She left him a lamp with enough oil to last the evening and a picture of water for the wash basin, and she said good night and went to do her own work. In the morning she made eggs and coffee and fresh bread, and she set it on the kitchen table and called him when it was ready. Gerald Marsh sat down across from her and looked at the breakfast and then at her and said, "My associate told me this was the best accommodation in the county. I thought he was being polite." And Eleanor said he was being accurate. Marsh said he stayed 3 days instead of one, rearranging his schedule by telegram with the particular ease of a man who has the authority to rearrange his own schedule.
On his second day, he asked Eleanor, with the careful directness of a man accustomed to business conversations, whether she had considered formalizing the hospitality operation. "I have a room," she said. "Two rooms." "That's not an operation. It's a farm with visitors. It's a business," he said.
"A good one. There are people, families, business travelers, people moving west who would pay for exactly what you're providing. Good food, clean rooms, personal attention. There's nothing like it within 60 mi. Eleanor looked at him.
You're a businessman, she said. What would you do? He told her. He was clear and specific because those were apparently the only modes he had. And what he told her was not complicated.
Document the costs, formalize the pricing, establish a reputation through word of mouth, which she had already begun, and expand at a pace she could sustain without sacrificing the quality that made it worth stopping for. "You don't need to become a hotel," he said. "You need to become the place people tell other people about." "You're already that." He gestured at the kitchen, the farm visible through the window, the evidence of organized productivity in every direction. You're already that," he said again. Elellanar thought about the lamp in the window, the table that could seat strangers, the place that said you are welcome here.
"Thank you," she said. "She meant it plainly, and he received it plainly, and that was the entirety of that." What she did not anticipate was what Gerald Marsh did when he got back to Chicago. He wrote a letter to a cousin who wrote for a regional paper. He mentioned in the course of the letter the remarkable farm outside Willow Creek, Montana, operated by a Miss Eleanor Whitmore, which offered the finest hospitality he'd encountered in the Western Territories. He mentioned it as an aside, the way a man mentions something he wants to share, but doesn't expect anyone to do much with.
His cousin found it charming and mentioned it column. The column was short, but it was printed. Eleanor found out about it when three people arrived on the same day in late July. Two families traveling west and a journalist from Helena who said he was writing about the growth of homestead hospitality in the territory and had seen her name in print. She stood at her door looking at the journalist and said I saw my name in print.
Yes, ma'am. He said Gerald Marsh's endorsement. It ran in the Chicago paper. You didn't know? I did not know.
She said. The journalist, a young man named Callaway, eager and slightly sunburned, produced the clipping from his breast pocket with the pride of a person who has brought a gift. She read it standing at her front door. Gerald Marsh had called her farm a testament to what determined American womanhood can build from nothing. He had called the food the finest I have eaten west of the Mississippi.