Katherine Dudley

Name: Katherine Dudley, introduces herself as ‘Katie’

Height: 5’11”

Age: 24

Hair: straight brown, worn pulled back into a neat bun

Eyes: blue

Features: dark eyebrows, faintly upturned nose, full cupid’s bow lips, soft jaw and strong chin, rosy cheeks and a bright smile she finds progressively easier to smile the closer she gets to either saving enough to return ‘back East’ or to eking out a decent living for herself here in Copper Ridge.

Personality: Raised to be a proper young lady she is softspoken, amiable and polite but speaks her mind when she feels the need and is opinionated in favor of women’s suffrage and with her family having had strong abolitionist leanings and connections is more than a little proud that her home state of Maine rescinded its law against interracial marriage this same year of 1883, well-mannered to the point of being prim and proper, kind, stubborn and resourceful, determined to make the best of bad situations and hope for the best, her tidiness goes hand in hand with her modesty and she is swiftly learning to become frugal and thrifty though she is inexperienced at handling her own finances, necessity has become her teacher.

Likes: the glimmer of hope she has here in Copper Ridge, the sense of self-sufficiency she is beginning to feel now, the distance she managed to put between herself and her brothel-owning ‘husband’.

Hates: how often the days are blistering hot and devoid of breezes, the dust that rises from the main road, the husband she ran away from, being afraid of the possibility that he might find her and try to use the marriage certificate to drag her back.

Clothing: she owns a couple gingham and muslin dresses, has a hat with dried flowers sewn into the band around it, and a pair of button-up shoes that are fast becoming well-worn.

Backstory: Born and raised in the small Maine town of Friendship, she grew up by the sea and may pine for it at times. With the typical education of the time, she had the one-room schoolhouse experience. She had arranged to travel to San Francisco as a mail order bride. Upon arriving after the long and costly rail journey to meet her husband-to-be, she discovered that she had been duped. The man was actually a cad who had gotten several mail order brides to pay their own way out unknowing that he was in truth he wasn’t looking for wives, he was looking to fill a brothel. While only one of those marriages is legal, he is in possession of a very official-looking marriage certificate with her signature and the signature of a minister and witnesses on it. Despite that, she ran away from that shockingly unacceptable situation with only one suitcase, her sewing basket, the clothes on her back, and enough money to buy a train ticket as far as she could get toward ‘back East’, which was the town of Copper Ridge. Once off the train there with only five dollars to her name, she found herself friendless and destitute. It has only been a few weeks since she set foot in town and she is playing the seamstress sitting beside the front of the general store with her sewing basket offering to “mend clothes while you wait” for nickels and dimes.

Notes: She knows that her ‘marriage’ was a sham and uses her maiden name of Dudley. She manages to keep herself fed and pay for a room at one of the boarding houses, and is trying to keep a savings on top of that.