Jennah’s Reviews > Lone Women > Status Update

The Mudges come to Adelaide’s house to rob and kill her. The creature kills Mrs. Mudge and her two oldest boys. It flies off into the night and Adelaide hopes it won’t come back

Matthew stays with Adelaide after bringing her home from the dance. While she is asleep he unlocks her steamer trunk and unleashes the creature inside. Adelaide has to fight to put it back. She pays Matthew not to say anything about the creature. She decides to go to Grace’s home and finds her bleeding on the floor and Sam in the cellar. The Mudge boys attacked them

two men, Matthew Kirby and his Uncle Finn, come visit Adelaide. They’re on a threshing crew (railway workers?). Adelaide gets many men (threshers and cowboys) that visit her. Matthew Kirby invites her to a dance half a day’s ride away. During the dance she sees Mrs. Mudge but the woman denies being her and says she is a widow named Rose Morrison.

Grace Price and her son Sam come to Adelaide’s cabin. They are her neighbors nine miles away

Adelaide’s favorite book is The Tennant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. Mr. Olsen takes her to her new home. She asks him to come back with the Mudges’ supplies if they don’t show up. He does, and she buys all the supplies from him. She has no neighbors at her home. She spends her days working & her nights reading. Whatever is in her trunk seems to be some kind of curse.

Mrs. Reed welcomes Adelaide to Big Sandy and recommends she hire Mr. Eldon for a carriage. She is on the carriage with the Mudges, a family that consists of four blind boys and their mother. The carriage gets stuff trying to cross a coulee and the passengers have to get out so Mr. Eldon can get it unstuck. They spend the night in an old hotel and in the morning the Mudges are gone.

Adelaide was born Nov. 8, 1883. She has the same birthday (6yrs prior) as the state of Montana where she intends to go from Seattle. She saw Mattie T. Cramer’s letter about her success as a Lone Woman in Montana. She pays for a plot of land in Big Sandy. Fred Harnden works for the Big Sandy newspaper, Bear Paw Mountaineer. He and Mrs. Reed (richest woman in town) greet the arriving trains.

Mrs. Reed is the President of the Busy Bees & the Big Sandy Suffragettes. Neither she or Fred Harnden pay attention to Adelaide when she arrives on the train.

while Adelaide is buying her boat ticket (to Seattle on the SS Queen) Mr. Cole throws her things out of his carriage and drives away. She has to haul her trunk onto the ship & is then told she will have to sleep on the deck instead of in a cabin:

The man Adelaide hired to take her to the Port of Los Angeles (Mr. Cole) knows of her family and talks badly about them most of the trip. Adelaide used to go to Victorville and Allensworth to sell her family’s Plums at markets.