Sisters in Jeopardy
Copyright© 2026 by Rachael Jane
Chapter 3: St. Louis
The river steamer that carried Lise north from New Orleans was a world unto itself ... loud, crowded, and restless. The paddle-wheel churned the muddy water day and night, sending up a spray that clung to everything like a film of sweat. The air was thick with humidity and the smell of river mud, tobacco smoke, and the sharp tang of engine oil.
Unable to afford an inside berth, Lise found a place on the open deck among other emigrants, her satchel tucked beneath her feet. She watched the city fade behind them ... the levee, the warehouses, the slave markets, the shouting vendors ... until it dissolved into the haze of the delta behind them.
The boat pushed northward, past plantations and swamps, past shacks on stilts and grand houses with white columns. Lise watched it all with wide eyes. This land felt wild, untamed, dangerous. At night, the air buzzed with insects. The heat was suffocating. She slept on the deck with dozens of others, the stars hidden behind a veil of clouds.
The river widened as they travelled north, its banks lined with cypress trees draped in Spanish moss. Plantations rose from the mist like ghosts ... white columned mansions, sprawling fields, rows of dark skinned slaves working under the watchful eyes of overseers. Lise had never seen such wealth, nor such cruelty. It unsettled her in ways she could not name.
At night, the deck was alive with murmured conversations in German, Dutch, French, and English. Lise started to pick up on English words and phrases. Although many of her fellow travellers spoke German, Lise knew that wouldn’t always be the case once she reached St. Louis. Some travellers spoke of farmland in the Midwest. Others of gold in California. A few warned of cholera upriver, of river pirates, of steamboat boilers that exploded without warning.
Lise listened, absorbing every detail. The language, names of places, and dangers to avoid. She had no room for fear. Only purpose.
The steamer stopped at Memphis, then Cairo, where the Ohio River met the Mississippi. Each stop brought new passengers ... farmhands seeking work, families fleeing debt, men with shovels slung over their shoulders and dreams of Californian gold in their eyes.
Lise kept to herself, clutching her satchel whenever the deck grew crowded. Several men propositioned her, but didn’t push further when she declined. There were plenty of other young women to choose from aboard the boat. Lise slept lightly, waking at every shout from the crew or jolt of the boat against a dock.
The river grew colder as they moved north. The air lost its swampy heaviness and took on a sharper edge. Lise wrapped her shawl tighter around her shoulders and watched the landscape change ... flat fields giving way to rolling hills, the trees thinning as they entered a cooler climate.
Lise felt her breath catch when the steamer finally rounded the bend and St. Louis came into view. The city sprawled along the river front ... warehouses, steamboats, muddy streets, and a forest of masts and chimneys. Smoke hung over everything like a low ceiling. The levee was a frenzy of movement: men hauling crates, horses pulling wagons, children darting between piles of cargo.
St. Louis was called the gateway to the West. According to her father’s one and only letter home, this was where he had been two years before. This was where she would begin her search. Lise stepped onto the levee, overwhelmed by the noise and the press of bodies. She clutched her satchel and moved with the crowd, her heart pounding.
The first boardinghouse she approached turned her away. “No rooms for single women,” the keeper said, not unkindly. The second demanded more money than she had. The third slammed the door in her face.
By dusk, Lise’s feet ached and her stomach growled. She wandered the muddy streets near the river front, where saloons and gambling dens spilled light and laughter into the night. Men lounged in doorways, their eyes following her with an interest she didn’t welcome.
She kept walking until she found a narrow alley where a faded sign hung crookedly above a door in English and German: ‘The Red Lantern Saloon: Der Saloon Rote Laterne’.
The windows were fogged with smoke. Music drifted out ... fiddle, laughter, the clink of glasses. A woman in a worn low-cut dress leaned against the door frame, smoking a pipe. She looked Lise up and down with a practised eye.
“You lookin’ for work?” the woman asked. She repeated her question in German when Lise clearly didn’t understand her question in English.
Lise hesitated. “Ja. Yes.”
“Can you clean? Serve drinks? Keep your head down?” says the woman in German.
“Yes,” Lise said again, though her voice trembled.
The woman nodded toward the inside of the saloon. “Talk to Herr Möller. He’s always needin’ help. Girls come and go.”
Lise stepped inside. The air was thick with tobacco smoke and the smell of spilled beer and whiskey. Men crowded around tables, shouting over card games. A piano played off-key in the corner. The floor was sticky beneath her boots.
Behind the bar stood a broad-shouldered man with an unshaven face and a stained apron. He looked up as she approached.
“What do you want?” he asked with a strong German accent.
“A job,” Lise said, forcing her voice to steady. Although she spoke in English her German accent was unmistakeable.
“You’re German,” he said.
“Yes. I can work hard. I don’t need much pay. Just enough to live,” she replies in German, unable to say those words in English.
Möller studied her for a long moment, his eyes narrowing.
“You got a place to stay?”
“No.”
He grunted switching to speaking in German. “You can sleep in the storeroom. It ain’t much, but it’s dry. Pay’s a dollar a week, plus meals. You clean in the mornings, serve in the evenings. You don’t drink on the job. You don’t talk back. Understand?”
Lise nodded.
“Good,” he said. “You can start now.”
And just like that, she had a job.
Not the job she wanted. Not the life she imagined. But a foothold. A place to begin.
She followed Möller into the back room, the noise of the saloon fading behind her. She set her satchel on the floor and took a deep breath. She was alone in America. But she was still moving forward.
By the end of her first week in St. Louis, the Red Lantern Saloon had become Lise’s world ... dim, smoky, and loud, a place where daylight rarely penetrated and where the river’s damp breath seeped through the floorboards. Her first days had blurred together in a haze of scrubbing floors, wiping tables sticky with spilled whiskey, and carrying tankards to men who barely noticed her except to leer or bark for more.
She quickly learned to keep her eyes down. To move fast. To speak little.