Patience Thayer

Spouse of Silas Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Patience Thayer was born in 1774 in the Kentucky River country, at the place that would later be laid out as the town of Frankfort, and she lived forty-two years as a dairywoman, a pioneer wife and a mother of hunters. She married Silas Faulkner in 1798, went down the Mississippi with him to Louisiana in 1804, and died in 1816 in an accident at the age of forty-two, leaving four children who carried the Red Ledger into its New Orleans chapter. She was not herself a vampire slayer, but the Faulkner family has always counted her among the people who made the western migration possible. Nobody in the Faulkner archive knows exactly when the Thayers came to Kentucky, and the family register is content to say that Patience was born in 1774, a year when the first stations were being raised at Harrodsburg and Boonesborough and the country beyond the mountains was a place of long hunters, surveyors and a few brave families. The town of Frankfort did not exist for another dozen years, and the name in the register is a later hand's attempt to say where the Thayers had built, at a ford on the Kentucky River where a settler named Frank was killed by Indians in 1780. Her childhood was spent behind log walls, in a world of constant alarms. The stations were forts in which the families slept, the fields were worked in groups under guard, and a child learned before she could read that a cow was worth more than a ribbon and that the first rule of the country was to be home before dark. The word she grew up with was salt. The Kentucky country was threaded with salt licks, where animals gathered and where the settlers boiled brine in iron kettles to cure their meat, and the roads that linked them, the salt roads, were the region's first highways. The Thayers lived on one of those roads, and their cabin became a stopping place for packhorse men, hunters and surveyors. Patience learned dairying in that kitchen. She milked the cows at dawn and dusk, skimmed cream in wide pans, churned butter in a tall dasher churn, pressed cheese in a wooden hoop and carried the surplus in a basket to the neighbours. Dairy work was uncommon on the early frontier, where the settlers lived mainly on corn and game, and a woman who kept a good cow could trade butter for almost anything. She met Silas Faulkner in the late 1790s. He was two years older than she was, born in 1772, a boatman who worked the Ohio and the Kentucky River and who, like his brother, had been called to the vampire slayer's work. The Faulkners had come west with the general tide of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts families, and Silas belonged to the generation that made the move from the coast to the Kentucky stations. They were married in 1798, at a small log church on the river, and she took his name, though the family custom reversed the usual order in the naming of their children. Silas was an easy, quick-tempered, affectionate man who could handle a flatboat in a flood and talk his way out of a river-pirate's ambush, and Patience, who was steady, practical and unafraid of hard work, was the rock on which he leaned. Their eldest, Lewis Thayer Faulkner, was born in 1800 and lived until 1881, long enough to see the railroad come to Louisiana. He did not hunt. Their daughter Eliza Faulkner, born in 1805, lived until 1877, and in 1828 she would marry Hippolyte Delacroix of the New Orleans house of that name, which tied the Faulkners to the Norman-French slayers of the Vieux Carre. Caleb Thayer Faulkner, born in 1807 and dead in 1871, was a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger. The youngest, Silas Thayer Faulkner, born in 1811 and dead in 1855, was also a slayer. Patience bore and raised all four in the first twelve years of the nineteenth century, in two different countries of the American interior. The great journey of her life came in 1804, when Silas, who was a boatman, took the family down the Mississippi. Louisiana had passed from France to the United States the year before, New Orleans was the greatest market of the west, and the Faulkner line, which had been drifting south and west for thirty years, made up its mind to go with the current. Patience was thirty, with a four-year-old son and an infant daughter on the way, and she packed the household into a flatboat with a cow, a churn, a sack of seed corn, a chest of the family's papers and the Red Ledger wrapped in oilcloth at the bottom of a sea chest. The voyage took weeks. The boat slid past the mouth of the Ohio, the Chickasaw Bluffs and the Natchez landing, past bars and sawyers that could tear a hull open, past Spanish garrisons and Indian villages, and on through the wide muddy reaches of the lower river. Silas poled and steered, and Patience kept the cow alive and the children calm. They reached the landing at New Orleans in the early summer. New Orleans was a shock. The smell of the river, the noise of the levee, the languages on every side, the mud streets and the great cathedral on the square were beyond anything she had known. She found a place for a cow on the edge of the town, and within a year she was selling milk, butter and cream to households in the Vieux Carre and to the boarding houses along the river. A dairywoman who could be trusted was a prize in a hot climate, and Patience's name was soon known in a dozen kitchens. The Faulkners took a house on the edge of the city, and from that base Silas began to hunt in the river parishes, and the Red Ledger opened a new Louisiana page. She lived through the War of 1812 there and saw the British army beaten on the plain of Chalmette in January 1815. She was a neighbour to the Delacroix household and a friend to Adele Delacroix, the midwife who delivered her last child. She died in 1816 at the age of forty-two, in an accident on the high ground of the levee, where she had gone to fetch a cow in a storm. The family buried her in the old cemetery and Silas, who lived until 1831, never remarried. Patience Thayer is remembered in the Faulkner line as the dairywoman who came down the river with the Ledger in her sea chest. In the Slayerverse she stands for the many women whose unrecorded labour made it possible for a family of hunters to cross a continent.