East to the Dawn by Susan Butler

difficult time, not only because she was only an occasional participant but also because Amelia was so dramatic, so clever, and so inventive that both Katch and Annie infinitely preferred her over “Moonie,” as they called her. “I didn’t care for her as much as Millie,” Ann would recall. Katch would say, “I always seemed to get stuck with Muriel.”
    Clearly Amelia was a hard act to follow. She was the glamorous, daring one—Muriel was the younger, timid, plump, solemn younger sister. Amelia was always dreaming up new activities and yet, a natural teacher,
always managed to be kind and patient to the younger girls. Naturally they all wanted to be with her—so did Muriel. So deep an impression did Amelia make on Ann Park, one of the younger sisters, that seventy years later Ann, over eighty years old, still remembered clearly that “Millie was always the instigator.... She would dare anything; we would all follow along.” Katch said, “I just adored her.... She was not only fun ... she could do everything.”
    Amelia had a passionate interest in animals, which manifested itself, more often than not, in those preautomobile times, on that most ubiquitous animal in North America-the horse. Anna Sewall’s Black Beauty had made a great impression on her, and the result was that Amelia believed she had a personal mission to intercede on behalf of any horse she saw being mistreated. This inevitably led to confrontations with delivery men, when they found she had loosened the taut check reins of their horses, which kept them from being able to relax their necks, and once to a fight with her mother, when she refused to be polite to a neighbor in Kansas City who was cruel to his horse Nellie. Nor did she change as she grew older; her love for animals never left her. She never forgot Nellie, who died as a result of mistreatment. In the 1930s she would read Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken of Dancing” to her husband, and he would know she was thinking of Nellie. Blanche Noyes, friend and fellow pilot, driving out west with Amelia many years later, remembered, “If there was an animal hit along the road, no matter whether she had an appointment or not, she’d stop and either take the animal to the next town, or we’d find someone to take care of the animal ... or we’d check to see if it was dead.”
    Amelia remained close to her parents and her sister through the summers spent in Kansas City. Amy seems to have done a superb job of making each of her children content with their disparate lives, for both sisters seemed perfectly happy with the arrangement. Amelia in Atchison had Virginia Park, Toot, and Katch, a school she “loved,” her own very special room, and her grandmother Millie, whom she could wind around her finger; Muriel had her mother and father and her own room in Kansas City. Amy would make frequent short visits to her family on North Terrace, always bringing Muriel.
    Muriel enjoyed Atchison, but she wasn’t as comfortable there as she was at home. For her there was “no comparison” between Atchison and Kansas City. “My family was in Kansas City; I liked Kansas City better,” she would recall. One reason Muriel felt strange in Atchison was that she had to be on her best behavior for her grandparents. But another more important reason was her status as a visitor, which was underscored by
the sleeping arrangements: Muriel slept with her mother in her mother’s old bedroom. Muriel, recalling that sleeping arrangement, seventy years after the fact, still had a tinge of resentment in her voice as she continued, “Amelia had her own room.” The special room—Maria’s.

    Summertime life in Kansas City was simpler, less structured than it was in Atchison. Because Amelia had no network of school friends and cousins as in Atchison, she was thrown back on the company of