The Chair: Volume I

Chapter 2 Leann-2

Once published in France, the book becomes a bestseller and a cultural sensation. After its success, Sydney, and Geoffrey, who is now connected with everyone who is anyone, and anyone who is everyone, but as you know, everyone knows this is nowhere, become the talk of Paris and their adventures inspire additional “Candice” adventure novels. Sydney’s battle of over maintaining creative ownership defies gender roles and drives her to overcome societal constraints, revolutionizing literature, fashion and s****l expression, and remains a hallmark reading and rights manifesto even into the early twenty first century. In the late 1850s, the two move to the town of Gabriel in Georgia, where Geoffrey becomes Mayor. Although going to America on a sailing ship is quite a step for Sydney, she loves Geoffrey and will follow him everywhere. New York publishers in America reach out to her and she is given a contract for new novels. In 1861, Geoffrey goes away as a Confederate army cavalry captain, but is killed in the Battle of Chickamauga, at The River of Death, being sheared in half above the waist while riding his horse by a Union cavalry captain’s saber as the two charged each other. Nearly coming unhinged at the news of the death of her beloved, she decides to channel her energy and organize a group that succeeds in making her Mayor of the town, that, in her words later “by the will of The Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” the town of Gabriel being spared the havoc and devastation, and in fact, bypassed altogether by Yankee General Sherman’s “March to the Sea.” She maintains order in Gabriel by enlisting the churches, the schools, and the owners of what few that are left even running cotton gins and lumber mills. She also organized, and then owned, a foundry and masonry that eventually began making war memorials and statues for the cities all across what once was the Confederate States of America. “To Our Confederate Dead,” a column with names of Atlanta volunteers and militiamen who died protecting the city during the Siege of Atlanta, was the first one manufactured, a thirty-foot granite and marble obelisk, later taken thirty miles by train in fifty pieces to Atlanta and assembled in front of the new City Hall, the original having been destroyed by fire.

The exploration and settling of the American West began in the 1840s, and the most famous period in its history, known as “The Wild West,” began in 1865 after the American Civil War, the war fought between the Northern and Southern United States between 1861 and 1865, and ending in 1895, with the “west no longer being wild.”

Although pioneering was usually initiated by men, they were by no means the only ones engaged in the expansion of the country to the west. So, who else does that leave? This is not a hard question. The answer is women, of course! Many single men, and married men, acted as temporary bachelors, seduced by the thought of rich farming and ranch lands and silver and gold lodes, and travelled west. Settlement was often contingent on the possibility of making and maintaining families there. Thousands of women, as a result, travelled the “Overland Trail” after 1840 when The Great Westward Migration took off in earnest. Most of these women were married, and while some were forced to make the move, many others insisted on accompanying their men, for they were determined to maintain family unity despite the great potential risks to their health and safety. Some of the single women married on the trip or soon thereafter, while numerous married women were widowed. Many of these female pioneers had to deal with the rigors of the journey while pregnant or while caring for young children. Taken away from all they knew, they took with them what they could, knowing they would “one day own it all again.” All this was done by most, not all, with a pride, grace, and hope that is unequalled in American history.

Here then is story, saga, journey of Laura Nicholson, introductory first part, is recalled here. I try to recall what I can of it all. Pardon me for straying off then back on with what I knew best. It is what I remember of long memorable journey. Doesn’t matter because I may very well be only writer to remember. Recall that Civil War had just ended, its dizzying confusing aftermath finding me somehow on my way west from Iowa of all places.

“Early in January of 1849 we first thought of emigrating to California. It was a period of national hard times and we are financially involved in our business interests near Clinton, Iowa, longed to go to the new ‘El Dorado’ and pick up enough gold and return to pay off our debts. The ‘Siete Ciudades de Cíbola.’

At that time the gold fever was contagious and few, old or young, escaped the epidemic. On the streets, in the fields, in the workshops, from the churches to the jails, and by the fireside, golden California was the chief topic of conversation. Who was going? How best to fix up the outfit? What to take as food and clothing? Who would stay at home to care for the farm and womenfolk? And the old who stayed back. Who would take wives and children along? Free advice was given often, but often it was free of common sense. However, as two heads are better than one, all ideas helped as a means to an end. The intended adventurers diligently collected their belongings and after exchanging such articles as were not needed for others more suitable for the trip, begging, yes, even stealing, and buying or borrowing what they could, with buoyed spirits started off.

Some half dozen families of our neighborhood joined us and probably about twenty five other familiar local persons, including Phoebe Harriett Jackson, who had before one year ago a nervous breakdown during her brief childless marriage to Lee Wayne Durbin, a constabulary and saddle salesman from Waterloo, as the well-dressed gorgeous woman and soon to be, just after crossing the Mississippi River before St. Louis, coffee pre-dawn campfire sparker and breakfast captain on the journey west, who insisted on the finest eggs, range fed or not, Phoebe later becoming the wife of Krans Meffrige, an eventual state of Washington U.S. Senator, a decent, but clearly absent minded woman of just twenty two years of age at the time of our departure, constituted our little troop sailing across the Midwest to Oregon.

Mr. Pone Corkel, Blaine Culberson, and Len Masters, all later famous, or might I say infamous, gunfighters, and three of the worst high wagering card players, in the west were with us, too, providing a secure, at least we thought, group of armed experts in the event of any outbreaks of violence. Later, with reports becoming public along about 1890, I think it was, that all three had been killed in gunfights. Corkel in Tombstone, Arizona, Culberson in San Francisco, and Masters, either in Flagstaff or Santa Fe.

Laura Nicholson’s recollection of her Great American West odyssey will continue after this detailed narrative of important facts regarding historic notable threads. Sit with me while. If you need to take break, or get something to drink or eat, this would be good time to do so.

The telegraph was developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel F. B. Morse, who was born in 1791 and died in 1872, and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a copper wire connecting stations. Zap. 1872 was also the year that another traveler, Phineas Fogg, set on his journey in Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days.”

In 1835, Joseph Henry and Edward Davy invented the critical electrical relay. Davy’s relay used a magnetic needle which dipped into a mercury contact when an electric current passed through the surrounding coil. Billy Joel later sang about “Davy, who’s still in the Navy, and probably will be for life.” This allowed a weak current to switch a larger current to operate a powerful local electromagnet over very long distances. Davy demonstrated his telegraph system in Regent’s Park in 1837 and was granted a patent in July 1838, the same year Samuel F.B. Morse first publicly demonstrated the telegraph, or at least his version of it. Two days later that same early January, Alfred Vail would demonstrate his telegraph using dots and dashes,” which was the precursor to “Morse Code.” Davy also developed an electric relay. He also enjoyed eating range chickens grilled over a spit out on the frontier, as long as someone else “scrambled to capture the wanton fowls,” under a starry night whenever he could and wondered, having no educational inclination or background really at all in astronomy, where “exactly was this ballyhooed yeoman in the night sky with arrows, the great Orion?” The “Trail of Tears,” the forced removal and relocation of the Cherokee Indian Tribe also began then, with over four thousand Cherokees dying along the way.

La la la, di da da

La la, di da da da dum

Sing us a song, you’re the piano man

Sing us a song tonight

Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody

And you’ve got us feelin’ all right

Now John at the bar is a friend of mine

He gets me my drinks for free

And he’s quick with a joke or to light up your smoke

But there’s someplace that he’d rather be

He says, “Bill, I believe this is killing me”

As the smile ran away from his face

“Well I'm sure that I could be a movie star

If I could get out of this place”

Oh, la la la, di da da

La la, di da da da dum

Now Paul is a real estate novelist

Who never had time for a wife

And he’s talkin’ with Davy, who’s still in the Navy

And probably will be for life

Oh, la la la, di da da

La la, di da da da dum

Sing us a song you’re the piano man

Sing us a song tonight

Well we’re all in the mood for a melody

And you got us feeling all right.

In 1836, an American scientist, Dr. David Alter, invented the first known American electric telegraph, in Elderton, Pennsylvania, one year before the Cooke and Wheatstone and Morse telegraphs. Alter demonstrated it to witnesses but never developed the idea into a practical system. When Alter was interviewed for the book Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia of Indiana and Armstrong Counties, he said “I may say that there is no connection at all between the telegraph of Morse and others and that of myself. Professor Morse most probably never heard of me or my Elderton telegraph.” Alter then, amused at his comment, and by then many of his other mostly incoherent ramblings at this point in what became a “sad sorry sullen soggy sordid saga, having lived in alleys for the most part” after his retroactive patent application was “rejected with all deliberate speed by those damn paid off bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.,” a man, beaten, bloodied, and finally unbowed, retired to his room at the Morris House Hotel in Philadelphia one early Spring evening, never to be heard from again. Rumors abound as to what happened to him.

Some say Alter shot himself in the head with a .22 caliber pistol that night, or had someone else paid to do it instead, and had made arrangements for his body to be dumped in the Delaware River, his being a huge aficionado of George Washington and his famous crossing, immortalized by painter Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” as then the original was later destroyed in Bremen, Germany by Royal Air Force bombers in a nighttime air raid in World War II. Leutze was an ancestor of Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam era U.S. Air Force flight surgeon and Capt. James Longstreet Lutz, from San Antonio, Texas, who was based at Luke AFB near Phoenix, Arizona in 1964, and the father of Robert E. Lee Lutz, a fellow Cub Scout friend and den member of this author, with sparking hot mom Den mother Lucille Lutz, who became the first pilot to Captain a Boeing 777 commercial flight across the Atlantic Ocean for Continental Airlines in the late 1990s on the Houston (IAH) to London (LGW) route. The painting, eventually restored, now is prominently displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.