New project: Inspired by great-grandmother Mary Jane Imlay Patterson, aka Mamie. . .

This week I’ve traveled to the western side of the state for a family visit. It’s a journey via plane, light rail, bus, ferry, car and tomorrow will involve a shuttle back to the airport. But besides all these fancy conveyances, what has moved me this week? What I’m doing next! It’s a new project, an historical novel inspired by great-grandmother Mary Jane Imlay Patterson, aka Mamie.

You mean my Grandma Patterson? I’m almost as big as she is now.

The very one, 9. I doubt she was ever more than five feet tall. You measured yourself against her the last time she visited here, from Waterville, WA.

And we were at her 100th birthday about a year ago.

That’s right, Lily, and she made it all the way to 103! Pretty impressive for someone born in 1873.

Mamie has surfaced in my writing a couple of times, once in a previous blog and later in a short story titled “Without a Chaperone.” The blog kept to the details of her actual life, but the short story placed her in the middle of an imagined event in the year 1893. That’s when she traveled from Hillsboro, OR, to Chicago, IL, to attend the Columbia Exposition. It was a World’s Fair, commemorating the so-called “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus. The world was changing at a fast pace then, with incandescent light, typewriters, luxury ocean liners, motion pictures and all kinds of things that amazed the people of that day. Mamie really did go the the Columbia Exposition, and to the real story I added her participation in a 1,000-mile horse race from Nebraska to the Chicago fairgrounds.

Did you make up the horse race?

No, but I made up the part about Mamie entering the race. It’s a story of switched identities, of a young woman seizing the opportunity to prove herself in the so-called “Man’s World.”

So much in our world has changed since that time. Sadly, the history of how those changes came about- -including greater equality for women- -is falling out of collective memory. That’s why I think it’s important to tell the stories of the people behind those changes, and about the world they lived in- -through fiction or through straight facts. Historical fiction is a mingling of both.

Mamie, the eldest of six children of Scottish immigrants, was fiercely independent and followed her own star. This was unusual for a young woman the year she went to Chicago, and a few years later in 1896 when she left a teaching position in Oregon to teach in Elk City, Idaho. The Oregon job paid $40/month; Elk City offered $50.

Mamie’s new project in 1896: Teaching school in Elk City, ID. She’s the one holding the scroll. . .

When I started imagining Mamie’s fictional life I realized I was already researching the life of another Pacific Northwest woman of that era, Abigail Scott Duniway. Abigail came west with her family in the 1850s. After seeing first-hand the harsh lives and virtually non-existent rights of women in pioneer Oregon she began campaigning for equal suffrage: the right for women to vote. Her suffrage activities spanned nearly five decades, from the time she was a young wife and mother of six to her death, By that time universal suffrage was a right in Oregon. Abigail was the first woman in the state to cast a vote.

Doubtless Mamie would have heard about Abigail and the suffrage movement. Mrs. Duniway traveled extensively through Oregon, Washington and Idaho, often speaking to large audiences to promote universal suffrage. The year Mamie started teaching in Elk City was the year women’s suffrage was established through an amendment to Idaho’s constitution.

Abigail Scott Duniway is scheduled to tell her story through Fort Walla Walla Museum’s Living History program this coming August. There’s a great deal of documentation about her life and work, including her autobiography Path Breaking. For Mamie, I am incredibly fortunate for the foresight of my late uncle, Dennis W. Sullivan, Jr., who transcribed the correspondence of Mamie and Claude Bont Patterson (a native Texan transplanted in Idaho, who later became her husband), during her time in Elk City. Dennie made bound copies of his transcription for Mamie’s descendants. For me, having access to someone’s actual words is key to developing their voice, whether on the page or live, for an audience.

The fight for equal suffrage is something I’m certain Mamie would have found extremely interesting. I would not be surprised to learn she had participated in marches, attended some of Mrs. Duniway’s lectures, and followed the unfolding campaign in the newspapers. How far I’ll let her fall down this intriguing rabbit hole in my fictional world is to be determined. The next few months I’ll be reading about the era, haunting historical archives, visiting relevant locations and talking to experts (on everything from spiritualism to placer mining). At this point, I haven’t settled on whether or not she will marry Claude Bont Patterson.

But if she doesn’t, then there won’t be a Grandma Mary, or Mom, or- –

Remember, 9, we’re talking about fiction. If the biggest truth Mamie reveals doesn’t include the story of our own creation, we’ll still be here.

Imagining Mamie, I suspect her real-life thirst for adventure might take her on a few more detours before she settles down. . .