Faith and Betrayal: A Pioneer Woman's Passage in the American West

September 23, 1873. Jean Rio delivers the Ayer baby girl at five-fifteen p.m., after a relatively easy labor, and the mother sleeps quietly for the next several hours. "Had a good night," Jean Rio records in her midwife's notebook. ("The baby grows nicely [and] all seemed to enjoy themselves," she notes nearly a month later, after the mother brings the newborn and the rest of her children to pay a visit.)

It is not always as easy as it might seem. Even the uncomplicated births like Mrs. Ayer's are trials, the mother usually moaning and screaming in desperation through a long, painful labor to the final agony and then the sudden release of delivery. Often there are tests and horrors Jean Rio must face and somehow cope with, using only her hands and her self-taught skills, experience, and inherent fortitude--hemorrhaging or mortally ill mothers; distressed, deformed, or stillborn babies--a bloody life-and-death struggle no less of a test than any battle faced by a man.

When she cleans up afterward, changing one plain dress--now stained--for another, washing the blood and afterbirth from her hands and arms, she removes her rings, a fine gold band and an exquisite small sapphire set in platinum. They are hardly the rings of a hardworking midwife on the raw California frontier of the late nineteenth century. She might seem a plain, even ordinary, woman of her time and place. But the unexpected grace and beauty of the rings match her own dignity and gentility. The rings signal that she is something other than an ordinary woman.

In her diary entry for October 23, she allows herself one of the rare references these days to the past that the rings echo. "Clear and lovely as a spring morning in England," she writes. "This summer was worth a long walk to see." How long a walk it has been, what a dramatic journey full of trust and betrayal, faith and disillusion, defeat and triumph, loss and gain! None of her new friends and neighbors in this rural hamlet can imagine it.

Only the rings and her obvious refinement and intellect, partially obscured by her unpretentious bearing, give a hint of the stark contrast between her past and present. Once she wore the finest gowns of European couture--a wardrobe so vast it had taken nearly an entire wagon to transport. Here she dresses in homespun. Once she performed the classics of song on the stages of Paris and London. Now she performs the exhausting rites of life and death, work no woman of her former station would have deigned to do. Most dramatically, once she was a prize convert to a powerful faith. Now she lives as a discreet fugitive from the betrayal of all that brought her here.

Chapter Two
A Wine Cask on the Channel

Tumbrils filled with entire families rolled along the cobblestone streets of Paris toward the guillotine amid howls and screams. All day, every day during 1792, the killing device was busy, corpses piling up faster than they could be disposed of. More than forty thousand people went to their deaths in those small carts. The decapitation was swift, taking less than half a second from the blade drop to the rolling head--the guillotine was "an instrument adopted by the Revolutionists for the more scientific and humane beheading of the condemned." Almost all the members of the Rio family from Lamballe, Brittany--renamed Cotes-du-Nord by the revolutionary government--were among them. "Hourly, the hideous instrument of torture claimed its many victims--old men, young women, tiny children--until the day when it would finally demand the head of a King and of a beautiful young Queen," as one fictional account put it.

Entire generations were eliminated, as victims of all ages were placed facedown on a bench. "The mechanism falls like lightning; the head flies off; the blood spurts; the man no longer exists," Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin once explained to a nervous audience. The instrument, however, wasn't always that efficient.

Many of the Rios, like thousands of others, had tried to flee--to England, Belgium, Scotland, Holland, Canada, or the United States. At least one small Rio girl would be delivered from the bloodbath.

In Paris in the summer of 1789, during the earliest phase of the French Revolution--the "Great Fear"--a manservant long devoted to a wealthy French couple from the Rio clan placed their infant daughter in a wine cask. Thus concealed, the baby was smuggled across the English Channel. Her parents and every known family member are believed to have stayed behind, and to have become victims of the revolutionists. Once in England, the guardian christened his tiny refugee with the name Susanna Ann Burgess while providing her with protection in a new land.