Naomi Nichols

Spouse of Levi Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Naomi Nichols was born in 1777 in the Watauga settlements of eastern Tennessee and spent sixty-three years as a herbalist, a wife and a mother in the river towns of the state. She married Levi Proctor, the teamster and vampire slayer of the White Ledger, in 1800, bore him two sons who both became hunters, and outlived him by twelve years, dying in 1840 of what her neighbours called the sweating sickness. She was never a slayer herself, and she was not born a Proctor, but the family's own tradition names her as the person who kept the White Ledger's western branch alive through a hard quarter-century. The Nichols family belonged to the first wave of settlers on the Watauga River, the small community that in the 1770s had governed itself as an independent association before North Carolina took it in. Naomi was born into a cabin with a puncheon floor and a stick-and-clay chimney, in a settlement where everything was built from trees, and where a child might see a bear, a panther or a war party before she saw a church. She learned her letters from a Presbyterian circuit preacher and her plants from her grandmother, who had brought with her from the Carolina piedmont a knowledge of the roots, barks and leaves of the southern mountains that no printed book contained. The Appalachian forests were a pharmacy. Naomi learned that the bark of the wild cherry quieted a cough, that the root of the ginseng fetched a price from the Chinese trade and could be dug in autumn, that goldenseal healed sores, that black cohosh eased women's pain, that sassafras purified the spring blood, that boneset broke a fever and that slippery elm soothed a throat. She learned to gather by the moon and the season, to dry on the rafters and to brew in a covered pot. By the time she was fifteen she was the best herbalist in the settlement, and neighbours sent for her in preference to the nearest doctor, forty miles away. She met Levi Proctor when she was seventeen, when a wagon train came through the Watauga country and one of its teamsters, a tall, quiet man with a grey-eyed stare, turned up at her door with a gashed forearm. She dressed the wound with yarrow and a strip of clean linen. He came back a week later, ostensibly to have it looked at again, and a third time, and by the end of the year he had asked her grandfather for permission to court. They were married in 1800, in the same cabin where she had been born. Levi, then twenty-six, was a slayer of the White Ledger, known as The Gentle Spindle, and Naomi, who had guessed at the nature of his work long before he told her, said that she had known he was a hunter by the way he entered a room, and that she would rather be married to a man who knew what was in the dark than to one who did not. Her own work complemented his. Levi's hunting took him along the wagon roads for weeks at a time, and when he came home he was often hurt, worn out or soaked to the skin. Naomi nursed him and, increasingly, the other hunters who came through. She became the White Ledger's healer in the west, the woman to whom injured slayers were sent when a doctor was out of the question. She knew what to do for a bite, a broken bone, an arrow wound, a fever of the marshes or the poison of a bad night spent too close to something that should not have been touched. In her kitchen garden she kept a bed of plants that the Watauga women had never grown, including a few brought from the Shenandoah by her husband's family. The White Ledger records more than a dozen hunters she treated over the years, and three who, in the family's telling, would have died without her. Their sons were born in the first years of the marriage. Edwin Nichols Proctor, born in 1802 and dead in 1846, and Albert Nichols Proctor, born in 1805 and dead in 1848, were both called to the work and both became vampire slayers of the White Ledger. She raised them with a mixture of firmness and humour, taught them to recognise a hundred plants before they could read a primer, and was a constant presence at their training in the orchard behind the house. Levi taught them the hunt; Naomi taught them how to live through it. She insisted that each carry a small oilcloth pouch with a needle, thread, a pinch of yarrow and a twist of clean linen, and that each come home by a fixed hour or send word. The War of 1812 came to Tennessee as a call for volunteers. The state sent thousands of men south and west against the Creek nation and then to the defence of New Orleans, and the settlements were left with their women, children and old men. Naomi served as the district's doctor through those years, treating the sick, the wounded and the confused, and she took a great many lessons from the experience. She learned the value of clean water. She learned that a soldier with a stomach complaint should not be bled. She learned to say no to the men who wanted to cut a limb. The loss of her husband in 1828, in an ambush on a lonely road, was the great sorrow of her life. She was fifty-one and found herself in a house full of his things. She did not leave the settlement, and she did not stop gardening. The family moved, in the early 1830s, to one of the growing river towns on the Cumberland, where the boats came and went and where a herbalist could sell her medicines to boatmen, merchants and the families of the new brick houses. She opened a small shop and kept up her practice until the end. She died in 1840, at the age of sixty-three, of a fever that the old people called the sweating sickness, which swept the town that summer and took a good many. Her sons, both grown men and hunters, buried her beside Levi in the churchyard on the hill. Naomi Nichols is remembered in the Proctor family as the herbalist of the Watauga, the woman who kept the western hunters alive. In the Slayerverse she is honoured for the healer's work behind the hunter's, which was no less a part of the long contest between the White and Red Ledgers.