Dear Sir,
I would be happy to take in the little girl I read about in your paper, Anette Pedersen. I will give her a good home and all the care she needs. I am a widow with a tender heart and good fortune enough to share, and a nice snug home in Lincoln where she wouldn’t have to do a lick of work, the poor child.
Dear Sir,
I am sending a dollar to Anette Pedersen, the little child who has lost a hand. Please make sure it gets to her.
To the General Public:
We have added Anette Pedersen to the roll of the Heroine Fund. All donations earmarked for her will go directly to her and she will share, along with the others, any donations that are given without any recipient designated.
THE HEROINE FUND
We are pleased to announce that the following Good and Generous citizens have made contributions to the Heroine Fund, originally started here at the Bee:
Mrs. Charles Wentworth donated $5 to Raina Olsen
Mr. Reed Garner donated $7 to Minnie Freeman
Mr. and Mrs. James Farmer donated $2 to Raina Olsen
The Bastable Boarding School in Lincoln has offered free tuition, room, and board to Anette Pedersen
Mr. Jacob Pendergrast donated $2 each to Raina Olsen and Minnie Freeman, and sets aside $5 for the education of Anette Pedersen
The Presbyterian Congregation of Grunby, Nebraska, took up a collection, the sum of which （$10） is to be divided equally between the three heroines
A former medical officer in the Grand Army of the Republic, who wishes to remain anonymous, donates a custom-made wooden hand to Anette Pedersen once she is recovered
THE HEROINE FUND UPDATE
As of this date, it totals nearly $15,000, spread nearly evenly among the three heroines.
RAINA OLSEN AND HER PUPILS
Today, February 5, Raina Olsen reopened her schoolroom, the scene of much horror and drama during the Great Blizzard. The Bee sent a photographer out to capture the moment. Pictured is Miss Olsen with most of her students. Since the creation of the Heroine Fund, Miss Olsen has been inundated with many proposals of marriage, although the innocent maid protests, stating that she is too focused on her pupils right now to think of anything else.
The exploits of the heroines were picked up by the wire services and ran everywhere, east and west, although it was the Bee that saw the greatest increase in readership because Nebraskans thought of them as their own. Everyone was touched by the girls’ plight; everyone on the prairie was proud of the schoolteachers. The updates on Anette’s health, which continued to improve, were followed as anxiously as the travails of a maiden in a dime novel.
One woman, in particular, followed those updates, although how she first became aware of them, no one, later, would be able to say. The woman could not read English and wouldn’t have been able to afford to buy a newspaper anyway. Or have access to one. Perhaps a neighbor had braved the weather to alert her to the news of this child. Perhaps someone recognized her name, now forgotten by most—if, indeed, they even knew she had a name—until the girl became famous overnight.
But this woman got on a mule one day, according to her husband. She told him and her sons that she would be back in a week, perhaps—she was hazy on that, that was what the husband remembered, later. In fact, she’d done some things to make him wonder if she planned on coming back at all—she took her meager wardrobe with her, her one comb that still had a few teeth in it, a tarnished silver spoon she’d brought from the old country. She told him to try and remember to feed the boys, for heaven’s sake. And then she was gone.
What no one knew but her was that she had seen something bright, something possibly beautiful, glistening on the horizon. She’d never had anything bright or beautiful in her life—except for that spoon, which, in truth, she’d stolen. She’d only known misery, poverty, hunger. She couldn’t remember why she came to America in the first place. Poverty was poverty wherever you lived. Maybe she’d just been swept up in the tide of others coming. She wasn’t the type of person to display initiative on her own. Life was short and cruel; it had its own plans and it was only fools who tried to outsmart it.