Bernard nor his father was working at that time, and thus they could contribute little. But Clara and Bernard together devised a plan to collect funds to send Irving to Minnesota. The “prairie cure,” which relied on the clear dry air of the Midwest to allay the disease, was popular at the time, and Barton hoped the change in climate would help her nephew. Sure that if she explained the case each of Irving's many friends would contribute a little toward the journey, Clara hoped to collect over one thousand dollars. She was, however, disappointed. Stephen Barton gave a good deal of money, and several Oxford families contributed five or ten dollars to the fund, but the net collection was something under two hundred dollars.64
The family believed the proposed cure was unlikely to aid Irving's health and would be a waste of money on a boy who, though charming and talented, they considered thoroughly spoiled. This attitude annoyed and hurt Clara, and coupled with legitimate worries over Irving's condition and her own sense of futility, it created an intense period of anxiety for her. To her diary she complained that her nerves were “ticklish” and her sleep fitful. In early February 1859, she became so distraught that she could accomplish nothing and spent her time wandering aimlessly.65 A month later, after receiving a letter from Irving that spoke of a greatly worsened condition, her old insomnia returned, and with it the painful physical symptoms that accompanied her periods of mental stress. “I became satisfied then,” she told Elvira Stone, “of what I had mistrusted before, i.e., where the difficulty in my back originates.”66 Her low spirits increased throughout the year until she began again to think life not worth living and meditated forlornly on “the strange duplicity of mankind.”67
It was not only Irving Vassall's case that depressed her but other family obligations as well. Her Aunt Hannah died in February 1859, leaving her “sad and desolate” and saddled with most of the responsibility for the funeral arrangements. Moreover, she worried about her father's increasingly feeble state. When David fell ill that spring, she felt obliged to care for him as of old. She returned to North Oxford to “nurse up” her brother, who was slow to mend, and her own affairs were left in disarray for nearly two months.68 At the same time she took up the cause of Mattie Poor, another young relative. Mattie, then studying music in Boston with high hopes of becoming a concert pianist, had more ambition than talent. Naive and profligate, she ran through the $125 Barton sent her in March 1859 in less than three weeks. Horrified, but unwilling to see the girl's education go unfinished, Barton burdened herself with this additional responsibility.69
She tried to raise her spirits by attending the lectures of fashionable speakers such as poet Oliver Wendell Holmes and travel author Bayard Taylor. She pieced together a quilt, kept up her voluminous correspondence, and took pleasure in a few outings with old friends.70 As the summer wore on, however, her thoughts were increasingly black, her mood ensnared in some terrible, dark cavern of depression. Irving's situation was worsening gradually, and it seemed apparent that her sister and other family members would do little or nothing to aid him. Worse yet, Irving himself had apparently begun to lose courage and seemed reluctant to try the prairie cure or anything else that might help his condition. Finally, convinced that she must shoulder this burden alone if she could not find others to help, Barton sent Irving a bank draft for three hundred dollars. Then, after a thorough check of her finances, she penned him a forceful letter. “You are going to Minnesota as soon as you are able to start, and your mother is going with you,” she wrote, adding that the expense was little to her in comparison with the prospect of his recovery. More money would be forthcoming, she promised, concluding: “So My Boy dont puzzle over it, but get ready, get off and get well, as fast as you can.”71
She felt better with the decision made, despite the worrisome drain on her finances. (The last check to Irving, she confided to a friend, had “exceeded my limit.”72) But, her guilt erased and optimism restored, she could now wax philosophic about her prospects. “I have taken the ‘rough and tumble’ of life and outlived aspirations enough to know something of it,” she told Bernard. “I have helped do just such things as I desire done for Irving and it was a pleasure then, and surely is now to remember it.”73 Feeling more useful and self-satisfied than she had in a year, Barton decided to escalate her role in the matter. Sometime in August she announced that she would accompany Sally and Irving on their trip west and stay to see them settled.
It was a long and difficult journey. Irving's illness was more pronounced than she had been led to hope. His thin, shaky frame was wracked by hemorrhages, during which he lay coughing up blood for hours. Barton met the Vassalls in Washington, where they took the dirty and rattling cars for Chicago. They sat stiff and tired for the three day trip, arriving in Chicago's raw wooden railway terminal on September 18. Irving was sick and worn; he had to lie prone and quiet for a week before they continued on. Though it was her first trip west of New York, Barton was too preoccupied with Irving to experience much beyond a grim determination to settle him in a healthful atmosphere; she recorded no impression of Chicago's rough streets or the wide stretches of waving prairie grass, so different from the rocks and rills of Hubbell s. Before her opinion could be formed, they traveled on from Chicago to Duluth, where they stopped for several days.74
Barton stayed with her sister and Irving until late November. They tried a number of towns in their search for a place to settle permanently but could not find one that suited them exactly. Irving, in despair over his ebbing strength, became pettish and was rarely satisfied with food, lodging, or location. Sally Vassall was also tired and exasperated, and it fell to Clara to keep them in good cheer. A woman who met them at this time remembered her as “a small person with a very bright face and at times very serious. Often she was gay, too.” Clara talked with Irving of slavery and politics, took him on excursions to see the Mississippi River, and tried to make herself useful to the families who generously put them up.75 One family was surprised to find her building a cupboard from rough boards when she saw that they had need for one. Another man remembered the gracious and cheerful way in which Clara “refused to deprive the ‘little sisters’ of their bed, and slept on the floor,” and how she loaned her “dancing slippers” to a disappointed girl whose own had been forgotten. Later in life the girl would brag that “she stood in Clara Barton's shoes a whole evening.”76
Finally, short of money and recognizing her own need to find a job, Barton returned home. Once there, however, her depression only worsened. To her discomfort she found her finances even less secure than she had supposed. Her old nervous condition was back and within a few weeks was so bad that she could scarcely leave her bed. She was also distressed to hear that both Bernard and his father were still essentially unemployed and unable to contribute to Irving's support. Worse yet, she either sensed or imagined a lack of hospitality on the part of David and Julie. Convinced that they wished her to leave, she felt more beholden than ever. In despair, she told Bernard that she had sent Irving thirty dollars more, but that he “must meet the next demand. I have very little money, no credit, no business, no prospect of any, and sick in bed, and unlike either of you, no home.”77
Two weeks later Irving sent a request for additional funds, which Barton felt unable to raise. He also wrote that he disliked Minnesota, found it unbearably cold, and wanted to return to Washington for the winter. To underscore his point he allowed that his health had worsened in the Midwest. Alarmed that the boy might leave Minnesota before the cure had a chance to work and completely exasperated at his demanding and ungrateful attitude, Barton's patience gave way. “Can it be that he is so trifling and selfish?” she asked Bernard. “Would he subject us to all he has…and then after we are all beggared, rob us of all the little chance of gratification we could possibly have, viz to see him try to improve a little under our exertions.” If so, she concluded, “if there's not more than this to him, he is not worth trying to save.”78
Her reserves of cheer and strength were giving out now, eaten away by worries real and imagined. Mattie Poor, who had also overrun her funds, refused to leave her studies, though she was now more than qualified to teach music. She demanded Clara's continued
