She stops at the beach

Here is everything the county's histories record about her.

She was eighteen. She was the youngest daughter of Charles Dwight. She taught at the Lake Schoolhouse in Van Buren Township. On the twenty-second of June, 1871, she took her pupils to Stone Lake at noon, for a frolic she had promised them.

She had been refusing a young man from over the Elkhart County line, and had declined to receive his company.

She was admired and respected by all who met her.

That is the whole of it. No mother is named. No siblings. No birth year, no birthplace, no house, no word she ever said. She is not mentioned anywhere else in either volume, in any other connection, in nine hundred pages. There is no biography of her family. Her father appears twice in the county's record: once as her father, and once in a list of Van Buren's justices of the peace between 1844 and 1849.

Here is what they record about the man who killed her.

Chauncey Barnes had for some time been paying marked attentions to her. His attempts at a reconciliation had been in vain. He took his disappointment very much to heart. He was suffering from jealousy. He went to see her that day for a last attempt, and madly resolved to end her life and his, if he could not win her.

That is four separate statements about what was going on inside him, in one paragraph, in a book that nowhere records a thought of hers.

He drove up to the beach with a young woman from White Pigeon in the buggy beside him and asked for an interview with the school-teacher. They walked away together a short distance. The children came toward the two of them, sitting at a distance, and heard a shot, and saw Addie Dwight with her hands raised, begging for her life.

The second bullet went through her head.

Then he emptied the revolver into his own head, and when the neighbours reached him he was reloading it.

He was carried to the county jail and for some time was at the point of death, and recovered. A special term of court in December of 1871 was given to his trial and it ran four days, hotly contested, with a considerable number of witnesses. The defence was insanity. Judge Hiram Tousley sat.

He was found guilty and sentenced to the penitentiary for life. The 1882 volume adds that the defence was content with saving the life of the young man, which is the county saying what the real argument had been about.

He is still confined there, the book says, in 1882.

The woman from White Pigeon is never named.

She appears in one clause of one sentence in one book. Nothing says who she was to him, why she was in the buggy, what she saw, or what became of her. Ford, writing in 1920, drops her entirely.

She is described from outside and he is explained from within.

Every word about her is somebody's assessment: charming, admired, respected, beautiful, virtuous, innocent, a victim. She wants nothing and decides nothing anywhere in the record except in one clause, and that clause exists to account for him. Her refusal of his company is not something she did. It is his motive.

He gets the interior life. The attentions, the disappointment, the jealousy, the resolve.

And then the sympathy is redirected, in the text, in a sentence.

much sympathy was expressed for the victim, and indignation toward the murderer. This latter, however, was softened by his attempted suicide, and the sorrow of his family.

His family's sorrow is in the county's permanent record. Hers is not. Her parents appear once more in the whole account, in the trial chapter, as the social position of the parents of the parties, which is given as a reason the trial drew a crowd.

There is one more thing, and it is the sentence that killed her.

she fell dead at the feet of her lover and murderer

He was not her lover. The same paragraph says she had declined to receive his company and that his attempts at reconciliation had been in vain. Two sentences after establishing that she had refused him, the book gives him to her anyway, at the moment of her death.

Ford keeps it. In 1920 he writes that she was murdered by a former lover.

The whole thing is written as a genre.

The beach is quiet and charming. Stone Lake is the most beautiful in the county. The tragedy is sadly romantic and the circumstances mournfully romantic. And the account closes like this:

It was one of those events which, though having a tinge of romance in history and stories of love and sorrow, are too terribly tragic in the real life of one's own generation.

A tinge of romance. That is the last sentence the county's history gives to the killing of an eighteen-year-old schoolteacher in front of her pupils.

Ford's chronology is where a county writes down what happened in a year, one line each.

His entry for 1871 gives her one appearance.

Chauncey Barnes murdered Adda Dwight, of Van Buren Township, then attempted to suicide. He was sentenced for life in the penitentiary.

He is the subject of three clauses. She is the object of one. And her name is spelled wrong.

This piece has nothing to correct. Every fact in the record is, so far as anybody can tell, true. What it has is a shape: a young woman is followed to a beach and stops there, and the man who shot her is followed to the jail, through his recovery, into the courtroom, through four days of testimony, to a sentence, and to a penitentiary where the book leaves him still confined eleven years later.

The book's own index calls it the Addie Dwight Tragedy.

Three pages later, the chapter heading calls it the Dwight and Barnes Tragedy.

By 1920 Ford heads it An Early Tragedy, and names neither of them.