Shenandoah's Redemption - The Journey

By G. Thompson

John David Yager had a struggling childhood. He was forced to grow up fast. After losing both of his parents and the Civil War looming before him, he decided to embark on an adventure where he would make many friends and some enemies. He would kill. He would dance with death. His journey and adventures would teach him many things. Among them is the recurring theme that the truth is always the truth. It would take him thousands of miles from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Florida Everglades the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781643505862

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Beginning 1845

Iwas born in 1845 at Milnes, Virginia. Later to be named, Shenandoah. I don’t know if I was named after anyone, but they named me John David. What I know about my relatives is only what my parents told me from time to time. My father’s name was John Isaic Yager. He was born of German immigrants who had fled from Germany. My mother was half Algonquin Indian from the mountains of Western Pennsylvania. She was more apt to tell me stories and share information than Dad. I never heard anything about her father except that he was white. Her Indian name was White Feather. Her white name was Bonnie Mcdorn which led us believe her father was Irish. She had no memory of him and was raised on an Indian reservation in Western Pennsylvania.

Dad and his family were members of the Quakers. Through trading with the Indian people, he’d met my mother. He fell in love with her and wanted to marry her, but this was not allowed by the Quakers. The elders advised him that if this happened, he would be read out from the Quakers, no one would be allowed to speak to him, and he wouldn’t be allowed in church. He would be shunned.

He left home in the middle of the night and went to the camp where my mother lived and asked her adopted father, Grey Cloud, for his daughter’s hand in marriage. They were joined in a ceremony held by the chief, Red Feather. They headed south with what little they owned in a small wagon pulled by two horses, with a paint pony, which was a gift from Red Feather, tied to the back of the wagon. They drifted south until Dad heard of work in a place called Milnes, Virginia. Along the way, they traded the pony for staples. They continued south through the Shenandoah Valley and crossed the Massanutten Mountains at New Market, then south to Milnes. They were later married again by the justice of peace in Milnes.

I was born a year later. They named me John David, but my mother called me Tace. She said that in her native language it meant someone who is strong. So, I grew up with two names, John David and Tace, depending on who was talking.

Dad had worked at a foundry in Pennsylvania and with that experience, got a job at the big gem iron ore furnace at Milnes. My mother did laundry and sewing for some of the other furnace workers. We rented a two-room log shanty from Mr. Lucas on the northern banks of Naked Creek, just upstream from the Verbena mill and about a mile from the furnace.

When I was seven, I started school in the one-room school house on Naked Creek Road.

My dad and mom had already taught me my letters and numbers, so I did pretty well. We had a mean old school teacher, Mr. Ferrel. If you fell asleep or wasn’t paying attention, he would whack you across the head with a big old yardstick that he carried all the time. That was the same year that Mr. Lucas, who owned the farm that we lived on, passed away.

The farm was divided between his two daughters. Dad and Mom had saved enough money that they got a loan from the Old Dominion Bank and bought part of the farm. It consisted of eighty acres with several good springs and about one-fourth of a mile that fronted the creek.

Over the next few years, we fenced it in with stacked stone or split rail fence made from locust trees. I didn’t like stacking the stone because you had to keep an eye peeled for copperheads and rattlers. Dad and I wore leather gloves with long arm guards when we built fence. The rattlers weren’t bad because they would at least make a noise if you got too close, but those damned copperheads would just curl up and hold their ground. They blended in with the ground and leaves, and I’d almost gotten bit a couple of times.

It seemed like Dad was working either at the furnace or on the farm all the time. I spent most of my time with Mom or by myself on the farm. I don’t know when Dad had time to sleep.

Dad bought a bull, Lester, and four cows. Each year, they had three or four calves. That, plus the two horses we had, kept the pasture eaten down pretty good. The rest we made hay on. The garden was fenced in, along with Mom’s tobacco patch. She would sit on the back porch where no one could see her and smoke her corncob pipe. Some years later, we built a four-room house on a hill well above the creek, which flooded often.

Mom had developed a constant cough. Dr. Waff, in town, said it was the beginnings of consumption and probably came from smoking tobacco or living in a closed space with a smoky fire like she did as a child. Dad bought the best potbelly stove that Loyd’s Hardware and Mercantile had. It kept our home nice and warm, and there was hardly any smoke, but her cough kept getting worse.

One Sunday after church, Dad took us to the furnace to show us how it worked. It was larger than anything I’d ever seen. Probably a hundred feet tall. Smoke billowed out of the top of the big stone pyramid that was flat on top. Giant bellows ran by the stream that flowed by, pumped air into the pyramid of stone. It was like a giant blacksmiths pot. Climbing a big set of stairs to the catwalk that was level with the top of the stone pyramid, we had a view of the whole area. In three big bins on the end of the catwalk were crushed limestone, iron ore, and charcoal. They were dumped into each of the bins from above.

The ore was mostly dug up near the surface, east of the furnace in an area called Grindstone Mountain and Stony Run, and then hauled on sleds to the furnace.

The limestone was quarried on a cliff near the furnace, busted with hammers and stored in one of the bins.

The charcoal was made in the mountains by cutting down hardwood trees and sawing them into three-foot lengths. The bark was peeled off and hauled to the tannery in Luray. They were then stacked on end against each other in a circle about twenty feet across. The whole circle of logs was then covered with dirt, leaves, and moss and then set a fire underneath. It would smolder for three to four days and then go out. When it had cooled and was uncovered, it was chunks of black charcoal. It was hauled to the furnace and dumped into the bin from above.

A catwalk, six feet wide, ran from the bins to the top of the furnace. A crew of men with shovels and wheelbarrows continually dumped equal amounts of each material into the mouth on top of the furnace. Those men were black with charcoal and soot from the smoke that belched up each time they dumped a load into it. The furnace had to burn continually, twenty-four hours a day, all year long.

Each morning, a man called a caster would unplug the furnace at the bottom. The molten ore, settled to the bottom of the burning tube inside the pyramid, would pour out into sand molds called piglets. Each pour would make over a hundred piglets. Each piglet weighted about forty pounds. When the molten ore started coming out as slag, a glassy-like material of varying colors depending on the other minerals in the ore, the caster plugged the outlet, and the whole process started again.

The sandpits with the piglets were then flooded with water, hand pumped from the stream. The cooled piglets were then lifted out with tongs and stacked on sleds, then drug by teams of big work horses, a quarter mile to the banks of the Shenandoah River. There, they were placed on rafts made from seven or eight big spruce or hemlock logs tied together.

From spring through fall, six men with long cedar poles would drift and pole each raft loaded with hundreds of piglets to Harpers Ferry where there was a foundry. The foundry heated and hammered the ore piglets repeatedly getting rid of the impurities and making it a usable steel. The logs were sold to the mill there, and the men walked back to Milnes.

It took three days to raft the ore to Harpers Ferry if the river was running full and longer in the summer months when the water was low. It took the men seven days to walk home. There were number of camps along the river where they would be fed and packed a lunch to take on the raft.

It was late winter, and most of the ice and snow had melted except on the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dad had done about every job at the furnace and wanted to run the rafts this summer. It was a dangerous job, but it was the highest-paying one. They had blasted passageways in the ledges on the bottom of the river for the rafts to clear. You had to learn and memorize where the channels were blasted, or the raft could get lodged on rocks in which case the iron would have to be unloaded by hand, the raft drug clear and then reloaded. Several men had drowned or been crushed to death when they got caught between the raft and rocks. One raft busted apart on the Compton rapids near Front Royal. Five men made it to shore but the sixth one was never found.

People said they thought those piglets had smashed him down into some clevis in the ledges deep in the river. They thought they might find him during the summer when the water was lower, but they never did. Others said they figured the turtles and fish ate him.

Neither Mom nor I liked him being gone that long, but he insisted it was the best thing to do. Mom and I could take care of the horses and the few cows we had.

I got a job at Mr. Loker’s livery stable on the south end of town. I worked two hours each evening after school and eight hours on Saturday. Dad, with his Quaker upbringing, wouldn’t allow any work on Sunday except for the regular chores around the house. Mr. Loker was a kind man and his wife, Martha, treated me like I was a child of their own even though a lot of people called me a half-breed. Mr. Loker, who insisted I call him Mainard, and I became very good friends. Every evening after I had shoveled the horse shit, groomed, fed, and watered the stock, Mrs. Loker would have me a basket of biscuits or a pie to take home. Plus, I made two bits for every eight hours I worked. Through the years, at Mainard’s instruction, I learned all about horses, tack mending, roping and riding, shoeing horses, and some blacksmithing.

Sometimes I dreaded going home in the evening because Mom’s cough had become almost constant. People quit visiting us. I guess they thought what was wrong with her might be catching. The doctor gave her a bottle of opium syrup and that seemed to help. She would sometimes cough all night long and spit up pinkish blood. She also ate a mixture of herbs and leaves that she picked by the creek and in the woods. She would take me along and show me the plants and tell me what they were used for.

Dad was gone on the river a lot, and I don’t believe he was aware of how much she coughed. I noticed that she took extra syrup when he was home.

Mr. Ferrel, the school teacher, retired that year. They closed the school on the Naked Creek Road, and we had to go to the little school on the south end of town. It was a one-room building with a potbelly stove in the center of the room.

I was growing like a weed, over five feet tall, and I was built strong like my father except that I had my mother’s black hair and eyes. I found myself staring at the girls in school, and more than once, Ms. Alice, the schoolmarm, would tell me to face the blackboard. Ms. Alice was around twenty years old and pretty good looking. The guys around the livery would joke about her never having a man and would crack a joke about her liking women! I was the oldest boy in the class.

One day when I was daydreaming, staring out the window, Ms. Alice had me sit at a table in the front of the room, a few feet from her desk facing the blackboard. I was embarrassed at first, but it didn’t take me very long to find out that I really liked it. Each time she would lean over to get something out of her desk drawers, I had a bird’s-eye view of her breasts. Sometimes she would see me looking, and she would just smile at me. I guess my face must have turned red as a ripe raspberry! The next day, I just went to my seat in the front without being told to. Sometimes, after recess, the stove got the room too warm. Ms. Alice would sit down at her desk and tug her skirts up over her knees. I didn’t quite understand what was happening to me then, but I realized later that it was her way of getting me to pay attention.

There was much talk about the South seceding from the Union, Civil War, taxation, and slavery. There were posters all around town. I had different feelings about it than most people. There weren’t many slaves around Milnes, and I didn’t know any slaves. They were kept separated from any white people and not allowed in school. Dad said they were just as much human as us, and no man should own another. Well, I agreed with that. I did understand the discrimination with all the teasing and such about my mother being an Indian. On top of that, Dad, with his Quaker roots, didn’t believe in taking another human life or war. I didn’t exactly agree with him on that subject and neither did Mom, though we never told him that.

I was infatuated with the West. I read every word I could find about it. I would stare at the map on the schoolhouse wall and try to imagine what it was like. I collected all the penny books about the West that I could lay my hands on. Most of the other kids were itching to go to war and shoot them a Yankee. I was content to dream about crossing the Mississippi, the Great Plains, the Rockies, and whatever else was out there. I guess maybe the way I was raised, with Dad being against fighting, made me a bit different from most kids.

Dad was gone a lot because the furnace had been conscripted to make twenty thousand cannon balls to be delivered to Savannah, Georgia. It seemed like Dad was gone most all the time. He’d be home one or two days, then off on a raft of iron ore piglets to Harpers Ferry again.

It was a hot day in August and Dad had been gone on a raft for two days. I had done the morning chores and was having some lunch at the kitchen table. Mom would only eat in her little side room because she would have trouble swallowing and would cough up blood and didn’t want anyone to see it. I could see that the rags she used were getting bloodier all the time.

A buggy pulled up to the front of the house and stopped. Mr. Campbell, the furnace owner, and Mr. Judd, Dad’s boss, got off and came to the door. I knew something was wrong because Mr. Campbell never visited anyone.

Mrs. Yager in? Mr. Campbell asked.

Yes, sir, I said, I’ll get her.

I went to get Mom, and she had just had one of her coughing spells and had blood on her chin. She wiped it off, and we went to the door.

Mr. Campbell, tipping his hat, said to Mom, Ma’am, I’m sorry to bring bad news, but Mr. Yager had an accident.

Neither I nor Mom could speak.

His raft got sideways in the Compton Rapids, and Mr. Yeager’s foot was caught between the logs and a limestone cliff. That was a relief because we surely thought he was drowned. He is at the Winchester infirmary and getting the best care they can offer.

Mom and I didn’t know what to say, we just stood there, kind of shock.

I’ve instructed the hospital to wire me to his condition daily, I’ll send Mr. Judd here over every day with the wire and to help out with any chores, Mr. Campbell said. Is there anything we can do for ya now? he asked.

Mom and I looked at each other in disbelief, then