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ALONG THE NEBRASKA COAST, AN HISTORICAL NOVEL. (ORIGINAL WORK)
Abstract
To a wild frontier riverport of civic hucksters, slave runners, muleskinners and bullwhackers, a New York inventor brings the gigantic steam wagon. If the machine can haul trains of freight wagons across the prairies, its backers can beat the railroad to the opening of the West. John Boulware, former soldier, frontiersman and founding settler, doesn't think much of the new contraption, but becomes an unwilling detective when he stumbles onto a plot to destroy the machine. His allies include the clever politician J. Sterling Morton, and a young bullwhacker (newly promoted to steam wagon fireman) named Jeremy Talbot, who is in love with Boulware's spirited daughter Christina. Unravelling the steam wagon conspiracy sends Boulware on a tangled quest involving renegade Oto Indians, abolitionists, and a 400-mile chase of a murderer along the Oregon Trail and into the desolate badlands. In the end, a lynching is prevented as the final piece of the steam wagon puzzle falls into place--and Nebraska City and its steam wagon are doomed to perpetual anonymity. This novel explores the meaning of "civilization." The principal characters all want Nebraska City to grow out of its frontier wildness, but what does it mean to be civilized, and at what cost is it achieved? The question centers on John Boulware, the once idealistic settler grown mean and cynical as he sees what has become of his town. Does civilization mean temperance and religion, as the freight king Alexander Majors insists? Is it tied to the law of the land, as Morton contends, even to the point of capturing runaway slaves and deporting Indians? Is commerce alone the answer, and the steam wagon the key to making Nebraska City the new Chicago? Or perhaps, as the novel attempts to suggest in the end, it is simply a matter of human decency and courage. The novel is based on a true story. Many of the characters are drawn from the pages of history. We'll never know the full story of the failure of the great steam wagon experiment, but it might have happened something like this.
Subject Area
American literature
Recommended Citation
VOLKMER, JON PATRICK, "ALONG THE NEBRASKA COAST, AN HISTORICAL NOVEL. (ORIGINAL WORK)" (1987). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8715858.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8715858