East to the Dawn by Susan Butler Page A

understanding their importance, as an adult would number them among the possessions she treasured most. Millie Otis appears never to have tried to absorb the culture and the ways that she found on the banks of the Missouri—the new world of the Indians and the farmers and those other pioneers who traveled west. She carried with her the values of the eastern seaboard, sought to perpetuate them, and succeeded. The literature she fed her children and grandchildren—the books Amelia Earhart found in the library and grew up on—were the tales of Beatrix Potter, the writings of Thackeray, Dickens, Swinburne—almost all English except for a few Americans like Cooper and Poe—the same literature that was being read in Philadelphia and Boston and New York. It was not surprising that both Amelia Otis’s daughters and their sons and daughters, having been taught to value the cultural icons of the East from the time they were born, would eventually return east, from whence that culture came. Even Amelia Otis’s lovely flower gardens—that Amelia raced around and through—were fashioned after those she had left behind in Philadelphia—the hollyhocks, phlox, gladioli, the heliotrope, the rows of roses in the beds separated by strips of lawn in the sunken garden, the wonderful orchard full of apple and peach trees she had planted, and the vineyard between her house and her sister’s where she grew malaga and concord grapes. So Amelia, although brought up in Kansas, absorbed the eastern establishment culture her family had imported west.
    Amelia was given the northeast bedroom for her own, the room her great-grandmother Maria Harres had lived in for thirty-three years, with its huge window that gave such a spectacular view of the river below. She
felt Maria’s presence. On long winter evenings Amelia would hear about Maria firsthand from her grandmother—how Maria had saved Amy’s life, how extraordinarily vigorous she had been, how she had lived to see two great-great-grandchildren born and had almost lived to see her—as well as hearing stories about the early years of the town.
    For Amelia it was a happy experience. There was no abdication of parental responsibility on her mother’s part; Kansas City was only fifty miles away—not halfway across the continent, as had been the case with Alfred and his parents—and Amelia went home in the summers. Furthermore her mother took every opportunity to visit and was around often, bringing Muriel, two and a half years younger, with her. The main drawback was that Edwin rarely visited North Terrace. His separation from his daughter was a wrench for Edwin, acknowledged by him or not, because when Amelia had been very little, he had spent so much time with her and they were so fond of each other that Amelia’s first word was Papa, not Mama. Now he had to be content with seeing a great deal less of her.
    Amy kept a baby book titled Queer Doings and Quaint Sayings of Baby Earhart. The entries detail the progress of a likable, slightly precocious baby with a strong self-sufficient streak. “She sleeps all the time,” wrote Amy once for the amazing duration of nine hours. She never sucked her thumb. At twelve weeks she “laughed and talked to herself in the looking glass.” On March 4 she caught hold of the end of her buggy and twice pulled herself to her feet. By May she was creeping. On August 27 she took her first step. “After she was two years old,” her mother writes, “she went to bed by herself, often singing herself to sleep ... invariably taking a rag doll with her.” Her imagination “was largely developed.... Will amuse herself for hours with imaginary people and playthings.” The concluding entry is the most charming and the most revealing: “I overheard her talking to herself and on her discovering me in the room she said, ‘If you are not here to talk to I just whisper