Description
The Wyandotte Gazette gives the following Enoch Arden story for that locality: Over in Platte County, about 12 years ago (~1856), there dwelt the heroine of this story, a maiden, whose cheeks were tinted by the warm African sun, and who, in the course of time, grew and was married to a youth with the same cuticular peculiarity, and the two, as slavery went on in those days, lived very happily together, until within a year or so before the war, when the woman was sold down in one of the southeastern counties of Missouri.
Shortly after her removal, she was again married, living happily also with her second husband. After the war they came to this county, and for the last six months have been living in Wyandotte.
The first husband enlisted in a colored regiment, and was supposed to have been killed; but an inquiry made for him the first of August, at Quindaro, revealed the fact that he was living in the upper part of this county, where he had settled after a long and unsuccessful search for his lost wife.
Hearing of her at last, he came one evening to Wyandotte, about three weeks ago, went to the house, took the precautionary peep through the key hole, and stalked boldly in. The tableau can be imagined.
We are told by our informant that they “argued” all night, as to which of the two should have her, and were about proceeding to blows, when the cause of all this difficulty (the woman, of course) suddenly disappeared, and, strange to say, has not been heard of since.
The two men, made friends by their mutual loss, went together in pursuit of her, but no clue as to her whereabouts has yet been discovered.
The world is made so much richer by this experience, and where Polly has gone, and which one she loved best, are questions that will take rank with the one relating to the personal misfortune of William Patterson, the one bearing upon the identity of McGinness, and that of the repeated query as to the presence among us of a little old Bourbon.
We leave the two husbands with the following moral to comfort them: “Tis better to have loved and lost, Than never have loved at all.”
(Researcher’s note: “Enoch Arden is a famous 1864 narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It tells the tragic story of a sailor who is marooned on a deserted island for over a decade. Upon returning home, he finds his wife happily remarried to his childhood friend, and selflessly chooses to die of a broken heart in silence to preserve her happiness.”)Date(s) of Creation
10/8/1868
