Bend In The River
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
In modern-day America, life is so rapid-paced that it’s a real sacrifice to spend much time pondering the events of the past, let alone speculating how those events might apply to our future. Even one more task--no matter how rewarding, instructive, or entertaining--can throw our schedules, no, our entire lives, out of kilter. If, on the other hand, we accept the idea of “cause and effect,” it’s hard to dismiss the fact that what’s going to happen in the future depends, in large measure, upon what happened, directly or indirectly, in the past. Isn’t it logical then, today, as our government struggles to keep the American promise of being a bright and shining light to the world, that we need to, once-in-awhile, look to America’s past?
For instance, we still have much to learn from those earliest Americans, the colonists. What was it that brought them to these shores? Never having known freedom, why were they willing to sacrifice their very lives and fortunes to find it? How could these simple folk found a nation based upon that most inexpressible of human virtues, faith? Learning America’s early history might not be the most exciting avocation, but it can certainly be instructive and illuminating. Without a doubt, this nation’s continued security and prosperity depend upon following the precepts and constructs of that past because, after all, apples do not fall far from their tree. And so I say, let’s set aside a bit of that precious time and spend it looking back to an earlier time, a time when the clock was, quite literally, much less important than the calendar. We owe it to them to keep the faith.
The American Colonial experience lasted nearly two centuries from, roughly, 1590 to 1783, the end of the Revolutionary war. Ten generations of poor, uneducated, but remarkably prolific European men and women gave up relatively comfortable, familiar lives for the promise of a better way of living in the dark, daunting wilderness of the North American continent. Despite the terrible attrition of the early years when one out of every three colonists was lost to strange new diseases, ineptitude, and to depredation by the indigenous population--those strange savage red men called “Indians” by the Europeans--the white population in America would grow to nearly four million souls. Families of ten, twelve, even twenty children were not uncommon because big families made sound economic sense in an era of small family farms and cottage industries. “Many hands” made “light work.” Unfortunately, childbearing took a terrible toll on the women of that day and men, left to rear large families, quickly re-married in order to preserve the integrity of the family. Invariably, they married younger women and the cycle was repeated. It was considered quite normal, in fact, for a man to marry and re-marry three, four, or more times and to rear as many different families.
During that same period, the decline in the native population was equally precipitous. They and their children had no natural defense against many of the white man diseases and the inexorable encroachment of civilization on their natural habitat forced them into tribal conflict with neighboring clans as they were forced to the west.
In all that time, the colonists remained faithful to the promise and they survived and prospered. For them, their act of faith was its own best reward. Life was hard and the danger was manifest. All of them, the less fortunate, the less robust, the less able, just as well as the brave, the diligent, and the persistent, helped to write the early pages of our nation’s his
About the Author
J. E. Gebhardt The author was born in Sunbury, Pennsylvania and grew up exploring the treasures that were the mountains, rivers, and valleys of that region which was, for most of a century, the frontier of a developing nation. There was something about growing up in that place and at that time that seemed to imbue in each small boy a sense of wonder and kinship with the early pioneers and the Indians and the author, at a tender age, experienced a mystical kind of connection with the sky, the earth, and the waters of this unique area. After serving three years with the U.S. Army, Mr. Gebhardt married his high school sweetheart and then earned an engineering degree from Penn State. Two of their three sons were born in nearby Bellefonte. Much later, the author added an MBA, enjoyed a stint as an adjunct professor at Kent State University, and, for a time, was an Associate-Editor of Power Transmission Design Magazine. Mr. Gebhardt resides in Jensen Beach, Florida with his wife, Kay, another Pennsylvania treasure, and is currently working on a sequel to Bend in the River.