Immigrants: Dragon Tooth Gold - Volume 1

Volume 1 of Dragon Tooth Gold begins the story of Aaden Callahan and Anna Mercier; two landed immigrants. They met while teaching at Columbia University in New York City. The year is 1841. The young Dr. Callahan woos and wins the heart of the smart and beautiful Anna. Their courtship isn't easy. Anna's abusive and dominating father doesn't approve and works through his connections as an investment banker to have Aaden fired from the University. Their relationship turns deadly when Anna's father challenges Aaden to a duel to settle the matter with deadly force. Aaden embarrasses Anna's father beyond repair in front of thousands of spectators in Faculty Park, across the street from the front gate of the University. Losing the duel and missing an earlobe, the banker's world crumbles around him. He takes his life in a drunken stupor when he finds his accounts frozen and receives divorce papers from his wife's lawyers.

Aaden and Anna are spirited away from New York on his younger brother's whiskey schooner Blessed by the Wind. The Blessed is no ordinary schooner. Armed and deadly they fight off pirates in Pamlico Sound and take aboard a blacksmith and his apprentice slave who is his adopted son.  They encounter a clairvoyant in Jamaica encounter more troubles having to fight an Argentine frigate on their way to New Orleans.  

 

Anna's mother settles in St. Louis and establishes The Black Freedom League. Aaden though is eager to homestead further west. He takes his wife and the servant family from St. Louis to Independence, Missouri, where there is land to homestead and a future to carve out of the wilderness. There, he establishes an empire partnering with blacks he buys and frees to take up homesteads around his holdings. Aaden spends his years building his lumber and brewery business. Anna founds a school in Independence for children of all colors and creeds. The abolitionist culture they create causes many problems the pro-slavery dominated state resulting in conflicts with slavers and even an assassination attempt.

Aaden and Anna raise four children. Eli, the first, and twin boys, Jacques and Roland, and then finally a girl, Suzette.  As the nation looms toward civil war, Anna yields to pressure from her mother and allows her boys to join the Army Supply Service.  The post commander at Fort Leavenworth promises to keep the boys close to home.  After a tornado sweeps through the lumber mill and brewery, however, the boys take a contract to join a wagon train all the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Suzette defies her grandmother who wants to take her on a clipper ship around the horn to Los Angeles and runs away to join her brothers on the trail west.

Kent McGrew, born at the end of WWII and raised by immigrant grandparents in the Sacramento Valley, began his mining career by accident at the age of fourteen. His father, the mechanical genius, was drawn into mining partnerships, building small processing plants for a share of the action. Having lost their ass three times by the time he was nineteen, he finally struck it rich enough to land at Montana School of Mines where he miraculously earned a Master's Degree in Mineral Dressing Engineering despite two years of hard living in Butte, Montana, working underground in the copper mines, and a three-year interlude in the US Army. To the credit of his first wife, Sandy Louch - the girl down the street, he aced the last three years of his education. All in all, he remains working at his profession for sixty years going to every continent on the planet except Antarctica, where he literally missed the boat due to a crashed tour plane the week before he arrived in New Zealand. From the tops of the Andes to the jungle and savannas of Africa to being part of the first delegation into China, Mr. McGrew has spent his days in the mastery of the science of his profession, solving mining and environmental problems. When asked where he is from - North America, when asked where he works - Everywhere. Simple answers to complex questions. Bogged down in technical papers, in the late '80s he created the pen name "Auntie GEM" (GEM is the acronym for Government, Education, and Mining - a subcommittee of the Society of Mining Engineers). His articles were carried by the Lead Daily Call and mining advocates syndicated the popular articles to all the weekly newspapers across North and South Dakota. Auntie educated readers in a humorous way about various aspects of the mining process blending in the rich the history of the area, helping to ease the tension of anti-mining initiatives in South Dakota at that time. Although "Auntie" probably wouldn't have approved, he also published in 1994 his Five Axioms of Mining Scams, several of which appear in Dragon Tooth Gold along with some new scams his research has uncovered along the way. Mining in South Dakota abruptly ended for him upon learning that Aspen trees contributed to his late, but unlucky find, of asthma. But at least it wasn't tuberculosis. Still, a friend suggested Arizona for its good air, and 30 years later he is still living under, above and around the mining district of Congress, Arizona with his beautiful wife, Sally. And he continues to mine, mentor and teach, a man in love with his profession. He was actively involved in the construction of Congress Elementary in 2000 and still works at the administration of the school district, bringing quality education to the children of rural Arizona. Besides the refreshing break from fifty years of technical writing to bring his readers Dragon Tooth Gold, he now trolls the library for each nugget of gold mining fact as he continues his quest to bring readers with him to his beloved American West.

Tahtim Ann Ayliffe is an educated writer having graduated from the University of New Mexico with a degree in Creative Writing. She works as owner/operator of the Spring Creek Company and Tulsa Granite in Wilburton, OK.

Mrs. Cummins is retired and lives in Boise Idaho.