The Caldwell tribune. [volume] (Caldwell, Idaho Territory [Idaho]) 1883-1928, 1889-06-29
4 Pathetic Story.

Siberia by administrative process in
1878. l became very well acquain-
ted with them, and for Mrs. Chernia-
vski especially l came to feel the
profoundest pity and regard. Few
women, even in Russia, have had be.
fore the age of thirty-five so tragic
and eart-breaking a life, and still
fewer have maintained tn odgh hard
ships. sickness and bereavement such
cheerfulness and courage. She was
arrested id Odessa in the early part
of 1873 at the age of about twenty
five; and after a long term of i'm
prisonment was sent by administers
tive process to the province of To-
bolsk: In the city prison of Kiev,
on the way to Siberia, she was de-
tained for q few, and while there was
forced to be almost an eyewitness OF
the assassination of her dearest
friend. A young man of English
decent named Beverly, whom she had
known from childhood, had been
arrested shortly before upon the
charge of living on a false passport
and carrying ON q revolu-
tionary propaganda, and
he was at that time in the
Kiev prison. The night before Mrs.
CherniavSki was to resume her jour
ney to Siberia, Ceverly, with COM
rade named Izbitski, attempted to
escape through a tunnel which they
had succeeded in digging from their
cell to u point outside the prison
wall. The prison authorities, how
ever, had in some way become aware
of the existence of the tunnel, and
had posted a squat of soldiers near
the place where the fugitives must
emerge from the ground. Late at
night, when they made their appear
ance, they were received with vol
ley of musketry. Beverly was NOR
tally wounded, and as he lay with
ing on the ground he was dispatched
by soldier with several repeated
bayonet-thrusts. Izbitski, wounded
and severely beaten, was taken back
into prison. The next morning when
Mrs. Cherniavski started with her
party for Siberia she had to march
past the bloody and disfgured body
of her dearest friend, which was still
living where it had fallen, in plain
sight OF the prison windows.
II can bear my own personal tor
ment," she said to me with a sob as
she finished the story of this tragedy,
but such things as that break my
heart
Il need not recount the hardships
and miseries that she, cultivated
and refined woman, endured on the
road and in the roadside etapes. be-
tween Kiev and the small town in
the Siberian province of Tobolsk
where she and her husband had been
assigned residence. They reached
their destination at last, a child
was there born to them, and they
lived there in something like COM
fort until March, 1881, when Alex
ander III. came to the throne, and
Mr.. Cherniavski was required to take
the oath OF allegiance. He rtfused
to d. so, and they were sent further
eastward to the town of Krasnoy-
arsk. A second refusal to take the
oath of allegiance resulted in their
being sent to Irkutsk. By this time
winter had set in, and they were
travelling in an open tarantas with a
delicate baby thirteen months of
age. 1t was with the greatest diff
Guilty that Mrs. Cherniaski could
keep her baby warm. and at the last
station before reaching Irkutsk she
the heavy wrappings in
which she had enveloped it and found
it dead. With the shock of this dis
covery she became delirious, and
wept, sang pathetic little nursery
songs to her dead child, rocked it in
her arms, and prayed and cursed
God by turns. In the courtyard of
the Irkutsk forwarding prison, in a
temperature of thirty degrees below
zero, Mr.. Cherniavski stood for half
an hour waiting for the party to be
formally received, with his wife raw
ing in Gelirium beside HIM and his
dead child in his arms.
''Mrs. Cherniavski lay in theprison
hospital at Irkutsk until she recover
ed her reason, and to some extent
her strength, and then sent two
thousand miles farther to the north
eastward under guard of gendarmes,
and colonized in a Yakut settlement
known as the Bataruski ooloos, sit
uated in the 'tiaga' or primeval will
derness of Yakutsk, one hundred and
sixtv-fve miles from the nearest
town. There, suffering almost every
conceivable hardship and privation,
they lived until 1884, when the Min
lister of the Interior allowed them to
return to O more civilized part of ST.
IBERIA.
'Mrs. Cheruiavski when / made her
was pale, delicate,
hollow-cheeked woman, whose health
had been completely wrecked by
years of Imprisonment, Punishment
and grief. She had had two chill
dren, and had lost them both in ex-
lie under circumstances that made
the bereavement almost intolerable;
for seven years she had been separ-
uted by a. distance of many thous-
and miles from all of her kindred;
and the future seemed to hold for her
nothing except the love
of her husband whose exile she could
still share, but whose interests she
could.do SO little in her broken state
of health to promote. She had not
been able to step outside the house
for two months, and it seemed to me,
when i babe her goodby, that her
life of unhappiness and suffering was
to close.
II do not know whether Mrs.