Tolman looked around at the desolate island, the river, the Gulf, the flat hard-packed sand of the beach road. “Hell of a long way from Virginia.”
Journey nodded. “That it is. The Confederates didn’t have many supplies, their clothes were worn out. They’d just won a victory in battle, but they stripped the Indiana private of his clothes and all the personal belongings he had with him.”
“Why is this important?”
“The Indiana private was named John Jefferson Williams.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Meg, listen to me. His name was John Jefferson Williams.”
“Is that supposed to mean something—?” Tolman’s voice died and she stopped walking. “No. There’s no way…”
“Remember that note we found in Lovell’s stuff, the one Samuel Williams wrote when he left in the fall of 1864? It was just one sentence, and it didn’t mean anything at the time. We were still trying to figure out what Samuel had done. But he wrote, before disappearing forever, ‘I leave all to my younger brother John, who has crossed the river to join the Federals.’”
“Crossed the river,” Tolman said. “He crossed from Kentucky to Indiana. So he joined the Indiana troops that eventually wound up here. My God, Nick, you’re saying Samuel Williams’s brother was the last casualty of the war?”
“That’s right. You remember my theory for how Samuel got from Louisville to Fort Washita?”
“He took steamboats as far as Fort Smith, then horseback from there.”
“Right. When he changed boats, probably at the mouth of the Arkansas, he could have sent the signature page on another boat going on down the Mississippi. Boats regularly made the run to New Orleans and around the Texas coast to Mexico. We know for a fact that at least some of the troops on Brazos Island found out about Lee’s surrender from a newspaper that was left here by a steamboat from New Orleans. All Samuel had to do was pay a messenger to deliver a sealed envelope to his brother, who by then was posted here. He knew it would be safe—nothing was going on down here, after all. His brother didn’t know anything about the Glory Warriors. All he had was a sealed envelope that had been sent from his much older brother.”
Tolman shook her head. “Sam Williams was brilliant. He thought of everything, planned it so carefully. He even figured out that Grant and Lee didn’t trust him, and he did everything he could to protect the pages.”
“Here’s the irony: When Samuel left Louisville back in the fall, that sentence about leaving all to his brother probably was just about the bank and his personal belongings. One way or another, he knew he was about to become Edward Hiram and wouldn’t be coming back to his old life. But by the next spring, when the war was over and he was putting the Glory Warriors into place, he saw it as a way to keep the signature page away from the other pages. It was a fail-safe—he’d created the Glory Warriors, but he didn’t want it to be too easy for them to take power. Maybe he thought the power wouldn’t be abused that way.”
Andrew whistled, then dropped his straw on the sand. Tolman picked it up, brushed it off, and handed it back to him. His eyes flickered across hers before darting away toward the waves.
Tolman looked thoughtful. “So where’s the page? The Rebel soldiers stripped John Williams’s clothes. If they were that desperate, and they found a sealed letter in the pocket of a dead man, I’m betting they opened it, hoping there was money inside.”
“Someone opened it, and I think what happened is that they saw the signatures of Robert E. Lee and U. S. Grant with the date of April ninth and Appomattox written on it, and they got scared. Within a few days, everything was back to normal down here on the border, and someone gave the page to an officer, maybe the Union commander at Fort Brown. When the war was officially over, the commander wasn’t sure what to do with the page. He knew he couldn’t keep it as a souvenir, he knew it had some importance, and he was probably nervous holding on to it.”
“I know you’re not going to tell me he sent it to Washington,” Tolman said.
“To the War Department. He washed his hands of it. But of course, the War Department didn’t know what it was, either. So I think some clerk in Washington, maybe in a low-level office somewhere—” Tolman smiled at that. “—put it in a drawer and forgot about it for a long time.”
They walked a few steps in silence. “At Fort Washita, you knew then the page wasn’t buried with Williams,” Tolman said. “I understand that we were drawing out the Glory Warriors at that point, but did Williams really have to be dug up? I have to tell you, I keep remembering falling on his bones, and the way they sounded snapping underneath me.”
“I’m sorry,” Journey said. “I had to convince McMartin.”
“Well, you certainly convinced me,” Tolman said. “At Washita, you said to look in the library to find the signature page. I thought you were delirious, but I guess you went to the library and put all this together in the last two months.”
“Partly,” Journey said.
He stopped and looked at her. Andrew pulled on his father’s arm, then seeing that Journey wasn’t moving, he stopped and scuffed a foot in the sand.
“What do you mean, partly?” Tolman said.
“The page sat around until 1937, when someone finally realized it might be historically significant and sent it to the Library of Congress.”
“No,” Tolman said.
Journey nodded.
“It was on display in the goddamn Library of Congress all this time,” Tolman said.
“Not exactly on display, but it’s been there since 1937. There’s a note attached to it from the curator at the time, stating that the signatures have been authenticated, and that it is, and I quote, ‘likely that a member of either General Grant’s or General Lee’s staff requested a second copy of their signatures upon Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House.’” Journey shrugged. “They think it was someone’s souvenir.”
“The Library of Congress,” Tolman said.
Journey smiled.
“Hidden in plain sight,” Tolman said. “The Glory Warriors could have found it at any time.”
“If they’d known where to look. It’s a bit of an illusion, isn’t it? Sometimes things are hiding, even if they’re right there for everyone to see.”
They looked at each other—a long, long moment of unspoken understanding.
“Maybe that’s true,” Tolman said. She was thinking of her mother, and President James Harwell. She wondered if Journey was thinking of his parents and brothers, or of his ex-wife and his son and Sandra Kelly. Or maybe he was just thinking about history.
“Then again,” Tolman said, “maybe it isn’t.”
They walked along the beach, close to the shore as the waves rolled in. A wind gust hit them, they felt air on their faces, and a fine, misty spray of water. Andrew Journey held both his hands over his head and waved them back and forth, basking in the November sun and the clear air and the water. He gave a happy, genuine laugh, and then he began to whistle again.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
We rarely get much measurable snow in Oklahoma, but we do experience our share of sleet and ice storms. In December 2007, the worst ice storm in our history struck and virtually crippled the state. Hundreds of thousands went without power for a week or more. I watched in my own neighborhood as stately, century-old trees buckled under the weight of the ice.
I was fortunate in that the power stayed on in my home, but otherwise my city was shut down for several days and I dared not venture outside. Stranded in the house, I found myself wandering about the Web and landed on an account of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. General Horace Porter, a member of Grant’s staff, had written the narrative and a single sentence caught my attention, words to the effect that the two generals were alone in the Wilmer McLean house for a short time, just the two of them, before their staffs were allowed in to witness the formal surrender.
What did the two men talk about in those few min
utes? I wondered. This story was born from that single sentence, that seemingly innocuous line in the midst of one of the most well-documented events in American history.
I feel obligated to point out a few lines between fact and fiction, so here goes: The Glory Warriors are completely fictitious. No such document as the one that forms the basis of this book, was appended to Lee’s surrender. However, General Order No. 100, better known as the Lieber Code, is real, as is the fact that it paved the way for many of the modern rules of warfare.
South Central College of Oklahoma and the town of Carpenter Center are my own creations. All other settings are real, although I took a few liberties here and there. The Poet’s Penn is fictitious, while the relationship between Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and U. S. Grant is not. The author and the general were good friends, and Clemens did in fact encourage Grant to write his memoirs and promised to publish them, which he did with great success. The royalties provided an income to Grant’s widow for many years after his death.
Private John Jefferson Williams of the Thirty-fourth Indiana was indeed the last man to fall in the Battle of Palmito Ranch, making him the final casualty of the Civil War. The character of Samuel Williams (“Edward Hiram”), however, is wholly fictitious.
The Colberts were prominent leaders of the Chickasaw people for many years. I appropriated the Colbert family name for the character of Jeremiah Colbert (“Onnaroketay”). The Chickasaw burial ground at Fort Washita is as described, with the exception, of course, of the G.W. marker. I remember Fort Washita well from my own boyhood, as I grew up hearing stories and legends surrounding the fort and those buried there. One sad note: in September 2010, while this book was in production, a portion of Fort Washita caught fire, and the restored South Barracks burned to the ground. The descriptions of the fort in the book are as it appeared prior to this tragedy.
I have been asked if it is accurate to ascribe Anglo names to Native people during the Civil War era. Particularly concerning the Chickasaw and the other tribes who were removed to present-day Oklahoma from the Southeast, many of the people used English names as far back as the late eighteenth century, a result of their interaction with, and subsequent intermarriage to, white traders, settlers, and “missionaries.” The 1810 rolls of the Chickasaw people, years before removal, show many families with names such as Colbert, Burney, and Smith.
In preparing this book, I read Bruce Catton’s classic A Stillness at Appomattox and, of course, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. Another valuable resource was The Last Battle of the Civil War by Jeffrey William Hunt, which covers in broad scope and context the Battle of Palmito Ranch, the desolate spot where the last shots of the war were fired, far away from the legendary battlegrounds of Virginia. To this day, a single historical marker—which has been repeatedly defaced—stands almost hidden along Texas State Highway 4. It is the only outward sign of any kind indicating the location of the final land battle of the war.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Books come about in mysterious ways, and many people contributed large and small, directly and indirectly, to make this one happen.
At the top of the list is my agent, George Bick, who brought an infectious enthusiasm and a wealth of publishing experience to this project. He not only gave me input that made this a stronger story, but saw the project through with style and good humor as well. He’s also quite adept at responding to e-mails from nervous authors. It’s a joy to work with him.
For his early encouragement of this book, I would also like to extend my gratitude to John Talbot.
My amazing and insightful editor at Forge, Kristin Sevick, understood this story better than I did at times, and she helped me to look at it in different ways—quite a significant accomplishment. She has been a tireless advocate, a wellspring of ideas, and a creator of handy time lines. Plus she is a fellow baseball fan and connoisseur of random historical facts. My name appears on the front of this book, but it is very much hers as well.
Copy editor Eliani Torres did a masterful job of keeping me accurate and consistent.
To Ray and Jean Miller, thanks for spending a Sunday afternoon working on the photo shoot, and for the terrific pictures.
For research assistance, I am grateful to the following:
Rodger Harris of the Oklahoma Historical Society; Richard Green, Chickasaw Nation tribal historian; Larry Marcy, superintendent of the Fort Washita Historic Site; Norman Rozeff of the Cameron County, Texas, Historical Commission; and Jeanne Burke, county historian for Clark County, Indiana, as well as several staff members of Falls of the Ohio State Park who patiently answered my questions. Additionally I would like to thank Bette and Ken Cullen for their hospitality and kindness while I was in the Louisville area.
I must acknowledge the late Chloe Sartin, the finest teacher of American history and government ever to enter a classroom. Not only did she instill in me a great passion for these subjects, but she also taught me how to take notes and organize data. Thirty years later, I still use a variation of the outlining technique she so lovingly pounded into all our heads at Madill High School.
Personal thanks to:
Connie Edmondson, Jim Lowery, and the people on the second floor, for their professionalism and compassion.
My colleagues and friends, past and present, at KCSC, the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, and Southwestern Publishing, for more reasons than I can count. Within these organizations, I am especially grateful to Brad Ferguson, Michelle Winters, and Elizabeth Meares for the many professional and learning opportunities I have been given.
My spiritual family at NWCC, who embody and exemplify the idea of unconditional love and understanding.
Friends from across the country, who have been so good to me through the years, with extraspecial thanks to those I always know I can call on at any time: Jeanette Atwood, Tom Clare, Brooke Harry, Darren Hellwege, Barb Hendrickson, Zena McAdams, Nancy Moore, Charles Newcomb, and Lane Whitesell. Rob Boss cheerfully answers all my e-mail questions about wine and firearms. JoLynda Ingram has been a steadfast friend through all the changes in my life. She also apparently harbors no hard feelings for the time I tried to teach her to drive a stick shift nearly twenty years ago, and she brought me a burger from Johnnie’s when I most needed it.
My parents, Bill and Audrey Anderson, and my sister, Teresa Anderson, have helped me in various ways over the years, even at times when I did not realize I needed them. Perhaps that is the truest test of family.
My sons, Ben, Will, and Sam, are the joys of my life, and are three of the most unique and fascinating people on the planet. I have learned more from them than I could ever have imagined, and all four of us are still learning. Walk this way, boys … or at least this direction.
I have heard it said that those who believe in us create an actual physical environment in which it becomes possible to succeed. I never fully comprehended this statement until I met Terri Cullen. She believed in my writing almost from the moment we met, and this book would not exist without her love and support. She helped me see light, beauty, and hope after a long period of darkness and despair, and I am humbled by her faith in me. Terri offered encouragement at every turn, patiently listened to me ramble on about plot scenarios, and even offered excellent suggestions for settings. Plus she served as my technology and academia consultant and she makes terrific chicken curry. I am truly blessed.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
COLD GLORY
Copyright © 2011 by B. Kent Anderson
All rights reserved.
A Forge® eBook
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-2861-8
First Edition: October 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-8558-1
First Forge eBook Edition: October 2011
Cold Glory Page 37
