In rural homes a girl is trained for motherhood and learns the basics of house management through helping to raise younger siblings. Typically, not long after puberty, she will be married and delivering or nursing babies without let up for most of her life. Often her first daughters have children before she herself is done.

Mary gazes into her squalling newborn’s face and knows that his life can be taken in a moment. Though she would never know the numbers, she was clearly aware of childhood mortality. In 1870, two years after her marriage to Alanson and while they were living in Nebraska, 114 deaths occurred in their county. Nearly 100 of those were children, most less than five years of age.

Cholera infantum had taken their little boy, John. Mary would never forget his extreme distress as vomiting and diarrhea drained his life so quickly, his feverish lips cracking like parchment, his skin becoming translucent until she could trace his veins and see his heart thumping below his heaving chest.

Not long after John was buried a near neighbor lost her not quite one-year-old when he choked on a piece of seed corn. The frantic mother carried his lifeless body from home to home while screaming for someone to save her purple faced child. Anything and everything could happen to these defenseless babies. As she puts Addison Alanson to her breast Mary shivers, teeth chattering from childbirth strain and fatigue without hope or expectation of relief.