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The Blood-Stained Dress — Flash Fiction
She watched the blood-stained dress burn, and it brought to mind the memories of the life she had lived until now. By April 1865, her family had lost everything and would eventually lose the only home she had ever known on the banks of the Albemarle Sound. Her wedding in May of that year to Edwin was not the social event that her sisters had experienced in the heady days of high cotton prices and indulgent wealth, but Edwin was the man she would follow no matter where the road led. As his partner and his helpmate, she knew the journey they started on the morning after their wedding would be a long and arduous one for the new life that awaited them in the Oregon Territory.
Leaving Edenton on May 3, 1865, the journal she kept spoke of how beautiful the mornings were along the road to Roanoke, Virginia all the way to the beautiful city of Louisville where they loaded the Conestoga wagon on a steamboat bound for St. Louis, the Gateway to the West. St. Louis brought many new sights, sounds, and smells to her nose, but with only enough money left to join the wagon train to Oregon. If they wanted to have enough money for provisions and to start anew in the Willamette Valley, she knew they could not indulge in any of…
