In June 1855, Sarah Butts flees her abusive home in Rhode Island to find her friend Maddie in the west. Her wrist is bandaged where her husband, Ank, has burned her with a soldering iron. His treatment of her is no secret. “Everyone in the street knows Ank likes to hurt me. Viola knows. My mother knew, although she never did anything to stop it.” She will travel to Boston and Albany, along the Erie Canal to Buffalo, on a lake steamer to Chicago and then by wagon to Galena, on the Mississippi River. Like so many other European Americans, Sarah hopes that when she arrives in Shakopee, in the Minnesota Territory, she will find not only Maddie but a new life.
Susanna Moore remains best known for her stylish thriller In the Cut, published in 1995. Three years ago she published a striking memoir, Miss Aluminum, revealing in restrained yet electric prose the hardships of a brutal childhood and a seemingly glamorous young womanhood (a successful model, she worked in Hollywood and hung out with Joan Didion and Audrey Hepburn). In that book she demonstrated how the self can split under the weight of trauma: that as suffering is endured, some part of the sufferer is able to observe the awful events as if from afar.
