Prelude
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WALKING IN THEIR FOOTSTEPS
2019
“Our streets are calendars containing who we were and who we will be next.”
Colson Whitehead, “City Limits,” 2003.
“Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments.”
Ann Beattie, “Snow,” 1986
“I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.”
Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck,” 1970
2019
📷
San Rafael, California
Thursday, October 10th
They couldn’t have known I would come looking for them. You see, they have no idea who I am.
They – my mother’s grandparents – have all been dead, as the President of their youth might have said, for four score and a handful of years.
They – descendants of immigrants from Ireland, England, and Germany – were born when the population of this country was one-tenth what it is today, when the western frontier extended just west of Lake Superior and the Mississippi River; when bands of Indians and herds of bison roamed the dry grasslands of the Great American Desert.
They – children from Pennsylvania, New York, and Illinois – born within years of the gold strike at Sutter’s Mill, would eventually make their way west, joining one whose Irish parents had already come to the diggins.
They – Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Dunkers, and Catholics – relied on a variety of faith traditions or rejected those tenets of belief as they managed the vicissitudes of their lives.
They – Boals and Dickinsons, Deardorfs and Delaneys – weren’t so much drawn by the soft, heavy metal that had compelled hundreds of thousands of argonauts to flood into California, but rather by the growth promised by those who had.
They – John and Mary, Frank and Elizabeth – didn’t have a grand plan. They made it up as they went along, as Americans have been doing as long as the United States has been a country. As I have been doing, a century after their births.
These individuals grew up in a time when our country was doing its best to tear itself apart. In my late middle age, I – or, more accurately, we – live in a fractious age, where we debate loudly, seldom listening, about what it means to be an American. Against this backdrop, I found myself looking into the lives of my forebears.
Who were these people? Their lives were shaped not only by the Gold Rush and the Gilded Age, but also by a series of financial panics. The Civil War, the Indian Wars, and the War to End All Wars touched them and their families. They bore witness to the promise of emancipation and women’s suffrage and the shame of the near elimination of native peoples and the exclusion of immigrants. What then was their American experience?
Going through the source material, I discovered that these largely anonymous people – you don’t know their names; they do not appear in the history books – lived extraordinary lives. They played their part when our country was extending “from sea to shining sea.” Their lives weren’t always beautiful – our country hasn’t always been beautiful – but they were meaningful.
In the course of my research, I discovered I once lived on the same street in San Francisco as my great grandfather 100 years before. Quite literally, I have learned I walk in the footsteps of my ancestors. In one way or another, we all do.
This book is their story. It is our story, the American story.
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This book is a work of fiction with a set of principal characters who are real people. The major events described in this book did occur. Scenes and backstories have been created that allow me to weave fact and fiction together into a story of their lives. Outfitted with incomplete information, it is likely I have gotten at least a few things wrong. But know this, I have tried to be fair – to my forebears, as a chronicler of their lives, and to you, the reader.
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