She was herself the motherless child of Robert Foulkes, a hardworking but somewhat improvident teamster on the Express Route between Big Bend and Reno.  His daily avocation, when she was not actually with him in the wagon, led to an occasional dispersion of herself and her progeny along the road and at wayside stations between those places.  But the family was generally collected together by rough but kindly hands already familiar with the handling of her children.  I have a very vivid recollection of Jim Carter trampling into a saloon, after a five-mile walk through a snowdrift, with an Amplach twin in his pocket.  “Suthin’ ought to be done,” he growled, “to make Meary a little more careful o’ them Amplach children; I picked up one outer the snow a mile beyond Big Bend.”  “God bless my soul!” said a casual passenger, looking up hastily; “I didn’t know Mr. Amplach was married.”  Jim winked diabolically at us over his glass.  “No more did I,” he responded gloomily, “but you can’t tell anything about the ways o’ them respectable, psalm-singing jay birds.”  Having thus disposed of Amplach’s character, later on, when he was alone with Mary, or “Meary,” as she chose to pronounce it, the rascal worked upon her feelings with an account of the infant Amplach’s sufferings in the snowdrift and its agonized whisperings for “Meary!  Meary!” until real tears stood in Mary’s blue eyes.  “Let this be a lesson to you,” he concluded, drawing the ninepin dexterously from his pocket, “for it took nigh a quart of the best forty-rod whisky to bring that child to.”  Not only did Mary firmly believe him, but for weeks afterwards “Julian Amplach”—­this unhappy twin—­was kept in a somnolent attitude in the cart, and was believed to have contracted dissipated habits from the effects of his heroic treatment.

Her numerous family was achieved in only two years, and succeeded her first child, which was brought from Sacramento at considerable expense by a Mr. William Dodd, also a teamster, on her seventh birthday.  This, by one of those rare inventions known only to a child’s vocabulary, she at once called “Misery”—­probably a combination of “Missy,” as she herself was formerly termed by strangers, and “Missouri,” her native State.  It was an excessively large doll at first—­Mr. Dodd wishing to get the worth of his money—­but time, and perhaps an excess of maternal care, remedied the defect, and it lost flesh and certain unemployed parts of its limbs very rapidly.  It was further reduced in bulk by falling under the wagon and having the whole train pass over it, but singularly enough its greatest attenuation was in the head and shoulders—­the complexion peeling off as a solid layer, followed by the disappearance of distinct strata of its extraordinary composition.  This continued until the head and shoulders were much too small for even its reduced frame, and all the devices of childish millinery—­a shawl secured with tacks and well hammered in, and a hat which tilted backward and forward and never