American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  Richmond, Carolyn, Cynthia, and Cherity saw Seth’s train off two weeks later. The good-byes were sad. The women cried. Seth held Cherity several long seconds, though neither found words suitable for the occasion. They fell apart, located each the other’s eyes, and tried in one last fleeting second to say with them what neither had been able to in words. Seth attempted a smile, such as it was, then turned one last time to his father. Richmond’s heart wept, though his eyes remained dry.

  The train pulled out. The watchers stood stoic and silent, crying again. Seth, from an open window, waved and shouted a few last words of farewell. He would save his own tears until he was alone.

  The train picked up speed and disappeared from sight. The four waited a minute longer, then slowly turned and made their way across the platform to the waiting carriage.

  “We are all together,” said Carolyn, “the four of us… yet suddenly it feels very, very lonely here.”

  The Virginia papers were full every day of news proclaiming the buildup of the Confederate Army and predictions of a quick end to the conflict. With the army under generals Lee and Beauregard growing rapidly and far readier for battle than Union forces, a march on Washington and takeover of the capital seemed about to commence any week. It was well-known that Lincoln’s call for troops to reinforce the capital had not yet materialized.

  But no march on defenseless Washington was planned throughout the month of May, nor even June. By then Lincoln’s reinforcements arrived. The Union Army began amassing for an attempted invasion of northern Virginia and march toward the Confederate capital of Richmond.

  Both sides were impatient to invade, yet neither was ready to make a move. The waiting continued.

  The first indication that the war had begun in earnest, and was close by, came in early July. Hearing rumors that Beauregard’s forces were on the march from the Carolinas, Richmond disappeared early one morning by horseback and took the road east. Within ten miles, from the vantage point of a low hill, he saw stretched out below him the vast throng of grey-clad soldiers heading north in endless columns. The sight took his breath away. All he could think was, Might Thomas be among them!

  He watched until they were gone, saddened anew at what now seemed inevitable, then turned and made his way at a more leisurely pace home to Greenwood. Whatever the future held, there seemed little doubt that this region of Virginia, sitting almost directly between the two capitals of Washington and Richmond, would find itself in the very middle of it.

  Carolyn and both girls heard the approach of hooves and hurried out to the porch.

  “What did you see?” asked Carolyn.

  “It is as reported,” sighed Richmond, dismounting and walking toward them. “General Beauregard’s troops moving north to head off an invasion from Washington.”

  “Was Thomas there… did you see him?” asked the anxious mother.

  “Carolyn… there were thirty or forty thousand men. It was a vast throng.”

  “Forty… thousand!” exclaimed Carolyn, reaching for a chair and sitting down.

  “There is no doubt now,” said Richmond, “this is a war. Many will die. My heart breaks to imagine it.”

  The invasion of the Union army into northern Virginia came on the eighteenth of July. It met General Beauregard’s forces at Manasses Junction beside Bull Run Creek just a few miles into Virginia on the twenty-first. Over seventy thousand men, Americans all, finally clashed and their rifles and cannons echoed deadly volleys across the ground that separated the two armies.8

  The fighting lasted most of the day. Finally Beauregard’s forces sent the badly disorganized Union army fleeing back toward Washington in a panicky mob. By day’s end, over forty-five hundred Americans were dead or wounded. A national tragedy had begun.

  News of the resounding Confederate victory brought no joy to Greenwood. They mourned the dead on both sides, and wondered with fearful hearts if their Thomas was among them.

  Even the unexpected joy that arrived two days later would prove painfully brief.

  They heard the approach of a borrowed buggy early in the evening. The women were in the parlor sewing. Wondering who it might be, Moses went to the door. The visitor, however, did not knock, but walked straight in.

  “Massa Seff…,” Moses began in surprise. Shrieks from the women in an adjacent room drowned out whatever he had been about to say. The three women dropped the things in their hands and were out of their seats in a second. Seth only managed to set down the camera and other equipment in his hands before he was mobbed by a frenzy of hugs and questions. After her own share in the excitement, Cynthia ran out to the barn to tell her father that Seth was home, and soon the handshakes, backslaps, and hugs began all over again.

  “I’ve been attached to the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment,” Seth told them. “I was with the Union army at Bull Run two days ago. It was horrifying. The army fled back into Washington in such disarray that if Beauregard had pursued us, he could have walked into the capital and taken over the White House. For now Washington remains in Union hands. But the troops are badly shaken by the outcome, as is the president—at least that’s what they say. I don’t know what’s going to happen. The Confederate army may overrun Washington and Philadelphia and New York by the end of the summer.”

  “But what are you doing here!” exclaimed Cherity, overjoyed to see Seth again.

  “Mr. McClarin told me to get on a train back to Boston with my plates and photographs after the first battle. After that he would decide what to do with me. But I was so close to home! As long as the trains are still running and no battles imminent, it wouldn’t have been right not to come down, even if only for half a day. I still have plenty of unexposed plates—I thought I would practice my photographic techniques on you tomorrow morning! I’ve even been trying to figure out a way to get a photograph of all of us at once… including me!”

  “Do you… have to go back so soon?” asked Carolyn. She did not understand photographs, she only wanted her son!

  “I’m sorry, Mom, I hate what I have seen. I despise the hatred both sides have for each other. But I will be faithful to this job. I love this country. So I must do my duty as I see it. So yes… I do.”

  Seth paused, and an expression came over his face that none, not even his father and mother, quite knew how to define. “Before I do anything,” he said, “I need to go for a ride on Malcolm.”

  He turned and offered his hand to Cherity. “And what steed will you choose, my lady?” he asked.

  Radiant, shyly embarrassed before the others, heart beating with more feelings than she could have described, and unable to find the voice to give him an answer, Cherity followed Seth from the room. She was wearing a dress but did not change it, and stood in patient silence while Seth saddled two horses, then again offered his hand to help her up. There was no race on this day, not even a gallop, but a quiet walk up the high ridge even more memorable than any of their previous rides together. No one else ever knew the words that were spoken that day on Harper’s Peak. But when the two returned to Greenwood several hours later, everyone knew that Cherity Waters and Seth Davidson had each claimed the heart of the other.

  Seth left to return to Boston two mornings later. This time, as they again said tearful farewells on the station platform, all five knew they may not be together again for a very long time.

  From the Old Books

  —America—

  A hunter, a woman, a child

  c. 30,000 BC-c. 10,000 BC

  The land called the New World was ancient with civilization long before the first European set foot on its eastern shores. How and why the species homo sapiens first came there had more to do with weather than conquest.

  In a time now lost in the mists of antiquity, a man, well bundled in skins and with feet wrapped in layers made from sea otter pelts, trudged forward, spear in one hand. With the other he pulled a small wooden sledge behind him along the surface of the frozen ground.

  A bitter wind blew agains
t his cheeks. His breath from nostrils and mouth sent white puffs of warmth into the chill air. He was used to the cold. He had spent his entire life in it. His father had taught him to hunt the big game at the edge of the ice. It was the only way he knew.

  He glanced back at those who followed—his wife, with child though he did not yet know it, her father, and his younger brother and his wife. They were primitive Paleolithic hunters from the sparsely populated upper regions of Siberia. Their existence was nomadic. They followed game to survive. This was the farthest north they had ever ventured. Strapped to the sledge behind him—sliding on rails of ivory tusk connected by means of smaller bone with skins tightly stretched between them—were various stone tools and implements. These included additional skins for warmth and shelter, flints and supplies to make fire and weapons and for skinning animals and tearing meat, as well as sharp-tipped spears, hammers, and crude stone axes that gave them an advantage over four-legged beasts twice their size and more.

  That they were now crossing a narrow isthmus of frozen land no human had trod before them was not planned. A chance sighting of game had brought them this way in the ceaseless trek after food. Had they taken a different route, another of their kind would have wandered onto this new continental corridor soon enough. But fate decreed these five as the first.

  They would not be the last.

  They struggled to survive during an age known as the Pleistocene ice epoch when enormous glacial sheets up to half a mile thick covered much of the world’s northern landmass. The seawater here was frozen in solid inland mountains of white. With much of the globe’s water mass locked away above land, its oceans were much lower than they would later become, and many sea floors turned into dry land.

  The planet’s fortunes, however, were continually changing. When atmospheric conditions brought a warming trend, slowly the ice began to melt. As the Northern Hemisphere again turned its face toward the sun, the boundaries of the glacial ice moved northward. Hearty animals that could endure the cold and find food in the new forests created by the northward spread of spruce and oak, migrated in the direction of the melt. Hunter gatherers of men tracked these beasts as they went. By slow degrees, over thousands of years, the regions exposed by the retreating ice pack became thinly populated with life.

  The retreating ice and low sea levels exposed temporary land bridges connecting all the globe’s continents. This first small band of humanity to discover the northernmost such isthmus had been following a herd of caribou for a week. The animals did not travel with great speed. The humans had been able to keep pace comfortably out of sight, then approach to kill one from the herd every several days and eat their fill.

  Though grassy provision was sparse with half the ground still frozen, sensing they were being followed, the caribou moved eastward. The band of hunters continued in leisurely pursuit.

  Others would follow over the next few thousand years. The opening of this climactic door provided the opportunity for increasing handfuls of Siberian, Mongolian, and northern Chinese hunters to lead the way into a previously uninhabited world. As long as they were able, creatures ventured across this Beringia land bridge, just as others were doing across similar land bridges around the world.

  The five humans continued on. In reckonings of the future it was sometime late in the month of May. They camped that night, as they had for the last several days, on the low causeway. In a few more days the land under their feet began to rise in elevation. Gradually both four-footed and two-footed creatures left one continent behind and crossed over into a new history.

  When another month had passed, they were moving across what would one day be called the Seward Peninsula. By now the human explorers had lost track of the caribou herd. But they had spotted other game—moose, elk, and a great white bear whose furry hide the man coveted to keep his wife warm.

  The small party of five managed to get far enough through the vast Alaskan ranges to winter successfully in a cave near the valley of the Yukon River, overlooked by gigantic towering peaks the likes of which struck terror into their hearts.

  They kept sufficient meat frozen in snowdrifts outside the cave’s mouth to prevent starvation. Many nights they heard mournful howls from roaming packs of wolves. But fire not only kept them warm, it also kept the wolves away.

  The man and woman’s child was born—the first true native to this place that would one day be called the Americas.

  The winter months were black and fearsome. During some weeks storms raged outside their cave-home for forty or fifty hours at a time. They had not known such deep blackness on the Kamchatka Peninsula they had left on the other side. In their voyage they had come five or six degrees farther north, and in those climes the loss of winter daylight was enormous. Fearing they had entered a land of perpetual darkness that the gods had cursed, it was with great rejoicing that at length they saw the sun creeping again into the sky.

  When at last winter loosened its grip on the land, the band, now six, prepared to take up again its pilgrimage. They left their cave and set out again in search of new provision. This winter had been severe. All they could think now was to seek the sun. As it rose in the southern sky, imperceptibly higher each day, the great ball of yellow-orange fire in the heavens became their guiding source of strength. Gradually the land began to thaw as they moved south. They encountered creatures of increasing variety—bear and deer, huge birds, abundant fish in the rivers and streams, even some small animals they had never before seen. The earth seemed sprouting new life of itself. Life again took on hope.

  They recognized enough of times and seasons to know that the white cold would come again. But never could they imagine enduring another such winter as that just past, especially with the fragile life of an infant now to protect. Following the sun thus became the sole guiding principle of their movement. When the sun rose high, their skin felt its warmth and made their hearts happy. They would follow the bright god of the sky wherever it led. They would follow it every day. Perhaps, before the freeze came again and the tiny flakes of frozen air began to drift from the sky and bring a chill to the earth, the sun would lead them to a place where ice and snow could not get its fingers of death so deep into their bones.

  So they trekked south, in the shadows of the mighty peaks with perpetual crowns of white. When they killed more than required for food, they sacrificed the remainder on altars of stone to the god of the sun as they had been taught by their forefathers, though they knew not why, chanting before the blinding orb of the sky, exulting in the blessing of its warmth.

  Southward they continued… toward the sun.

  A year passed… another winter came, though less severe… then another thaw. The baby survived, bundled in its swaddling share of the white fur of the great northern bear, took strength from its mother’s hearty constitution, and grew strong.

  Others came after them in the years that followed. Those who ventured between the continents too late in the season were caught in the clutches of winter, their bones disappearing under vast drifts of snow and ice. But some made it through, as had the first, and survived to move south.

  The man and his woman had another child, then another, as did his brother and his wife. More years passed.

  The old grandfather died… the young ones grew.

  South their steps still pointed… ever in the direction of the sun.

  Occasionally they met others of their kind. At first they were able to communicate with those they met, for all these first explorers had migrated from the same regions.

  Again for a time the great ice returned to the earth. The isthmus they had crossed was covered once more in glacier, only to be flooded again by the sea several more times over the millennia in a climactic ebb and flow of thaw and freeze.

  The last opening across the Beringia land bridge connecting Alaska with the outer reaches of Siberia was created approximately 10,000 BC. The two continental ice packs froze one final time to allow hunters of big game from the most distan
t outlying portions of Asia across this lowland strait, then south toward the rich plains of North America. In ever larger numbers than before, they poured into this new land by threes and fours, then by hundreds. While the door remained open, the new continent slowly became peopled with what would become a new American race. Its characteristics would retain traces of its Oriental, Siberian, and Mongolian ancestry, though love of the sun would brown and toughen its skin, forever distinguishing it from its Asian forebears.

  The ice ultimately relinquished its hold on the north. When the final thaw was complete, the oceans of the Arctic and northern Pacific again washed over the land bridge. The passage of eastern migration was closed off—this time forever.

  By then many thousands had come. They little thought of themselves as discoverers of a new land. Only as hungry men and women who must follow the source of food wherever it led. How could they foresee that their adventurous spirit would give a whole new side of the globe—unseen from the population centers of China, Europe, and the Near East—the opportunity to grow and expand with the life-giving seed of a new race of humankind.

  Migrating still farther south, the human newcomers multiplied and spread in all directions across and down the two huge American continents. They found the land teeming with animal life—a few camel, mammoth, sloth, large cats, prehistoric species of horse, and casteroide, innumerable moose, deer, bear, antelope, and bison, as well as abundant smaller game.

  While retaining vestiges of common roots, these who trekked from Siberia to Alaska diverged over millennia into separate peoples with their own individual cultures. Very different destinies would follow the various tribal groups of these first Americans. The most advanced and skilled continued to follow the sun southward, eventually migrating past the high mountains and expansive open plains of the north into the hot equatorial region near the Tropic of Cancer. Others spread out eastward toward the shores and island regions where Europeans would one day encounter them and mistakenly give them the name of another brown-skinned race half a globe away.