keep his comprehension sharp. He had not told Caleb Moss he could read because men who knew it tended to try to use him for things he did not want to be used for.
He had developed a policy of letting people assume what they assumed, and the assumption that a mountain man in Colorado could not read was one he had found easier to maintain than to correct. The mail-order bride advertisement had been Caleb’s idea, not Amos’s. Caleb had argued, over three visits across two years, that Amos needed a woman in the valley.
The mountain man had agreed eventually because the winters were indeed getting longer. The advertisement went out. The mail-order bride letters started coming. He read every one. Most of them were exactly what you would expect, practical, cautious, brief. He could tell from the handwriting and the sentence construction which ones had been written by the woman herself and which had been written with help.
None of them caught his attention in any particular way. Then Amos Burke, the mountain man who was not supposed to be able to read, opened Hannah Morse’s letter. He read it twice. Then a third time. He went and sat in his chair and looked at the fire for a long while. Then he wrote to the bureau and told them to send her.
Hannah Morse arrived in September of 1876 on the stage to Elk Creek town, which was not so much a town as a collection of buildings that had agreed to be adjacent to each other. There was a general store, a blacksmith, a small hotel that also served as a saloon, and a post office window cut into the front of the general store.
The general store owner drove her up to the mountain man’s cabin. He told her two things, that Amos Burke was the best trapper and the worst talker in the valley, and that if she needed anything from town, she should write a list and someone would bring it up because the mountain man never wrote things down. “Never wrote things down,” the mail-order bride repeated.
“Amos cannot read or write,” the store owner said. “That is what the bureau said. That is what everyone says.” “I understand,” Hannah said. “That is why I am here.” The store owner looked at her with the expression of a man who has said something he believed to be true and is suddenly not certain it is. Amos Burke was at the cabin when the mail-order bride arrived.
He helped her down from the wagon with the formal care of a man who had been alone long enough to treat courtesy as a skill he was determined not to lose. He showed her the cabin, the garden, and the shelf of books. The mail-order bride walked to the shelf immediately and ran her finger along the spines. “Walt Whitman,” she said.
“Leaves of Grass.” “Someone left it at the trading post,” the mountain man said from behind her. “Of course,” Hanna said. She turned around. The mountain man was standing in the middle of the cabin with his hands at his sides and a carefully neutral expression on his face. She decided, in that moment, that the neutral expression was doing a great deal of work.
“I can teach you to read if you would like,” the mail-order bride said. “When there is time, we could start with McGuffey.” She gestured at the McGuffey reader on the shelf. A very small thing happened in the mountain man’s face. It was the expression of a man who has just been told something he already knows and is deciding, in real time, how to respond.
“That is kind,” he said. “We will see.” The mail-order bride took that as a yes. She did not know yet that it was something else entirely. The correspondence Hanna Morse managed for the mountain man was primarily practical. Letters to the bureau settling accounts. Letters to the trading post ordering winter supplies.
A letter to a land office in Denver regarding a boundary dispute that had been unresolved for 3 years. And that the mail-order bride resolved in two letters because she found legal language clarifying rather than bewildering. She also wrote letters home. She did not think about where she set them before mailing them because she was not thinking about the mountain man reading them.
She would write them at the kitchen table in the evening and set them near the door to take to the post office window the next time someone went to town. The mountain man read them not out of intent, he told her later. The first one had been set near his hand at the table and he had picked it up before he registered what he was reading.
After that he read them because he could not help it, which is not the same as an excuse, but is at least an explanation. The mail order bride wrote to her mother in Harrisburg with the freedom of someone who had no idea her letters would be read before they were sent. She described Elk Creek Valley honestly, the beauty of the mountains, the length of the silences, the cold that came earlier than she had expected.
And the way the sky at dusk here was a different color than any sky she had seen in Pennsylvania. She described the mountain man honestly, too. That he was a man of very few words who was not unkind. Who kept the cabin and the land with a care that suggested he took seriously the idea of leaving things better than he found them.
And who had books she had not expected. She wrote to her mother in November. I think the mountain man is a good man who has been alone long enough to forget how to say what he is thinking. I have been here 2 months and I have learned to read his silences the way I would read a text in an unfamiliar language.
Some of them are comfortable and some are not and I am learning to tell the difference. She wrote in December. I read to him from Whitman in the evenings when the fire is going and there is nothing else to do. And I thought at first the mountain man was simply politely enduring it, but I have realized lately that he is listening very carefully.
He responds to certain passages. Not out loud, but something in his face changes at the same lines every time, and I have started noting which ones they are. She wrote in January, “I have decided that I am not going to tell him I have noticed this. It seems important that the mountain man have one thing he does not have to explain.
” The mountain man read that letter three times. He sat with it in his hand for a long while after the third reading. Then he set it carefully back near the door, exactly as it had been. He went back to what he had been doing. He did not say anything, but that evening when the mail-order bride read from Whitman, the mountain man listened with his eyes on the fire and did not pretend to be doing something else. It was March.
Six months since the mail-order bride had arrived. The snow was still heavy, but the light was coming back. The particular lengthening that happens in the high country in late winter that tells you spring is real, even if it is still months away. A letter from her mother had come up with the weekly supply run.
The mail-order bride sat at the table and read it and set it on the shelf with the others. The mountain man was at the workbench repairing a trap frame. The silence that afternoon had a quality she had come to distinguish from other silences, denser, more aware, she said without planning to, “My mother wants to know if I am happy.” The mountain man did not look up from the trap frame.
“What do you write back?” he said. “I have not decided,” the mail-order bride said. “Are you?” he said. “I think I am,” she said. I think it is a thing I have to grow into. I did not expect that. I thought it would either work or it would not. The mountain man was quiet for another moment. Then, what does she say in the letter? Hannah reached for it.
She says she is glad I have someone to read the Whitman to. She says the mail-order bride stopped. She set the letter down slowly. She turned and looked at the mountain man. I told her in my first letter that you could not read, she said carefully. He put down the trap frame. My mother says she is glad I have someone to read the Whitman to.
The mail-order bride said again. She says it is easier to find a man who appreciates poetry than a man who will admit it. She looked at the shelf of books. At the McGuffey Reader she had offered to teach from on her first day. At the Whitman, at the natural history, at the Bible. She looked back at the mountain man.
How long, she said very quietly. Since I was 21, he said. She breathed in once, out. You read my letters home. The mail-order bride said a very long silence. Yes, the mountain man said. All of them? Yes. She was quiet for a while. She was, she found not as angry as she might have expected.
She was something more complicated than angry. The one in November, the mail-order bride said. Where I said I was learning to read your silences. Yes, the mountain man said. The one in January. Where I said I had decided not to tell you about the poetry. He did not say anything. He did not have to. The mail-order bride went out outside and walked to the south end of the garden.
Where the edge of the soil was beginning to show soft at the rim of the beds. She stood there in the March cold with coat buttoned to the chin. The mountain man came out after a while and stood a few feet from her. “I should have told you,” he said. “First day.” “Yes,” the mail-order bride said. “I did not because I thought” The mountain man stopped.
He tried again. “I thought if I told you, you would write differently.” She turned and looked at him. He was looking at the mountains to the north. “You read my letters so you could know what I actually thought,” she said. “Yes,” the mountain man said. “Without me knowing you were reading them.
Yes, that is,” the mail-order bride said carefully. “The most convoluted way I have ever heard of a man trying to know a woman.” Something happened in the corner of the mountain man’s mouth. “I know,” he said. She looked at the mountains, too. “What did you think,” she said, “when you read them?” The mountain man was quiet for a long time.
“Then I thought she notices things. She is careful with things she is not sure about yet. She is honest in writing in a way she is not quite honest in speaking because writing gives her time to find the right word, I thought.” He paused. “I thought the bureau sent me the right mail-order bride and I had no idea how to say that out loud.
” The mail-order bride was quiet. Then she said, “Read to me from Whitman tonight. I want to hear what it sounds like in your voice.” The mountain man looked at her. “All right,” he said. That night after supper, the mountain man got the book from the shelf and sat in the chair by the fire and read to the mail-order bride.
His reading voice was low and careful and he read the way a man reads who learned to love words before he loved anything else. With attention, without performance. She sat across from him and listened and thought six months of letters she had sent thinking they were private and this is what they had built between them.
She decided she did not mind. They were married in April when the pass cleared enough for the justice of the peace to come up from the county seat. The letter the mail-order bride wrote to her mother after the wedding said it turns out the mountain man could read the whole time. I think this may be the most honest arrangement I know of.
He read me Whitman by the fire last night and I thought you would want to know that. I found that letter in 1921 in a cedar chest under the kitchen floor. The mountain man had kept it. He had kept every letter his mail-order bride ever wrote.
The Mountain Man Read Every Letter His Mail Order Bride Wrote Home. She Had No Idea He Could Read.
I found this letter in a cedar chest under the kitchen floor of the old Burke cabin in the spring of 1921. The chest had been there since before I was born. The letter was inside an envelope that had never been sealed, addressed in a hand I had seen on account books and land deeds, but never on anything personal.
It said, “October the 3rd, 1876. Dear Mr. Burke, I am writing to you because the agency says you cannot write and would like a mail-order bride who can manage the correspondence for you. I hope this letter finds you well. I am Hannah Morse, 22 years of age, daughter of a Methodist minister in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I am described by those who know me as practical, which I have decided to take as a compliment.
I am told you are a mountain man somewhere in Colorado Territory, that you have been alone up there for 6 years, and that the winters are very long. I wonder if you miss people, or if you have forgotten what people are like. I have not yet decided if this letter will be entirely honest with you, or just honest enough to be convincing.
I suppose we will find out together. Yours sincerely, Hannah Morse.” Found that letter in 1921. I am their granddaughter. The story of how it got under the floorboards is the story of what happens when a mountain man and his mail-order bride build a life around a misunderstanding that turns out to be, in the end, much more honest than the truth would have been.
Here is what happened. The Bureau of Western Settlement and Matrimonial Services, operating out of Denver, Colorado, in 1876, kept detailed notes on its clients. The notes on Amos Burke of Elk Creek Valley, Colorado Territory, said the following: Former trapper, age 38, no known family, owns land, has livestock, in good health, unable to read or write.
Requires mail-order bride capable of correspondence and household management. The notation about reading and writing had come from a fur trader named Caleb Moss, who passed through Elk Creek Valley twice a year, and who had filled out the paperwork on Amos’s behalf, telling the bureau clerk that this mountain man could not do it himself.
This was incorrect. Amos Burke could read. He could read well. He had learned from a Presbyterian missionary in 1859, when he was 21 years old and had been a trapper for 3 years and had decided that being able to read might someday be more useful than being unable to. In the 17 years since, this mountain man had read every book he could find.
His cabin shelf held the collected poems of Walt Whitman, a natural history of the North American Mountain West, two volumes of agricultural science, a Bible he read for the prose rather than the theology, and a copy of McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader he used to keep his comprehension sharp. He had not told Caleb Moss he could read because men who knew it tended to try to use him for things he did not want to be used for.
He had developed a policy of letting people assume what they assumed, and the assumption that a mountain man in Colorado could not read was one he had found easier to maintain than to correct. The mail-order bride advertisement had been Caleb’s idea, not Amos’s. Caleb had argued, over three visits across two years, that Amos needed a woman in the valley.
The mountain man had agreed eventually because the winters were indeed getting longer. The advertisement went out. The mail-order bride letters started coming. He read every one. Most of them were exactly what you would expect, practical, cautious, brief. He could tell from the handwriting and the sentence construction which ones had been written by the woman herself and which had been written with help.
None of them caught his attention in any particular way. Then Amos Burke, the mountain man who was not supposed to be able to read, opened Hannah Morse’s letter. He read it twice. Then a third time. He went and sat in his chair and looked at the fire for a long while. Then he wrote to the bureau and told them to send her.
Hannah Morse arrived in September of 1876 on the stage to Elk Creek town, which was not so much a town as a collection of buildings that had agreed to be adjacent to each other. There was a general store, a blacksmith, a small hotel that also served as a saloon, and a post office window cut into the front of the general store.
The general store owner drove her up to the mountain man’s cabin. He told her two things, that Amos Burke was the best trapper and the worst talker in the valley, and that if she needed anything from town, she should write a list and someone would bring it up because the mountain man never wrote things down. “Never wrote things down,” the mail-order bride repeated.
“Amos cannot read or write,” the store owner said. “That is what the bureau said. That is what everyone says.” “I understand,” Hannah said. “That is why I am here.” The store owner looked at her with the expression of a man who has said something he believed to be true and is suddenly not certain it is. Amos Burke was at the cabin when the mail-order bride arrived.
He helped her down from the wagon with the formal care of a man who had been alone long enough to treat courtesy as a skill he was determined not to lose. He showed her the cabin, the garden, and the shelf of books. The mail-order bride walked to the shelf immediately and ran her finger along the spines. “Walt Whitman,” she said.
“Leaves of Grass.” “Someone left it at the trading post,” the mountain man said from behind her. “Of course,” Hanna said. She turned around. The mountain man was standing in the middle of the cabin with his hands at his sides and a carefully neutral expression on his face. She decided, in that moment, that the neutral expression was doing a great deal of work.
“I can teach you to read if you would like,” the mail-order bride said. “When there is time, we could start with McGuffey.” She gestured at the McGuffey reader on the shelf. A very small thing happened in the mountain man’s face. It was the expression of a man who has just been told something he already knows and is deciding, in real time, how to respond.
“That is kind,” he said. “We will see.” The mail-order bride took that as a yes. She did not know yet that it was something else entirely. The correspondence Hanna Morse managed for the mountain man was primarily practical. Letters to the bureau settling accounts. Letters to the trading post ordering winter supplies.
A letter to a land office in Denver regarding a boundary dispute that had been unresolved for 3 years. And that the mail-order bride resolved in two letters because she found legal language clarifying rather than bewildering. She also wrote letters home. She did not think about where she set them before mailing them because she was not thinking about the mountain man reading them.
She would write them at the kitchen table in the evening and set them near the door to take to the post office window the next time someone went to town. The mountain man read them not out of intent, he told her later. The first one had been set near his hand at the table and he had picked it up before he registered what he was reading.
After that he read them because he could not help it, which is not the same as an excuse, but is at least an explanation. The mail order bride wrote to her mother in Harrisburg with the freedom of someone who had no idea her letters would be read before they were sent. She described Elk Creek Valley honestly, the beauty of the mountains, the length of the silences, the cold that came earlier than she had expected.
And the way the sky at dusk here was a different color than any sky she had seen in Pennsylvania. She described the mountain man honestly, too. That he was a man of very few words who was not unkind. Who kept the cabin and the land with a care that suggested he took seriously the idea of leaving things better than he found them.
And who had books she had not expected. She wrote to her mother in November. I think the mountain man is a good man who has been alone long enough to forget how to say what he is thinking. I have been here 2 months and I have learned to read his silences the way I would read a text in an unfamiliar language.
Some of them are comfortable and some are not and I am learning to tell the difference. She wrote in December. I read to him from Whitman in the evenings when the fire is going and there is nothing else to do. And I thought at first the mountain man was simply politely enduring it, but I have realized lately that he is listening very carefully.
He responds to certain passages. Not out loud, but something in his face changes at the same lines every time, and I have started noting which ones they are. She wrote in January, “I have decided that I am not going to tell him I have noticed this. It seems important that the mountain man have one thing he does not have to explain.
” The mountain man read that letter three times. He sat with it in his hand for a long while after the third reading. Then he set it carefully back near the door, exactly as it had been. He went back to what he had been doing. He did not say anything, but that evening when the mail-order bride read from Whitman, the mountain man listened with his eyes on the fire and did not pretend to be doing something else. It was March.
Six months since the mail-order bride had arrived. The snow was still heavy, but the light was coming back. The particular lengthening that happens in the high country in late winter that tells you spring is real, even if it is still months away. A letter from her mother had come up with the weekly supply run.
The mail-order bride sat at the table and read it and set it on the shelf with the others. The mountain man was at the workbench repairing a trap frame. The silence that afternoon had a quality she had come to distinguish from other silences, denser, more aware, she said without planning to, “My mother wants to know if I am happy.” The mountain man did not look up from the trap frame.
“What do you write back?” he said. “I have not decided,” the mail-order bride said. “Are you?” he said. “I think I am,” she said. I think it is a thing I have to grow into. I did not expect that. I thought it would either work or it would not. The mountain man was quiet for another moment. Then, what does she say in the letter? Hannah reached for it.
She says she is glad I have someone to read the Whitman to. She says the mail-order bride stopped. She set the letter down slowly. She turned and looked at the mountain man. I told her in my first letter that you could not read, she said carefully. He put down the trap frame. My mother says she is glad I have someone to read the Whitman to.
The mail-order bride said again. She says it is easier to find a man who appreciates poetry than a man who will admit it. She looked at the shelf of books. At the McGuffey Reader she had offered to teach from on her first day. At the Whitman, at the natural history, at the Bible. She looked back at the mountain man.
How long, she said very quietly. Since I was 21, he said. She breathed in once, out. You read my letters home. The mail-order bride said a very long silence. Yes, the mountain man said. All of them? Yes. She was quiet for a while. She was, she found not as angry as she might have expected.
She was something more complicated than angry. The one in November, the mail-order bride said. Where I said I was learning to read your silences. Yes, the mountain man said. The one in January. Where I said I had decided not to tell you about the poetry. He did not say anything. He did not have to. The mail-order bride went out outside and walked to the south end of the garden.
Where the edge of the soil was beginning to show soft at the rim of the beds. She stood there in the March cold with coat buttoned to the chin. The mountain man came out after a while and stood a few feet from her. “I should have told you,” he said. “First day.” “Yes,” the mail-order bride said. “I did not because I thought” The mountain man stopped.
He tried again. “I thought if I told you, you would write differently.” She turned and looked at him. He was looking at the mountains to the north. “You read my letters so you could know what I actually thought,” she said. “Yes,” the mountain man said. “Without me knowing you were reading them.
Yes, that is,” the mail-order bride said carefully. “The most convoluted way I have ever heard of a man trying to know a woman.” Something happened in the corner of the mountain man’s mouth. “I know,” he said. She looked at the mountains, too. “What did you think,” she said, “when you read them?” The mountain man was quiet for a long time.
“Then I thought she notices things. She is careful with things she is not sure about yet. She is honest in writing in a way she is not quite honest in speaking because writing gives her time to find the right word, I thought.” He paused. “I thought the bureau sent me the right mail-order bride and I had no idea how to say that out loud.
” The mail-order bride was quiet. Then she said, “Read to me from Whitman tonight. I want to hear what it sounds like in your voice.” The mountain man looked at her. “All right,” he said. That night after supper, the mountain man got the book from the shelf and sat in the chair by the fire and read to the mail-order bride.
His reading voice was low and careful and he read the way a man reads who learned to love words before he loved anything else. With attention, without performance. She sat across from him and listened and thought six months of letters she had sent thinking they were private and this is what they had built between them.
She decided she did not mind. They were married in April when the pass cleared enough for the justice of the peace to come up from the county seat. The letter the mail-order bride wrote to her mother after the wedding said it turns out the mountain man could read the whole time. I think this may be the most honest arrangement I know of.
He read me Whitman by the fire last night and I thought you would want to know that. I found that letter in 1921 in a cedar chest under the kitchen floor. The mountain man had kept it. He had kept every letter his mail-order bride ever wrote.
