Rourke

Rourke

by

James Whitesell

Copyright@2016 by James Whitesell

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Dedication

Peter E. Whitesell. He stepped forward and served his country for four years in the Civil War. Endured privations unfathomable to us today. Somehow survived the major battles and nearly died of disease after being incarcerated in a prisoner of war camp. His home valley destroyed by enemy cavalry while he was in the prison camp. His homeland ruined, he went west after the war to start a new life. We are proud to be his descendants.

Peter E. Whitesell.

Co. I, 33rd Virginia Infantry, the Stonewall Brigade.

Army of Northern Virginia

Confederate States of America

No way will the pap of political correctness dishonor his memory.

Author's Introduction

From childhood on my interest was captured by three compelling historical threads. Ones that remain to this day in my advanced geezerhood. The American Civil War. World War II. And the Minnesota Dakota war. The reasons? Personal. Family stories about an ancestor who fought on both sides in the Civil War. My father's younger brother killed in action in World War II. And growing up in Minnesota, on ground once the land of the Dakota--the Sioux--Indians. These three subjects, underlying life's usual milestones, education, family, work (and plenty of mis/adventures), have long gestated within me. No more. Years of writing experience were finally put to use. The first of my historical threads to see print was a World War II historical novel, Ausgleich--Scales of Justice. It is a heavily researched book in a quasi-fictional format that challenges our smug good guy/bad guy good vs. evil view of World War II. Unusual for a work of fiction, it has an extensive bibliography.

Now, with Rourke, the other pair of gestating historical interests are put to digital print. The Dakota War of 1862 and its contemporary, the American Civil War--where, in researching family history, I was astonished to discover my ancestors' experiences in that war were like a poor man's Gone With The Wind. Though no characters in Rourke are based on them, they nevertheless were present when many of the events in the book took place, including Gettysburg, Richmond's Chimborazo Hospital, Fort Delaware Union POW camp and the burning of the Shenandoah Valley.

Rourke was heavily researched and is presented in an historical fiction format that is embedded in genuine events and locations. It also has an extensive bibliography. The lens through which this book views the Civil War is that of the ordinary soldier and civilian, particularly in the South, and challenges the conventional mainstream view of the Civil War being fundamentally about slavery. Maybe it was so to the movers and shakers, the big dogs, North and South. Not so much to the ordinary folks.

The Minnesota Sioux uprising sections of Rourke are anchors for future books set in the post-Civil War west. Rourke challenges the view of the Dakota Indians as being pitiless bloodthirsty savages, the Americans' own bloodthirsty retribution following the Sioux uprising a mockery of the vaunted legal, egalitarian and democratic ideals of the nation.

Above all, Rourke, and Ausgleich, play the literary dead march to the world shattering calamities that wars visit upon the ordinary people ensnared in them.

No matter what side they're on.

Table Of Contents

Prologue.

Chapter 1: The First Glimpse

Chapter 2: Missouri

Chapter 3: The Shenandoah Valley

Chapter 4: The 33rd Virginia

Chapter 5: The Rebel Cavalry

Chapter 6: Kentucky

Chapter 7: Little Crow

Chapter 8: The Shenandoah 1864

Chapter 9: Antrim Requiem

Chapter 10: Return to Minnesota

Chapter 11: Bibliography

Chapter 12: Sample The Lords Of Power

ROURKE

by

James Whitesell

Prologue

The raiders disappeared into the great roiling tumult of the vast American West where no one would ever find them.

Or so they thought.

Late summer. 1865. The guns of war were silent. As silent as the graves of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died in the horrific fratricidal blood letting that came close to fracturing the corpus of the raw boned adolescent United States of America. A nation so new that its oldest citizens were older than the country itself. There were thousands upon thousands of dead. Mountains of them. Many hundreds of graveyards, some hastily dug on the battlefields, others outside the military camps, where more soldiers died from disease during the war than in battle. Mute scars that would remain as bitter reminders on the landscapes of the former border and southern states. It was a country full of widows and orphans, legions of veterans maimed body, mind and soul, and thousands upon more thousands of shattered and ruined lives. A high price to pay for unity. Too high, some thought.

Among those who thought the price too high were the three men riding on an old Sioux trail on the bluffs overlooking the meandering muddy Minnesota. The Missouri wasn’t the only muddy river in the west. The Minnesota took it a descriptive step beyond the Muddy Missouri. The name itself. Minnesota was the Dakota word for muddy water. Ten years earlier this trail wound through the land of the Dakota. Which is the name the local Native Americans called themselves, Dakota, though almost everyone else continued to call them the Sioux, an exonym loosely derived from a pejorative name their hereditary enemies, the Ojibwe, called them.

After untold generations of living here, along this river and far beyond to the north and east and south, the Dakota were gone. Dead or scattered to the west winds where their Nakota and Lakota cousins remained defiant and as yet undefeated. But not in this place. Here was defeat. Utter, complete, total defeat. The Dakota were swept away so completely it was almost as though they had never existed. Only the occasional lonely survivor and the bones of their ancestors remained. In the years from the 1850’s into the mid 1860’s the Minnesota River Valley experienced more change than the accumulations of millennia. The reason?

The Americans had arrived.

Not soldiers, or trappers or explorers or fugitives or intrepid adventurers. Not this time. Settlers. As so many other Native American tribes had already learned to their eventual ruination, the settlers came to stay. They were like wizards to the Sioux, with their tools and knowledge of arcane matters beyond the ken of the Dakota worldview. The newcomers took their metal axes to the forests, damned the creeks and rivers, ripped open prairie sod with their iron-tipped plows to plant crops alien to Dakota experience. They brought fruit trees and domestic animals. They sailed huge steamships on the big rivers. They built forts and towns and the beginnings of great cities. They staked out chunks of unfenced Dakota land and claimed it solely for themselves. They brought with them the cornucopia of their civilization. They also brought alcohol and diseases for which the Dakota had no acquired immunities. The diseases decimated one Native American tribe after another, some to extinction.

To be sure, the Americans were wizards to the Dakota mind. Devil wizards. Devil wizards who put an end to the Dakota way of life. They made the Dakota world a species of hell. But the wizards also made their own hell. They called it the Civil War. A war, in battlefield reality, about as civil as the descending blade of the guillotine in France's own fratricidal conflict. These three men were caught in the maelstrom of war. Not just the Civil War. There was a second war, one born in the tumult of the Civil War. The Great Sioux Uprising of 1862. A war fought over the very ground where the three horsemen were riding that day. Two vicious wars that commingled in the lives of the three horsemen in a hellish alchemy that changed them in ways only survivors of the cauldron of war could understand. They were survivors. Survivors with a mission that rose to the level of a overarching quest. They were pursuers, avengers, bent on the Biblical Eye For An Eye. They would find the raiders. And visit upon them the retribution of the Righteous.

Or so they, with the intense fervency of a Crusader, believed.

"God oh God, the old man’s memory repeated inside his head as it had nearly every day during the long string of gloomy months. I shoulda’ been there. Mebbe...mebbe if I...I'd a...." the thought, as it mostly did, faded into an opaque cloud in his brain that his conscious mind could not, or, more probably, would not, penetrate. Before his mind closed off the tormented memory, a single image lingered in his mind. It was the year previous. 1864. He was out on the Dakota prairie, scouting for General Sully's army, an army hell bent on crushing the resistance of the Sioux tribes once and for all. A handful of soldiers came riding with incautious haste towards him, a major from General Sully's staff in the lead, his face a tightly closed mask. The somber major reined up, a fresh-faced lieutenant at his side. The young officer, Lt. Isiah Trimble, West Point, Class of '62, specifically detailed by Colonel DeWitt at far off Fort Snelling and sent to find the old man, pulled out an envelope from his saddlebag and handed it to Whit. Lt. Trimble said nothing, but the grim-faced major, an acquaintance of the old man, leaned forward and spoke what everyone else who knew the contents of the envelope was thinking.

We are so, so sorry, Mr. Jackson.

Shaken, Whit took the envelope, opened it and read the contents. He stared, ashen faced, wordlessly, at the major. What was there to say? His life was shattered into so many pieces that it there was no question of it ever being made whole again. A year had passed and he still felt broken and empty and angry. And vengeful. Above all, vengeful. The bile of unconsummated retribution so churned his guts that he had to force his mind to a more pleasant memory. Of more than a generation ago, in the Minnesota River Valley, not far from where they were now riding.

He was a young man in his twenties then, fresh from the Virginia farm to the western wilderness. He met another adventurous easterner, a thick-bodied russet haired Vermont youth named Moses Taylor, almost a decade younger than Jackson and virginal in the ways of the wilderness. The two had ventured out from the stone-walled security of imposing Fort Snelling, built twenty years earlier at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers as an imposing harbinger to the Native Americans of what was to come.

Look at that! Moses Taylor said to his new friend, gesturing at a vast prairie stretching out before them, its waist high grasses swaying rhythmically in the wind and making a gentle murmuring sound that struck Whit as Mother Nature's own music. The pair stood in awe, staring at the wondrous sight.

Just you be careful out there, you two, had cautioned a sergeant at the fort before they left. The Sioux ain't hostile, but there always be a wild hair or two out to make trouble. He jabbed a finger at them. "Be alert. Always. Alert. And be back in the fort before dark."

They took his advice and walked on along the river that the Sioux called the Muddy Water, the Minnesota. Not far from the fort they began to see Indians. Men lounging outside their teepees, women and girls picking berries in the woods alongside the river, young boys frolicking in the summer sun, two men returning from a hunt with a gutted and quartered whitetail deer on their shoulders. They were different people from Whit's, yet seemed not all that different.

This be the world o' the wild Injuns we be hearin' so much about? He said with some incredulity to his new friend.

Not lookin too wild to me, Whit, Moses said, having had much the same impression as Whit. That was when Whit understood it for the first time. Odd as it might seem, he knew it in without a shadow of doubt. This was where he would make a new life. Not in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the land of his birth. Here. The west.

This would be his home.

But, so many decades later, with that opened letter in hand the year earlier out on the Dakota prairie, it was all gone as quickly as the dry grass in a prairie wildfire. His family. Gone. All gone.

Murdered.

The old man, Whit Jackson, riding on the river bluff that day with two others, was on the far side of a generation older than the other two. A tough looking man on the sunset slope of sixty. Not an easterner or a city dweller. A veteran of the frontier. Grizzled. Bearded. Lean and wiry, dressed in worn buckskins. Underneath a beard the color of tarnished pewter was a hawk's face inherited from a Catawba Indian grandmother. An east coast tribe that, surprisingly, spoke a variant of a Siouan language. The old man's given name was Thaddeus Whitworth Jackson, long since known to all as Whit, and he rode a huge draft mule of over seventeen hands. In a scabbard at his side was a venerable but superbly crafted and deadly accurate Kentucky rifle converted a few years earlier to percussion. In his belt were a pair of Navy Colts and a finely engraved Bowie knife he won in a poker game. The old timer didn't look like a man to be trifled with.

It wasn’t just a look.

The younger man riding at his side was taller. Square built. Even more dangerous looking. Whit Jackson's great-nephew William Jackson Rourke had pioneered in Minnesota, fought Indians, then made friends with at least some of them, built a home out of the wilderness and then gone off to four years of war. Just about the only famous place in the east he hadn't been in the Civil War in Virginia--to him it was the War Between the States--was Appomattox. Rourke rode off with many other Confederate cavalrymen just before the surrender. He never did surrender. And he never would. That didn’t mean he bemoaned the fall of the Confederacy or embraced the mythology of either the Great Emancipation or the Lost Cause. He didn’t. He scorned both sides for getting into that cataclysmic war when they could have--and, he still firmly believed, should have--resolved their differences far more peaceably and laid the evil of slavery forever to rest without the horrific fratricidal slaughter that would scar the nation’s soul for generations to come. Not surrendering was personal to Will Rourke, not political. He was determined. Stubborn. As resilient and tough as a chunk of recalcitrant ironwood. Like his great-uncle Whit Jackson.

Rourke was thirty years old, doubly hardened by war and tragedy. He was an intensely somber man, his blue eyes stern in an unsmiling face that had the same wild hawk's look as his grandmother's brother. His hair was flaxen, his skin bronzed and weathered from a rugged outdoor life. Years earlier he had been handsome. Now his look was that of a hard, dangerous man. Four years of war, a losing war, were stamped permanently on him, percolating from his stoic bearing down into the tiniest crevasses in the marrow of his bones. It was impossible for him to return to his life from before the war. For more reasons than one. The war was one of the reasons. But not the only one. Even the carnage of the war did not rise to the causal pinnacle of his seething disquiet. Whit Jackson's family was not alone when they were murdered. Will Rourke's family was also there. And shared the same brutal fate. The murders were horrific enough in themselves. But there was yet more horror. The women in the families were murdered....

After they were repeatedly raped.

Riding at Rourke's side was a younger man, still only twenty-four after four years in the Confederate cavalry. Tom Sykes met Will Rourke when both were riding from their adopted northern homes to their Virginia birthplaces. They joined the Virginia Cavalry together and were mostly together in various units in the Rebel army through the long years of the war. Most, but not all. The gaps that made up ‘not all’ were themselves sour nightmares only recalled with surly vitriol. Both men carried a pair of Navy Colt revolvers in their belts and shiny Spencer repeating rifles in scabbards alongside their saddles. The same weapons they’d had in the last months of the foolhardy lost war that had forever changed them and an entire nation. Weapons they dryly recalled were ‘donated’ to them by Union soldiers. Both men rode heavy bodied horses that were quick and agile as well as rugged. Horses of the predominant type most called Quarter Horses. Both animals also ‘donated’ by Union cavalrymen.

Somehow the middle-sized, stocky Sykes had come through the war with his friendly, cheerful ways intact. Maybe it was youth. Or maybe it was because his family hadn't been butchered in 1864 as Rourke's and Jackson's had been. Cheerful Tom Sykes, with his clean-shaven youthful face and shock of auburn hair, was a stark contrast to the somber hardness of his companions. On the surface. The carefree youthful look was only as deep as the image captured on a tintype. To the practiced observer a second, lingering, look pealed away the floss of surface congeniality. Underneath, like a subsurface layer of volcanic granite, he was a solid rock of a hardened veteran of the Rebel cavalry, forged in the crucible of privation and combat, who was more than capable of handling any trouble that came his way. Out in the west where they were riding there would be plenty of trouble for all of them.

It wouldn't be long in coming.

But this was all still in future. After the war.....

The long and bitter war of the nation slaughtering itself.

Rourke

Book I

The UnCivil War

Chapter 1: The First Glimpse

Will Rourke was not yet four years old. He was with his father, Peter, as they drove a wagon to nearby Harrisonburg to get supplemental feed for their horses. As they drove down a narrow dirt road, hemmed in by rail fences on both sides, Peter looked over at a nearby tobacco field. Black men were hunched over, working the ground. A white man stood erect behind them, hollering orders. Young Will looked questioningly up at his father.

Who are they, father? They are dark. Why do they look different? Peter Rourke was silent for a moment, wondering how to tell his son that, despite what he so often told his family about how they lived in a land that cherished freedom and liberty, human bondage still existed.

They are slaves, son, Peter Rourke answered with a sour expression. Black people who are held in slavery. Young Will's eyes remained riveted on the father he so trusted.

What is slavery, father? His father sighed. Deeply. This day had to come.

Thus began the introduction of young Peter Rourke to the schizophrenic world of 19th Century America. Though Peter Rourke was not about to burden his small son with his vision of the future, he already knew that slavery was a human time bomb that would one day explode in their lives.

An explosion that would reverberate through centuries yet to come.

Roots

William Jackson Rourke was the somber former Rebel captain’s name, though he was known to most simply as Will. Will Rourke. A very few intimates sometimes used the familiar Willy. Whatever he was called, even as a boy he stood out among the other boys in his rural chunk of Rockingham County in the lush Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. A valley where earlier generations of the Scots-Irish Rourkes and Jacksons built New World lives in a land formerly populated for untold millennia by Native Americans. Peoples now little more than memories faintly echoed in related place names like Shenandoah, the Allegheny range of the Appalachians and the Massanutten Mountain that bisected Rockingham County.

The Scots-Irish, who before emigrating hailed from the Protestant north of Ireland, shared one quintessential characteristic with the Catholic Irish. They were no friends of the English and their preening pompous overbearing aristocracy. It took no Colonial arm-twisting for them to take up arms during the American Revolution and become the stubborn backbone of George Washington’s Continental Army. Hundreds of thousands of the Scots-Irish emigrated to the colonies of America and spread throughout and alongside the long spine of the Appalachians. Many of the early American presidents had Scots-Irish ancestry. Andrew Jackson preeminent among them, who himself became a Scots-Irish folk hero when he whipped the British at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812. It was another of life’s perversities that only after the battle did Jackson learn that a peace treaty between the British and the Americans had been signed the previous month in Europe. Before the battle.

Despite that, his war hero corona remained untarnished all the way to the White House. .

Will Rourke grew up in a country of mostly modest sized farms owned by the Scots-Irish and another large immigrant group, the Germans. Few of these small farmers had slaves and the world of the Shenandoah Valley was dissimilar to the plantation economies of the Piedmont and the Tidewater regions of eastern Virginia. The rugged and more inaccessible terrain of the Mountain and Range geography of western Virginia was a different world than that of the aristocratic slave driven plantation economy in the less daunting physical landscapes of east Virginia. The aristocrats, and the slaves, were in the Shenandoah Valley, too. But in smaller proportions. The traditionally anti-British attitudes of the Scots-Irish, and the anti-slavery views of the Germans, made for a generally distant, at times hostile, attitude towards the American aristocrats who the Scots-Irish considered to be far too much like the detested pompous English. Whit Jackson lumped them all together, the British and American aristocrats, and referred to them--often attended by a string of colorful adjectives--as ‘pestercrats.’ The only blacks that Will Rourke actually knew were the handful of freemen who worked as tradesmen in Rockingham County. He saw slaves, wondered over them, but never had much opportunity to talk to any of them. He did have a chance to engage with the slaves’ masters from time to time, an experience that more often than not soured him the rest of his day. One in particular, when he was still a boy of fourteen, long stayed with him.

Reuben, bring young Will Rourke here a glass of cool water. Will had stopped at the plantation of the prosperous and powerful Davis family looking for some work to make a few scarce dollars. Will was fourteen years old and the young aristocrat, Will Davis, the scion of the wealthy Davis family, wasn't much older. Reuben was a slave of about the same age. There was something about Reuben, and the peculiar interaction between master and slave that puzzled Will. Unlike the obsequious, masked or occasional hostile expressions he was accustomed to seeing on the faces of slaves, Reuben's was different. His humanity was there to plainly see. A hurt humanity. And Davis, preening aristocrat that he was, seemed to have almost a fondness for Reuben. Hidden perhaps, but there. It would be over a decade later that Rourke would understand the dynamics between them. But, for now, he was only a somewhat puzzled fourteen year old boy looking to make a few dollars. Which he did, using the carpentry skills learned on the farm to repair a sagging wall on the plantation's summer kitchen. As the shadows of evening spread over the valley he went home.

But he never quite forgot the peculiar feeling he got that day on the Davis plantation.

The rich valley of predominantly modest sized prosperous farms was only one thick strand in the fabric of Will Rourke’s growing up years. The valley was surrounded by mountains where ranged the aboriginal creatures of eastern North America. Black bears, white tailed deer, wild turkeys and even a few vestigial wolves and cougars. Will and his friends spent their spare moments in the mountains. Hunting, fishing, camping, tracking. Exploring, both the natural world and themselves. Young Will Rourke was comfortable in his own skin and equally at home in both field and forest. He could plant a crop, shoe a horse, build a house, dig a well, do any of the myriad skills of a farm boy. And he was equally as adept in the thick forests of the surrounding mountains.

Will, already in his early teens large and powerful for his age, had a quiet confident strength that made him a natural leader. He grew up on a farm where the family treasured horses. Horses on the Rourke farm grown too old to work were not put down. They were put out to pasture. Peter Rourke, Will’s father, once saying to a butcher who wanted to buy an old horse to render for meat and other commercial uses.

Our horses have worked hard for us and deserve to live out their natural lives on our farm. I see no harm in that.

"No harm? Sniffed the butcher. They be just dumb animals," His sour whispered words never quite made it from his lips to Peter Rourke's ears. Just as well.

The butcher snorted, mumbled something else decidedly negative under his breath that Peter Rourke couldn’t quite hear, and stomped off. The man was prudent not to openly insult Peter Rourke. He, like all the Rourkes, including the women, maybe even especially the women, were not people to wrongly antagonize. Except for the occasional rogue, endemic to many a roughhewn pioneering and farming family, the Rourkes were straight forward, honest folk. Salt of the earth.

True, they could be rigid and maddening and at times irascible. Some called them stubborn to a fault. But they were fair and hardworking and most were not enamored of the popular myths of the time. The very idea of slavery was even more repugnant to them than the puffery of the entitled aristocrats. They were not foolishly romantic about either slavery as the ‘peculiar institution’ of the South or the rabid abolitionism of the North. They believed the blacks should be freed. But free or slave, the blacks did not share their Scots-Irish heritage and would always be distinct from them. Nor did they either demonize or embrace the noble savage image of the Native Americans now vanished from the Shenandoah. They were a different people, with their own unique ways of living, who were inundated by more powerful and numerous peoples. A process as inexorable as an advancing glacier scraping away the lives of humans in its path along with the very land on which they lived.

The Rourkes, and the Scots-Irish, disinclined to linger over philosophical pratings on the pathologies of the human condition, looked on with the eye of practicality. They would ride the wave they were on as long as it lasted. And, with the multiplying inundations of fresh waves of immigration, the Scots-Irish wave was already starting to recede. Though its eddies would continue to swirl among the crags and hollows of Appalachia for many years to come. The Rourkes of the Shenandoah Valley were as tough as the nails they pounded into their homes and barns. The rugged pioneer spirit had not yet been tamed in them. They were not often the sort to start fights.

But, more often than not, they did know how to finish them.

Look at the lad, Peter Rourke said to his wife, Sarah, one day as their son Will galloped off to cavort with his boyhood friends. He was born to the saddle, that boy. Sarah answered without turning her head from watching her oldest son ride away.

Yes, Peter, she replied. Born to the saddle. Then she turned to look at her husband.

And, I believe, much more.

The Rourke farm had a pair of thick bodied draft horses, solid creatures with considerable ancestry from the heavy bodied dray animals in the north of Europe, as well as a small stable of faster and more graceful carriage and riding horses that were a mixture of the English Thoroughbred and Spanish horses brought north from Florida in the 18th Century. Will Rourke was still a beardless boy in his early teens when he could work all day long with the team of huge draft horses, or ride all day long on a different day astride one of his family’s small stable of riding horses, or, on another day, range the mountains on foot from sunrise to sunset. He was a remarkable young man, but not unique. There were many like him in those hard-raised country days where self reliance was as essential to life as the air itself.

I throwed White Feather ta the groun and be thinkin' that be the en o' it, Whit Jackson said as they sat before the hearth of the Rourke farmhouse and he regaled the Rourkes with his tales from the wild west. Then 'e 'as on 'is feet with a big grin on 'is Sioux face and befer I could say a 'ting I was flat on me back. White Feather stood over me, laffin', and then be reachin' down to pull me to me feet. From that day on we be best o' friends up ta this very day.

That was the watershed day when everything changed for young Will Rourke. The day his great-uncle Whit Jackson came in from the western wilderness to visit his Virginia family. The tales of wilderness adventure that Whit spun over the flickering light of the evening fireplace cast a bewitching spell over young Will’s spirit that grabbed him and held him more tightly than any manmade net ever could. Even in the bright light of day the enchanted fireplace tales continued to dance before his spellbound eyes. When Whit Jackson retraced his journey back to his home in the western wilderness he was not alone. He had company.

Young Will Rourke.

A decade and a half later, aged in ways more attuned to a geologic time scale than a mere fifteen human scale years, the former Rebel Captain Will Rourke was remembering the past as they rode west over the prairie. How he had come to the Minnesota Territory at the beckoning of his adventurous great uncle back in the late spring of 1850. He was still a boy in years when he left his family's farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia at the age of fifteen and went wide eyed into the wilderness to make a life for himself. A boy in years, but, like most of his generation, Will was farm raised and intimately acquainted with the wide variety of practical skills of a farm boy. He knew his way around tools and hard work, animals and firearms. And he had work toughened ropy muscles to match his skills. He was ready for adventure.

He found it.

After a few years, and a handful of young Will's hair-raising pioneer frontier adventures, the Minnesota country was opened up by what the Americans called treaties and the Sioux called extortion. The settlers poured in from all over the country, but increasingly were Germanic peoples from the German speaking and Scandinavian lands in Europe. Hardly twenty years old then, Rourke married the captivating 17 year old dark-eyed French-Canadian beauty, Marie Bottineau, and started a family. Over the last half of the decade of the fifties he, working alongside his great-uncle Whit, built up a horse ranch and farm and a family. They called the place Antrim, after the Rourke and Jackson clans’ Scots-Irish roots in Ulster Ireland’s County Antrim.

By 1861 Will Rourke was a prosperous farmer and rancher with four living children. Like many of the farm families, they’d lost one of their children, a daughter, LaBelle, to what the well meaning but ineffectual local country doctor, scrawny New Hampshire born Zebulon Moss, simply called ‘fever.’ But the other four Rourke children thrived and grew as the Minnesota wilderness became less wild with each passing year. Life was good for the Rourkes and Jacksons as the decade of the 1860’s dawned over the fecund Minnesota mixed landscape of forest, lake and prairie. The lakes and rivers were full of fish, the fields ripe with crops, the farms of the settlers well supplied with domestic animals and maturing orchards, the prairie home to the wandering buffalo, white tail deer abounded, there were still elk in places, the forests full of potential timber and firewood. It was, it seemed to them, a blessed land.

And then everything changed.

The bright dawn of hope and progress faded and almost disappeared. War clouds built up ominously overhead and clouded the vision of nearly the entire nation. Will got a fistful of letters from back east telling him almost all of the members of his family in Virginia were against secession, as was evidenced by the Virginia Secession Convention on April 4th of 1861 convincingly voting 2-1 against secession, but the family, with roots deep in Virginia, would remain loyal to the state should she make the fateful choice to secede.

Then came Fort Sumter and President Lincoln asked for a levy of 75,000 troops from the states, all the states, including the Southern ones, to put down what he called the ‘rebellion.’ That was the final straw that broke the back of anti-secession sentiment in the South. Virginia voted to secede just two days after Lincoln’s call for troops. Three more Southern States would soon follow and several others only stopped from seceding by interceding Union military force. Loyalty to one’s home state, where lay the sweet earth of the fields that fed and nourished them, the familiar beloved towns they lived in, the cherished friends and relatives they’d known all their lives and the graveyard bones of their ancestors, was a palpable bond far stronger than the abstract notion of the inviolable unity of the United States of America. Almost all of the Rourkes and Jacksons of the Shenandoah Valley went with Virginia and joined up with the Confederacy.

Will Rourke had to make his choice. He wasn't much for the war, and he certainly wasn't for the southern aristocracy or slavery, yet he could not bring himself to turn his back on family and heritage. There was talk the government would eventually start drafting the men in his Minnesota neighborhood. Everyone was incensed by Southern secession and hotly demonized any pro-Southern sentiment.

Are you with us, or against us? Homer Austin, a neighbor, formerly from Massachusetts, said to Will when they were talking about the outbreak of war after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in South Carolina. You have to choose a side, Will, he continued in a tone that had an edge of challenge. We all do. My sons have already joined the Minnesota Volunteers. A probing look from Austin. What do you propose to do, Will? You can't avoid this. Will you join the fight to preserve the Union? Will didn't answer. He didn't have an answer. Not yet.

As war fever intensified and the pressure to join the fight to preserve the Union continued to intensify, Will realized that, be it now or in the future, he would be forced to make a choice. He was not a man to cut and run to avoid the war, as so many others would do. Including a man who was a Missouri Confederate deserter who jackrabbited for the California gold fields and sanctuary from the slaughter, his sense of whimsy therefore remaining intact to lighten the hearts of generations to come. His given name was Sam Clemens, but he would one day become famous under his pen name.

Mark Twain.

Rourke, finally, made his choice. The only one he could. Family and heritage. The place of his roots, where his ancestors pioneered, where his large Scots-Irish extended family still lived. Virginia. It was already invaded by the North. One day, as auspicious as any day in his entire life, Rourke mounted his horse and rode towards the birthplace of the American nation to join the