Now, in 1843, with Big Bill again on the road during months of her pregnancy, Eliza gave birth to a second daughter, Mary Ann; two years later, twins arrived. The boy, Frank, was healthy, but Frances was sickly from birth and received some seventy visits from a local doctor before she died just short of her second birthday. Eliza tried to protect the seven-year-old John D. from this first lacerating brush with death, but it remained engraved on his memory. When he visited Moravia as an old man in his eighties, he pointed to a field and explained that “when Frances was buried I was sent over to
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