She walked at the rear of the caravan. This meant she ate the dust of hundreds of wagons and thousands of hooves, every day, for months. It meant she was responsible for animals that could stray or be lost in terrain where losing them was costly. It meant she was at the most exposed and vulnerable position in a column of travelers on a route that was not safe. She did this while caring for her daughters and serving as midwife for other travelers.
She could not read the deed she signed in 1866. Someone had to read it to her and explain what it said. She signed a document she could not verify was what she had been told it was. This required trust in the people around her, and that trust was justified — the deed was real, the transaction was legitimate, the property was hers. But the dependency that illiteracy created was a real vulnerability, and navigating it required the sustained cultivation of trustworthy relationships.
She treated smallpox patients. This was dangerous. The people who died of smallpox died badly, and the people who cared for them were exposed to a disease that could kill them too. She did it anyway, with herbal treatments that could not cure the disease but could manage its symptoms and reduce suffering. She was present in those sickrooms.
She visited prisoners in the county jail. Prisoners in a nineteenth-century county jail were not in a comfortable or dignified environment. Visiting them was not glamorous philanthropy. It was showing up in an unglamorous place for people who had been discarded by the society that put them there, and providing them with material goods and human contact.