April White - The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier

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The Cataract House Hotel in the 1890s.

F ROM N EW Y ORK , the journey took four days.

The North Shore Limited departed from Grand Central Depot on Forty-Second Street in Manhattan each afternoon at 4:50 p.m. It was not the fastest train to Chicago; that superlative was reserved for the New York and Chicago Limited, which reached the newly crowned Second City fifteen minutes quicker. But in the summer of 1891, the North Shore Limited was considered the most luxurious of the passenger cars that hurtled west from New York City.

A swirl of steam and soot enveloped waiting passengers. Crowds thronged the depots platforms. It was a democratic sort of chaos. The cacophony and oppressive heat were the same for the woman who had packed up her meager possessions in a tenement on the Lower East Side and the one who had directed her maid to prepare her trunks in the parlor of a Fifth Avenue mansion. Once a monument to innovation, Grand Central Depot was a prematurely aging marvel; the train shedtwo hundred feet wide and six hundred feet long, with a glass ceiling arching one hundred feet abovehad been the largest in the world when it opened just two decades earlier. But it was not large enough to meet the demands of a restless city barreling toward a new century. Millions now passed through the depot every year.

The well-to-do among the passengers booked tickets for a Wagner Palace Car, a serene mahogany and brocade escape from the overflowing second-class accommodations and dismal third-class option. A woman of means traveling alone booked four seats across two upholstered benches. It was an expensive but necessary signal of her propriety. As the North Shore Limited pulled out of the station, heading north toward Albany before turning west to Buffalo, the woman could use the extra space to accommodate her wide traveling skirt and her hat, wrapped carefully in a thick veil to protect it from the cinders floating through the windows. When night fell and the porters transformed the car into a rolling hotelthe benches reconfigured to form the lower berths, and the ornate ceiling compartments opened to reveal the upper onesthe woman would have complete privacy behind her heavy sleeping curtains.

As the sun rose on the morning of the second day, the North Shore Limited approached the International Suspension Bridge spanning the American-Canadian border. Barely visible in the new morning light and overwhelmed by the sounds of the engine was Niagara Falls, less than three miles away. The magnificent cataract was a highlight of the trip, as was the bridge itself. Since it opened in 1855, this feat of engineering had drawn such daredevils as Maria Spelterini, a young Italian acrobat who stretched a tightrope parallel to the tracks and made the same journey across the river blindfolded and then again with her hands and feet manacled. And it had drawn those far braver: In the years before the Civil War, the bridge was a beacon for the enslaved. To reach its midpointthe international borderlinewas to be free.

The North Shore Limited continued on, skirting the northern edge of Lake Erie and the southern shoreline of Lake Michigan, and before sunset on the second day, the train arrived in Chicago. It was not unusual to see a lady disembark alone in Great Central Depot, a fire-scarred structure that could not rival its grand New York counterpart. The railroad advertised the North Shore Limited to unaccompanied woman travelers. It arrived in ample time for one to reach her destination by daylight. But for a few aboard, that destination was still further west.

A trek across the breadth of Illinois and Iowa first required an overnight stay in Chicago. The next afternoon the Illinois Central got underway, speeding across the prairie toward the setting sun. Its sleeper cars had all the material comforts of those that ferried passengers between New York and Chicago, but here a woman alone raised eyebrows. A modest traveling dress, clean hat, and tightly pinned sleeping curtains were no guard against the curiosities and judgments of her fellow passengers.