Letters to America

  Copyright © 2015 by Tom Blair

  Foreword copyright © 2015 Tom Brokaw

  Illustrations by Ken Cosgrove.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Rain Saukas

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-304-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-970-1

  To the fourth generation Chesapeake waterman, with a face of leather and hands of calluses and scars, who rises an hour before the sun to the absolute promise of a grueling day and only a slim hope of a fair catch; to the young teacher who, while lovingly clutching her soldier husband’s pillow, drifts to sleep knowing that in morning’s light a ponytailed voice will once again ask where Daddy is; to a graying, stoop-shouldered shop owner who hides within the cruel knowledge that if the bank fails to renew his capital loan the family’s home will be lost; to the mother of two who stands rigid at the curb in frigid cold in anticipation of an hour-long bus ride to an office building where, for minimum wage, she will scrub clean public toilets for eight hard hours … and to all of those other wonderful Americans.

  Contents

  Foreword by Tom Brokaw

  Introduction from the Past

  Luke, 1850s

  Junie, 1840s

  Patrick, 1860s

  Abigail, 1770s

  Warren, 1940s

  Milly’s Sister, 1900s

  Jack, 1860s

  Emilie, 1620s

  John, 1960s

  Mordecai’s Uncle, 1900s

  Nananawtunu, 1640s

  Alice’s Husband (Tom), 1980s

  Epilogue

  Foreword

  Tom Blair is an American original.

  Aren’t we all, you might ask.

  True; no nation in the long history of mankind has such a unique citizen DNA. With the exception of the Native Americans, we all arrived here from elsewhere. (My paternal Brokaws were Huguenots from Holland, my maternal Conleys, Irish from County Mayo—working class on both sides.)

  Tom Blair, the author, was born to an English mother two weeks after his American soldier father was killed during the invasion of Normandy. Two years later a ship glided past the Statue of Liberty with Tom’s hopeful mom holding him. Only opportunity stood at the docks to greet them. The same opportunity that greeted those who landed at Jamestown and Plymouth over three hundred years before.

  Tom grew up to embody the American Dream, becoming a successful entrepreneur, overseeing public companies, and raising a family that acknowledged their greatest gift—that they were Americans, and that America is the Greatest Country the world has ever seen.

  But America only became the Greatest Country after two hundred and fifty years of sacrifices by past generations of Americans. Sacrifices beyond the comprehension of those of us with running water and a convenience store within a ten-minute drive. In Letters to America, the author demonstrates that most challenges individual Americans are facing today shrink in stature when contrasted with those of the generations before us.

  The structure of Letters to America is unconventional: a compilation of twelve letters, each a chapter told in first person by fictional Americans about their everyday lives. The voices are entirely distinct—men, women, and children; white, black, Native American—yet the stories are loosely linked by subtle resonances, and the letters have a cumulative effect that is both humbling and deeply poignant, filled with hope for a future that can be as inspirational as our past.

  The book is at once an imaginative, sobering, and instructive message to contemporary Americans, the inheritors of all the work, invention, values, and personal and financial interests of those who cleared the way for today’s generations.

  Tom Blair never met his father, but he knows how to honor his service, and all those generations that sacrificed to give us today’s America. In turn, we should honor Citizen Blair by absorbing the lessons—the truths—of Letters to America.

  Tom Brokaw

  June 2015

  Introduction from the Past

  Dear fellow Americans,

  Before you ponder the letters that follow, we wish to lay upon you an indisputable truism. Beginning with that most remarkable year of 1776, generation after generation of Americans have struggled and sacrificed to create a most magnificent America. You, today’s Americans, do not have the right to squander this glorious gift from past generations.

  Permit us to continue.

  Some of us have been observing you for a few years; others for more than two centuries. Most often we watch with utmost fascination and unfettered amazement. And, while we are foremost proud of you, and think proudly of ourselves as one of you, of late we have become heavy with worry.

  Today your, our, America stands on two legs, a leg of self-reliance and a leg of compassion for those in need. Over the decades America has shifted its weight, first favoring one leg, then the other. Today’s America leans heavily on the leg of compassion … mending hurts. While compassion, the noble intent of bending to help the fallen, is a mark of a country’s greatness, buried within America’s boundless compassion are the seeds to sow a future generation that will expectantly look to government to fulfill their needs. In doing such—in expecting the government to caress their very existence—future generations will forfeit the greatest birthright of Americans; the unbridled right to succeed by exercising their passions, their skills, their hopes … to make their mark. And, know well that the path to success for most human endeavors is sacrifice. A sacrifice—training, studying, risking, working, saving—that renders achievement, once attained, one of the greatest of human experiences.

  For those first generations of Americans most families ate only what they killed or grew. An empty belly was an uncompromising motivator for clearing fields and planting crops, pausing only to track deer or build a fish dam. Hunger was not an abstract notion for those citizens of early America; it was a lifelong partner. The absolute need to toil for next week’s bread, next season’s crop, next year’s slaughtering, created not so much an American work ethic as a survival ethic.

  Do some of you kind citizens still have fire? Yes, certainly, but not the burning-hot fire of those travelers on the Mayflower, or of those pioneers walking in the dust next to their covered wagons so as not to tire the oxen. Today’s America shelters its citizens from the rigors and cruelties that its early generations suffered. No longer does one fear starvation, typhoid fever, a whipping by the master, or twelve-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week, mind-numbing, backbreaking work in a textile mill or a blazing-hot foundry. Sharp-fanged fears of yesteryear have been displaced by a basket of less dire concerns: shrinking retirement funds, stagnant wages, the threat of higher taxes and bloated bureaucracies, coupled with the questionable ability of elected officials to govern, to lead, to speak in realities, and to make the hard choices.

  We have concluded that the most compelling wake up call to Americans
is not a letter drafted to you from one well-known and revered individual from a long-past generation; likely you wouldn’t know how to tally “eleven score and nineteen years ago our forefathers.” Rather, we have compiled a dozen or so letters from the nondescript among us. None of these individuals accomplished anything of which history made note. Their lives were like thousands of others, and as the country grew, millions of others of their same generation. While their lives were ordinary, we hope that as you read these letters you come to realize that what may have been ordinary in the life of a long-dead American may appear most extraordinary as viewed from today. Our hope is that by reading these letters to you from the past you come to better acknowledge and appreciate the legacy that is America; and in doing so you will accept, individually and collectively, the need to make those difficult decisions that will endow future generations of Americans with no less of a great country than was bestowed upon you.

  From afar,

  Your fellow citizens

  Luke

  Except for the Native Americans, the immigrant story is the American story. The majority of European immigrants in the first two centuries of migration to what became the United States settled the land stretching from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi River. Next, from the 1830s onward, wagon trains of settlers pushed west from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast. These Americans, these pioneers, abandoned their farms and shops in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and other states for a hope. The same hope that pushed their great-grandparents to abandon their lives in England, Ireland, France, Germany, and Italy to risk perilous sea voyages to the New World … the promise of a better life.

  This second wave of immigrants colonized the lands between the Mississippi and the Pacific, except for the scattered Californian seaports settled by the Spanish two hundred years earlier. During the long journey west from the Mississippi the wagon trains traveled for months along the Oregon Trail and its offshoots—the California Trail, the Bozeman Trail, and the Mormon Trail—to reach their destinations.

  The journey west was spectacularly challenging and often fatal. But the promise of the new territories and new rewards swayed many to the challenge; such is Luke’s story.

  MA DIDN’T WANT TO GO. DIDN’T WANT TO LEAVE HER FRIENDS. Didn’t want to leave her father. Didn’t want to leave her church. And no way she wanted to leave her vegetable garden.

  Pa said we were going. So’s we went. West we went. Sold our Iowa farm. Sold the plow horse. Sold the cows and chickens. Gave most all the furniture away. Ma kept her hope chest. Pa didn’t put no money in the bank. Pa used some to buy four oxen and a wagon. What was left got hid in the bottom of Ma’s hope chest. Money hid to buy land in California.

  There was four of us. There was me and an older sister and Ma and Pa. My sister, Mary, was a girl. I mean a real girl. She liked dresses and cookin’ and washin’. A lot of girls I knew weren’t like real girls. They was like soft boys. Worked and rode like a boy, they did. But not my sister. That’s why I think she was right with going west. Where our farm was there wasn’t many boys that could turn into men so’s my sister could marry ’em. Think she thought maybe there’d be more where we was going.

  Headed to Missouri River first. Took us two weeks. Weren’t hard weeks. Only two streams that slowed us down. Weren’t deep or wide. ’Course one of our pea-brained oxen broke a leg. Got it stuck in some rocks along the second stream. Pa shot him dead, and the army bought the carcass for three dollars. Said the oxen meat could feed Indians. Pa bought another oxen. Mad that it cost twice what the others cost. Learned real fast further west the more the cost.

  Next I thought maybe we’d have to shoot Mary. She was lookin’ pretty much like a woman by the time Pa sold the farm. At the farm we had the outhouse. Maybe only fifty steps from the back door. On the trail to Missouri there weren’t no outhouses. There were plenty of clumps of trees at first. So’s everybody was alone when they were squatting. But then the open fields. Mary stopped going off. Always with the wagon. After a few days she didn’t look right. Didn’t act right. Stopped eating. Ma knew what was wrong. We had two bottles of medicine. Had them as long as I could remember. One was big for big cures. One was small for small cures. They fixed just about anything but a broken arm or a gouged-out eye. Ma gave Mary two spoonfuls from the little bottle. From sunup till sundown Pa had to keep stoppin’ the wagon while Mary went runnin’ off to the horizon. Pa got so mad he told Ma never again give anyone the little bottle cure.

  When we reached the Missouri River wagon trains were being formed up. Some headed to Oregon. Some to California. Gold or cheap farmland is what the people going to California wanted. Maybe twenty wagons already gathered. Gathered in a California wagon train. Pa talked to the men. Most from Iowa and Illinois. Told we needed fifty wagons before we headed West. Pa said it was ’cause the leader of the train was greedy. Said he was collecting twenty-five dollars a wagon to take them West. Pa said couldn’t imagine. Couldn’t imagine someone getting over a thousand dollars for four months’ work.

  Camped outside of Council Bluffs waiting for our wagon train to gather. It took more than two weeks before fifty families joined up. Most leather hands. A few cotton hands. Most every wagon had a ma and pa and a basket of children. Took a tally of the boys in the train. Two close to my age. Arch and Matthew. Both fine fellas. Matthew’s pa kept him close to their wagon, so’s he couldn’t explore with Arch and me. Mary tallied the older boys. More than half a dozen her age or older. Happy she was.

  Train had its leader. He was a Captain. He wasn’t a real Captain. But since he was in charge he was called Captain. His name was Wrighter. But we didn’t call him Wrighter. We called him Captain. Made me feel good though. Made me feel good his name was Wrighter and not Wronger.

  Once everyone joined up the men had a meeting. Pa wouldn’t let me sit in. But I did. Sorta did. Got my whittling knife out and set down leaning against a tree on the downwind side of the meeting. Not too far away to hear. I sat a-whittling on a stick and listening with my ears. Captain started with the most important. Said for sure only he set the rules. And that was the first rule. If someone didn’t want to follow the rules that was fine by him. But they needed to leave straight up and go their own way. Captain said he’d been twice to California and twice back to the United States. He knew what to do and what not to do. Said that some trains took the Sabbath off. Told us only days we’d take off was when there was grass and water for the animals. Said we could take extra Sabbaths off when we got to California if we wanted to get right with the Lord. Captain said Indians wouldn’t attack. Said they would steal. Each night there would be guards posted. Two men a night. He would pick who was standing guard. Told us cholera, starving, freezing, and going mad in the Salt Desert is what could kill us. God would decide the cholera. If we did what he told us we wouldn’t starve, freeze, or go mad.

  Captain said there were four parts to our journey. Some big, some small. Some not so hard, and one that could kill you. Said the first part was the longest. Traveling along the Platte River for five hundred miles past Fort Laramie shouldn’t be any worry. Second part was going over the Rockies along the Sweetwater River. Shouldn’t be no trouble less it snowed heavy last winter. Snow melting making the water rush over its banks. Talked slow the Captain did about the Salt Desert. Shortest part of the journey. Worst part. Said he’d seen oxen and men go crazy from burning heat. So hot bacon would fry on a skillet without no fire. Last part was following the Truckee River through the Sierra Mountains. Said he knew everyone heard of settlers being snowed in and starving. Not all starved he said. Some ate the ones that did starve. We wouldn’t be getting snowed in, no way. If we didn’t get to the Sierras before October we would halt till spring.

  Some other things about the women. Said no cussing around the wives and daughters. Said that if a fellow needed to squat he had to be behind a tree or far off. Said the men should tell their women to go off to the right side of the train when they had to be alone. Me
n should walk a ways out to the left.

  Then the Captain asked a question. Strange I thought. Asked which men didn’t drink. Which men thought whiskey was the devil’s nectar. Three hands went up. Asked if any of the three was only with a wife and no one else. One hand stayed up. Captain said he’d give him ten dollars of his fee back if he’d carry the whiskey in his wagon. For sure, the fellow said. Then the Captain made a rumble. Told everyone to take any whiskey they had and give it to this fellow. The fellow grinning that he got ten dollars.

  That night Pa told Ma about the meeting. Left out some things. Put something in. Didn’t tell Ma or Mary about the freezing and starving. Didn’t say anything about the Salt Desert. Did tell Ma the Captain said men should get a good supper ’cause all the hard work and such. Told her about the whiskey. Said he wished he’d said he didn’t drink the devil’s cider. Wished he’d got the ten dollars.

  Before heading across the Missouri River the Captain looked over every wagon. Cut out a dozen sickly oxen. Made some families get rid of belongings. Only thing Captain wanted in the wagons was stores, tools, and clothes. Told families to sell their potbelly stoves and the like for whatever they could get in Council Bluffs. Said no matter how little they got it would be more than when they threw it out in the middle of the Salt Desert. Thrown out ’cause their cracked-tongue oxen couldn’t pull another mile. Got right mad when he found whiskey bottles in two wagons. Found them after they’d all been given over.

  Everything took from Iowa was piled on our wagon floor. Couldn’t see the floor for the axes, plow heads, clothes, blankets, dried beef, sacks of grain, and Ma’s hope chest. No place to lay or even sit. Right away we knew our wagon wasn’t no good. Other wagons were better. They had two floors. Bottom one held the family’s stores and tools. Maybe two feet above the first floor a second floor with a bunch of trapdoors on rope hinges. So’s you could always get whatever you was storing below. The good thing was the second floor was clear. A place for a sickly person to ride in the day. A place big enough for a family to lay their bedding at night when the wind was blowing the rain sideways.