Black Dove

About the Book

Abby Spooner is the mulatto daughter of ex-slaves who escaped from bondage in Kentucky before the Civil War. Fleeing to Kansas they hoped they could find a safe haven that would provide for opportunity for fugitives in a free state on an equal footing with Anglos in the west.

Squatting on a tract of bottom land in eastern Kansas they farmed and eked out a lively hood harvesting a subsistence crop. When “Bleeding Kansas” is terrorized by competing bands of guerillas trying to influence the admission of the state into the union as a free state vs. slave state to balance partisan votes in the Congress of the United States, Abby’s parents and little brother are brutally murdered by Quantrill’s raiders in 1863.

Raised in a Quaker orphanage in Lawrence, her mixed parentage (descendents of white owners and Negro slaves) provide the mulatto child with the genetic heritage of both races. She is neither white nor black.

Excelling in the Quaker school her mentor, Sara Quitman, trains her to be a teacher with the hope that frontier schools will not discriminate against her star pupil because of race. Teachers are in short supply on the frontier.

Engaged as a teacher by mail order by a group of German farm families settled in Ford County, the innocent and naive Abby leaves the orphanage at age 18 to travel by train to Dodge City with a one way ticket. The train is de-railed by a band of Indians and she is forced to continue her trip in a horse drawn wagon accompanied by cattle buyer, Sam Kluge. They are waylaid and robbed and forced to finish the trip to Dodge on foot, barefoot and bleeding.

Arriving at the railhead town at the same time as drovers from Texas arrive to sell their Longhorn cattle, she is summarily dismissed from her teaching job because of her obvious ethnic origin. Abandoned and on her own, Abby gets mixed up in a free for all between the town banker, Rafe Knutson, cattle buyers, cattle rustlers, Irish railroad workers, cowboys from Texas, and Buffalo soldiers from Fort Dodge.

In Dodge City she meets Sergeant Ben Able, a black soldier serving in the 10th Cavalry. They fall in love, but are separated by the extended patrol duty demanded of soldiers. The soldier’s mission is to protect homesteaders from raids by small bands of Indians who have vowed to never give up. Native Americans wage a last ditch war of survival by harassing any and all Anglos who keep coming in ever increasing numbers from the east. The Indians steal livestock, raid and kill. The soldier’s duty is to guard the frontier.

The town banker, Rafe Knutson helps Sofiya, a hardened black widow survivor of a Buffalo soldier killed in action on the frontier to operate a restaurant and boarding house. She befriends Abby and offers her home to Abby in exchange for helping out in the boarding house.

The town sheriff rapes Abby. After she recovers from the violent attack, Sofiya and Abby with the banker’s help, operate a saloon and bordello for black soldiers from Fort Dodge which is a cut above the sordid establishments that fleece the cowboys, Irish rail workers, and buffalo hunters in Dodge City.

Their business is burned out in a racist riot. The two women flee the town and find refuge in a winter blizzard with a gypsy woman, Bertuska, very sick with either cholera or typhoid. Abby does not know which. In spite of nursing the two women, both Sofiya and the gypsy die because of lack of medical attention.

At Fort Hayes Abby becomes a laundress for the army and migrates with a troop of cavalry to Camp Supply in Indian Territory where Native Americans are restrained on the reservation after being defeated in the Red River War of 1874.

Ben Able is wounded on patrol protecting a cattle drive from Texas. Abby and her lover are re-united at Camp Supply in a field hospital. Working as a laundress she nurses Ben back to health and in do

About the Author

The author, C. H. Jamieson, is the son of a pioneer air mail pilot. His father and two uncles pioneered in carrying the mail in the days of by guess and by God by the seat of their pants, with little more expertise than determination to get the mail through. Jamieson grew up under the wing of a Curtiss Jenny in the barnstorming days of the twenties and learned to fly in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Jamieson began airline service as a co-pilot for Braniff Airways in 1948, flying the Douglas DC-3, and retired as a Senior Captain flying the Boeing 747 over routes to Europe, the Pacific, and South America. He and his wife, Nelda Jean, have two sons who are Captains flying for Federal Express, one based in Anchorage, Alaska, the other in Memphis, Tennessee. Another son lives in Boulder, Colorado. They have seven grandchildren.