Sea Control - Sea Control 163 - Japanese-US Maritime Intersections in the 1860s with Dr. Nyri Bakkalian

Episode Date: March 16, 2020

Links:1. Van Valkenburgh's Communications to Secretary of State Seward2. Japan Center for Asian Historical Records scans of Kotetsu-kan Shuryo Tenmatsu (The Particulars of the Kotetsu’s Acquisition)3. Naval History and Heritage Command, on W.B. Cushing: 4. Van Valkenburgh to SecState Seward, on the Stonewall’s arrival and the question of its handover5. Van Valkenburgh’s listing in C-SPAN’s records6. Listing for USN surgeon Samuel Pellman Boyer’s journal 7. Second Listing for USN surgeon Samuel Pellman Boyer's Journal8. USS Shenandoah’s listing on DANFS 9. Naval History and Heritage Command bio on Admiral H.H. Bell, CO of the Asiatic Squadron, who died in the water off Osaka just before the war of 1868 

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome aboard Sea Control. Today, our guest is Dr. Nairi Bakalian. Dr. Bakalian is a freelance author. She holds a Ph.D. in Japanese military history from Pitt. Today we're going to be discussing the American and Japanese Civil Wars and their maritime intersections. As always, our views are our own and not representative of any institution with which we may be otherwise associated. Nairi, welcome. You have a really interesting and specific cross-section of interests that fit perfectly with sea control. Can you tell us a bit more about yourself, how you got into your field, and why you've chosen to specialize in the way that you have? Hi, so it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. I started listening after your recent episode about USS Constitution, and oh my gosh, here I am appearing on the podcast myself.

I'm currently a freelance author and artist, and a growing number of folks know me because of my history threads on Twitter. I have had some fiction published. I've had some nonfiction published. I'm about to have my first novel come out. It's called Grey Dawn. I won't get too much into it here because it focuses on the Army rather than the Navy. So why did I specialize the way that I did? The Bakumatsu Meiji transition, Bakumatsu is Japanese for end of the shogunate, roughly 1853 to 1868, has been badly understudied by academe, particularly in English, and especially when it comes to the war of 1868 to 1869.

You know, for a year and a half that birthed the modern Japanese empire and its military, it's kind of shocking how little academic attention has been paid in English language scholarship. One recent author, Bob T. Wakabayashi, said that people are either in a hurry to wrap up talking about what came before or they're in a hurry to get through the preamble of talking about what came after. And internal to Japan, locally within Japan, I have a strong interest in the history of northern Honshu. People who follow my Twitter have commented on this as well. Partly born out of my having lived there in Sendai, the biggest city. My doctoral dissertation was focused on the history of the Northeast in the Civil War of 1868. And nearly didn't happen along the way because it was in the middle of major transition of retiring faculty to new faculty. And I went through three advisors, the people who had the credentials to be able to mentor me through the graduate process, all either retired or didn't get tenure and moved on.

And in a department full of mostly Atlanticists who studied Caribbean and the slave trade, you know, there was me doing Japanese Civil War of 1868, and I had a buddy who did Chinese military history of the Ming Dynasty, and we were kind of isolated. and between not having the mentorship and not really having resembling actual colleagues with which I could work, it was a little bit difficult and it almost fell through. But I pulled it together in the end. I was the last of the old cohort of people who studied Japan. My experience as an instructor and as a teaching assistant was eventful. Again, I had the misfortune of being in that transitional period between generations in the faculty. So some of the oversight that would have otherwise been there for rising grad students like myself was sadly lacking. And on top of that, I have complicated feelings about assigning grades to an understanding

of something as nuanced as history. And besides, my passion is bringing history to the general public. And despite everything, here I am with my strong period and local niches, engaging in lively conversations on social media, posting silly memes, teaching history through threads on Twitter, even talking about history on one podcast after another about history that I kept being told, oh, it's too small. Oh, it's too regional. Oh, it's so niche. But people want to hear about it. And as we're going to talk about today, it actually intersects with international affairs and international maritime history. You know, just because I have it where my feet planted in Sendai doesn't mean that I'm not conscious of this connectivity, you know,

across cultures, across regions, across borders. And it's been a hard fight, but it's been rewarding to bring attention to an understudied period that's so pivotal to what modern Japan became. But it's been worth it. So let's talk about some of those Twitter threads, because that was kind of the first thing that grabbed my attention. And Robert Bruce von Valkenburg was the first one that got me starting to look through your feed. And it's just one after another of these intersections between U.S. and Japanese maritime affairs, and you think about that as a naval officer, and it's like, well, of course, you know, we fought the largest naval war in history with the Empire of Japan from 1941 to 1945. No, these all go back to the 1860s. You know, of course, I'm familiar with

Commodore Perry sort of opening Japan to the West, but you cited one example after another here of all these interactions taking place around the time of the American Civil War, which is, of course, a time of great upheaval for the united states and then followed closely by the japanese civil war so i'd like to go down the road here a little bit with robert bruce von balkenberg you posted a photo of him first and you say you're going through photos i'm picturing you with a large photo album on a chair flipping through or pulling up your google photos document flipping through sort of the way that i do and i want to you know see my daughter's face or something when i'm at work i suspect this is a different historian thing though now a little bit yes it looks a little bit

like what you described, but it's a little bit of a historian thing. Something that you learn, I think, particularly working with an understudied topic and period like mine, is that images are hard to come by. And increasingly, this is a very image-driven culture that we live in. And I think even people who are up to date on what gets more engagement on Twitter and other platforms will tell you, using hashtags, using emoji, and using pictures is bound to bring more eyes onto a topic. This is, of course, the case with social media, but it's also, in general, more user-friendly, I think, for somebody unfamiliar with the topic to actually see an image rather than just a wall of text. What I started doing when I began my

undergrad back in the early 2000s was I started saving photos on the Japanese side of the internet we'll call it I started looking for photos from this period because I've been on my own been interested in this period ever since I was 17 and didn't really have any Japanese at the time but I realized that okay I have to build up a personal archive of these photos in the interest of my work down the road i also did this with just citations and dates because you know i knew that if i wanted to have a sense of what happened in what order i needed to a be able to cite it and b have it in a handy document so i have this and i need to do something with it because it's been burning a hole in my hard drive for years i have this document that's the bakumatsu meiji transition

from the birth of the oldest samurai who was killed in action in the Civil War of 1868 back in 1775 all the way to the death of the last feudal lord in 1941. Wow. And it's not all populated, but it's a very long document and it's the product of about 13 years of work at this point. But the pictures were similar. So when I say I'm going through photos,

I'm going through an aggregate, a folder on one of my computers that's kind of an aggregate of pretty much every historical photo related to Japan that I have saved ever since about 2001. And some of them I've actually had to go back and replace because, as you may imagine, the quality of pictures back in 2001 and the quality of scans of period photos today is very different. And photos that I have access to now in 2020 of Van Valkenburgh, of William Barger Cushing, of Admiral Enomoto Takeaki, and so on, are much higher quality than when I was a college freshman starting out. But that's basically, that's essentially what that means. So who was Van Valkenburgh? And am I saying that correctly? Yes, you are. Robert Bruce Van Valkenburgh. So he was from upstate New York, I think around Plattsburgh. He was the local U.S. congressman, but he also was a recruiter of troops during the American Civil War.

That's the part of his personal history that I'm a little bit less intimately familiar with. He was in charge of a local depot, as I recall, and he commanded a regiment in, I think it was, oh yes, the 107th New York Infantry on the 3rd Brigade, 1st Division, 12th Corps under General Joseph Mansfield. He was in action at the Battle of Antietam, and after Antietam, he left the Army to return to Congress. He served briefly as an acting commissioner of Indian affairs, and it's after that that he got appointed American minister resident to Japan. So before we go to the minister resident to Japan, because I have some questions about that title first, Do you know what his unit did at Antietam and then how was it that he was able to leave the army mid-Civil War? So I'm not familiar with what his unit did at Antietam, but I imagine it's been extensively written about because Antietam as a battle is so deeply studied and has been so deeply studied. So I don't have the answer to that, but I am certain that it's out there.

As for leaving the army in the middle of the war, this was a thing that I know that both people on the Union and Confederate sides did more than once. This was not uncommon to command a regiment, command a brigade, and then resign because you got a governorship or resign because you got elected representative or something. I can't remember exactly the names, but I think a couple of people in the Confederate Army had also pretty much done the same thing, where they had commanded a regiment through a number of different campaigns, and then they got elected, and they resigned and went and became a politician. Thank you. So you mentioned he's next appointed as the American minister resident to Japan, which sounds to me like a different way of saying that he's an ambassador or consul, but I know it's not. Can you explain the difference? So this is a title that I, as I understand, is largely no longer used. But the gist of it is that a minister resident heads a legation rather than an embassy. So it's sort of a one or two steps lower.

Okay, so something on par more with a consulate than a full embassy. Yes, that's actually, in modern diplomatic terms, that's actually a really good way of putting it. On that topic, I feel like I should point out that way back when I started this research, when I was an undergraduate at Ursinus College, one of my readers was a former U.S. ambassador, Joseph Melrose, and I remember he said he particularly enjoyed reading about how people back in the old days did things, and he commented to me that you had a lot of latitude back then. Yeah. You didn't have to phone Washington all the time. Just about the only thing you could do nowadays without telling Washington is go to the bathroom.

Yeah, and we're going to go deep on just the kind of latitude Falkenberg had there. So we're now in 1866. America has just survived its civil war. Yes. I'm going to ask you what's happening in Japan, but first I'm going to preface it with I think most Americans' understanding of this period is driven entirely by the movie The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise. I know you have feelings, so I'm going to turn this over to you. This is like, what are your feelings about that movie? Is it historically accurate?

Is it absolutely horrendous? Is it somewhere in the middle? Where does it fall? Oh, dear. Oh, dear. The Last Samurai. I'll do the compliment sandwich. I'll say the nice thing first.

It's very pretty. It's breathtakingly pretty. But that being said, it is monumentally historically irresponsible. It's basically history sausage. It takes 15 years of complicated, bloody history and squishes them into about a year and a half. Not to mention that there were, of course, Americans in Japan in that period, American military advisors, American diplomatic advisors and observers. But the idea that there was an American who went and fought with the rebels in the one last stand is preposterous. There were Americans involved in the Civil War of 1868, but they were not, you know, dressing up in armor and using swords against guns. Yeah, we'll get into this, but the Northern Alliance, one of the factions in the Civil War of 1868, used Enfield rifles and Gatling guns.

Ancient samurai clans using repeating rifles and incendiary rounds and Spencer carbines alongside swords and spears and bows and arrows. So that image in The Last Samurai is a little bit mistaken. Not to mention that in terms of costuming, also, I felt a little bit confused because the movie opens with the Imperial Japanese Army of 1866, or no, sorry, of 1876, dressed like the Shogunate Army of 1865. And then in a year, they suddenly look like the actual Imperial Japanese Army of 1877. That's not how it works. That's not how it works. So having said that, the other thing I should add is that if they had been just a little bit more true to life, Tom Cruise's character would have been French or Prussian. And the good thing I'm going to close with is the soundtrack is also gorgeous. Okay. No, there's strong takes all. Yes. And it's like I would actually look forward to seeing you do a remake of the movie. But so what is happening in Japan in the time frame here around 1866, the time frame we're talking about for Von Falkenberg?

Yes. So 66, the shogunate is in the middle of a war. It's fighting a recalcitrant domain called Choshu in western Japan. and it's bungling the campaign broadly stated one of my specializations coming having you know in the research that i did was alliances and one of the things that i've learned is that you don't half-ass an alliance to be perfectly blunt um because if you half-ass an alliance you're going to it's going to fall apart it's not going to be cohesive and you're not going to be able to achieve the objectives that you want to achieve so the chauvinist is mired in its campaign against Choshu domain to bring it to heel to make it submit for rebellion upon rebellion upon rebellion

and in Choshu domain they are thinking that they are working on behalf of the emperor when in fact it's the shogun still at this point who holds his title and his authority by merit of having that authority delegated from the emperor so you have the shogunate fielding its modern army and modern navy trained and equipped by the french and the dutch and the americans this is something we will touch on in a little bit but trying to field this modern army of its own along with the coalition of its feudal domains that were nominally subordinate to it and failing because the easiest way of putting this is that you are going to have a hard time fighting a 19th century war if your 19th century western style chain of command is butting heads with old feudal chains of command so if

you're in command of the coalition the shogunate coalition forces based in kokura northern kyushu and you've got a regiment of the shogunate army under your command but you also have karatsu and kumamoto and saga and a couple other domains with their troops also under your authority they can decide that unless they're ordered by their overlord they're not going to do anything and that's part of what made the coalition on the shogun's side break down so the shogunate is fighting this war that it ought to be able to win because it has an overwhelming advantage in terms of personnel and in terms of equipment but they lose it because you know you don't half-ass an alliance meanwhile the shogunate is also making efforts to continue to modernize both its military

forces as well as its foreign relations. It sent emissaries to Europe. It is about to send military mission to the United States, and it's trying its best, but it's failing. At this point, I think a lot of the particularly astute people knew, how can I put it, they knew which way the wind was blowing, and they could tell that people were going to have to get their act together really fast, or things were going to fall apart, and things fell apart a couple years later. So, man, I have about 15 follow-up questions about all the commentary about alliances and current day events. But we're going to skip those because otherwise this will become a current events podcast. Yes.

The real star of this thread, though, is the ex-CSS Stonewall. So what can you tell us about her? The Stonewall. What a story. What a history. So this is a ship that's built in France with Confederate money, sold to Denmark so that France wasn't technically breaking neutrality, but actually sold to a Confederate agent, commissioned into the Confederate Navy on international waters. And then by the time it got across the Atlantic with the U.S. Navy and getting chased, the war had ended, and the captain sold it to the governor general in Cuba, from whom the United States bought it, and it was in Brooklyn Navy Yard as of 1866. This is an ironclad ram with, for the time, cutting-edge weapons.

It is probably superior to just about anything that the Shogun's Navy possessed at the time. And mind you, the Shogun's Navy had its own cutting-edge Dutch-built, French-built, American-built warships. So it's sitting in Brooklyn Navy Yard when the Shogunate military mission that I mentioned just now shows up in 1867 looking to buy rifles and cannons and equipment. But also they see this old Confederate, or not old, but they see this decommissioned Confederate warship in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and they go, wow, that'll be great. And they pay half of the price up front, promise the other half on delivery. And so a U.S. Navy ship under Commander George Brown sails out of Brooklyn around South America and after having to get refueled on credit in Honolulu, arrives in Japan, makes landfall on 24 April 1868. And at that point, the Shogun's government doesn't exist anymore. So how does Stonewall then come to intersect with Von Valkenburg?

So the conditions under which Sonwal was sold to the Shogun's government was pay half price on initial deal, half price on delivery. But that assumes that the Shogun's government would still exist when the ship arrived. And the Shogun's government had just collapsed because the last Shogun resigned in late 1867, and the Civil War broke out roughly, I think it was 27 January 1868. and the shogun's armies were still fighting but the old administration had pretty much collapsed so there really isn't a recognized government of japan per se at the time the problem for van valkenberg on the arrival of the stonewall was that okay on the one hand he has the shogun's army and navy still fighting and arguing that this is their ship because they already paid a ridiculous amount of money for it the nascent imperial army and navy also are making their

advance eastward or northward and their emissaries come to van valkenberg and say that no we're the legitimate government and we should get it but at that point the war was not decided and could have go in any number of ways. So if von Valkenberg were to give this to either side, that would mean that the United States had sided with one of the parties in this war. And that was not something he was willing to do. And it was also something he wasn't able to do because on February 18th, he issued a declaration of neutrality. So his hands were tied from the beginning. What then are von Valkenberg's options now that he's declared neutrality in essence? So his options are break neutrality one way or another, stall for time, and if you were to compare his course of action with how pretty much every lesser feudal lord in Japan was operating at the time, stall for time was pretty much the modus operandi during this war.

So Van Valkenburgh, rather than break neutrality and get his butt kicked, stalls for time. Mind you, this is right after a couple of incidents in Hyogo, which is now the port city of Kobe in western Japan. Hyogo had just been opened to foreign settlement a couple months before this. And there was an incident where a number of the local lord's troops had a misunderstanding with a bunch of British and French troops. and the foreigners broke a law that they didn't realize they were breaking but nobody spoke each other's language and pretty soon the french the british and the u.s marines were trading pot shots with the japanese so there was a very real threat of if van valkenberg committed to one side or the other there would be american lives at stake not to mention as ambassador melrose told

me all those years ago he had a lot of latitude but he didn't have perfect latitude in making his own decisions, ultimately, sooner or later, he would have to answer to Secretary of State Seward. So he chose to stall for time and not give it to anyone. So Stonewall arrived under the flag of the Chauvin's Navy, but the very next day, it was flying an American flag and it was under an American crew again. So who is the captain of the American crew? Where did he rustle up this American crew? So initially, and in sort of piecemeal over the roughly the ensuing year. This was from the Asiatic Squadron. So warships that were in Japan at the time, the Iroquois, the Monacasi, the Oneida, the Piscataqua. But I have this, and you've seen

me post pictures of this on Twitter, but I have this diary of an American naval surgeon who was assigned to the Iroquois, and his name was Boyer, Samuel Pellman Boyer. Boyer actually commented on the arrival of the Stonewall and the diplomatic problem that that caused. And what Van Valkenburgh wound up doing was actually, in fact, instructing the senior naval officer in the area at the time, I think that would have been the squadron commander, Stephen Clegg Rowan, to have his skippers assign crew as able on temporary duty to run this ship with a skeleton crew. Now, on July 1st, Van Valkenburgh has a very good stroke of luck in that arguably one of the foremost naval officers of his time, William Barker Cushing, arrives aboard the USS Maumee,

and Van Valkenburgh has Cushing be in charge of the Stonewall and the skeleton crew. Van Valkenburgh and the naval officers had to engage in a little bit of sleight of hand because of this diplomatic issue. There was nobody actually on the rolls, like there was nobody actually officially assigned to the Stonewall, they were all still on the mess rolls of their respective original ships, but they were crewing this ship and guarding it, and occasionally having to stare down the imperial forces that sent other smaller vessels to surround it and sort of keep an eye on it. But that's what Van Valkenburgh does. He has the Navy pull crew from other ships. Now, what I was saying earlier about Boyer was actually, Boyer comments that when Cushing's

ship arrives, people are complaining that they're getting assigned to Cushing's ship. And the reason being that the Maumee was so horrifically in poor shape on in leaving Philadelphia Navy Yard that Cushing actually refused to take command and had a long drawn out argument with Gideon Wells, Secretary of the Navy, that I can't take command of this ship. I can't be responsible for the crew that you put on this thing. No, Cushing, you're going to take command. Oh, I don't want to. I I can't do this in good conscience. No, you're going to take commander. I'm going to give it to somebody else.

Okay. And so it's arguably the worst ship in the Navy at the time. And Boyer notes that people are complaining that they're getting assigned to it. But my feeling is that the reason that they're getting assigned to the Maumee is that there are people getting pulled from all of these other ships to periodically serve on the Stonewall. Yeah, I can say I've never actually had a disagreement with the Secretary of the Navy, where I refused command. But understandable, different times. Yes. When Cushing does get to Stonewall, one, you've identified Cushing, he has his own separate thread. Yes.

You refer to him as Civil War badass. Yes. What did he do during the Civil War? well he did a number of things but i think arguably prompted by his bereavement at the death of his brother alonzo who commanded artillery at bloody angle during pickett's charge in gettysburg he declared that he would become a fiend and though most notably he commands this small assault team and goes out on a very small launch essentially a steam-powered launch i think it was and blows up the ironclad css albemarle somewhere in north carolina with a

spar torpedo which for those who don't know is basically a bomb on a very long stick and treads water and evades capture for 24 hours before getting rescued by the union navy he also i think abducted a confederate general from the general's bedroom nice and just did a number of things like that for somebody who got dismissed from annapolis in his final year having been that kind of badass in my in my words got him noticed and gave him opportunities for advancement where otherwise he really wouldn't have had any i mean i think that cushing and philo mcgiffin it was still legendary in annapolis and i think there was a recent episode of prebble hall that talked about him yes i think the two of them would have been birds of a feather i don't think they

knew each other but I think they would have been birds of a feather but Cushing has basically Cushing has these opportunities for advancement that he might otherwise not have had because he was a badass because he did these incredible things yeah there seems to be sort of a theme that runs through history that all these guys who are mischief makers at their respective naval academies go on to do great things because you need people who can make mischief in war so when Cushing gets to Stonewall what does he do with it he basically continues what was already being done, which was crew it, maintain it, guard it, and keep it out of the hands of either side. Because this was a vessel, and you know, independent of the diplomatic considerations,

but more immediate concern is that this is a vessel that's cutting edge enough that if either side gets it, it could tip the balance. Obviously on the water, but to some extent on that immediate coast as well. And this is, for me, one of the more interesting periods of naval architecture, just the number of innovations that are happening all at the same time. So you have stone walls and ironclad ram the development of ironclad warships steam coming into widespread use yes the transition from solid shot to shells which now explode when they hit a target so all this happening at the same time you have a huge u.s navy build up for the civil war and then what the u.s traditionally did contraction immediately following so now all these vessels are available on the open market if

you will kind of a fascinating time to see all these different bits and pieces come together Let's talk about another actual U.S. Navy vessel that wound up serving the Japanese is the Takyang. Yes. Go ahead. So the Takyang, really I am not surprised that it is not better known because it was a very small ship. It was not that big. It was chartered and commissioned for use in the shelling. You remember I mentioned the war that the Chauvinist was waging against Choshu Domain in western Japan.

Part of what the Choshu domain had been doing that the shogunate was so up in arms about was that it was shelling foreign vessels transiting the Strait of Shimonoseki, which is the strait between western Honshu and northern Kyushu. And it's a little bit of a tight spot, and there's not really much room, particularly with ships and power plants of the time, to really be able to evade a well. So the foreign powers that had naval assets in the region at the time all collaborated and sent an expedition to destroy the shore batteries in Chosu. And Tak Yang was commissioned for that under the command of an officer named Pearson. And really, it's kind of incredible to me that the U.S. was able to really have anything go there at all because we were in the middle of our civil war. This is 1864. Yes. So the only big ship, the only major vessel present in Japan at the time was a sail sloop called the USS Jamestown.

So Tat-Yang was small. It was underpowered. It needed a tow at one point, which Frederick Pearson grudgingly accepted from the British. And I imagine the British kind of chuckling politely at the Yanks with one little ship with a couple of guns. Hey, we technically helped, too. but after the war after the not the war but after the expedition takang is decommissioned and sold to the shogun's navy as oemaru maru is a suffix that scholars of the world war ii japanese navy might recognize that's the old school ending for the name of a naval vessel this is still the case with fishing ships and other civilian ships but not for warships anymore but at the time it was

So Pakyang is the Chinese pronunciation of the characters. Oe is the Japanese reading of the same characters, so Oemaru. And Oemaru was a support ship, I would call it, in the shogun's navy. It was later reassigned to the local flotilla of the House of Date, which ruled Sendai Domain in the north and which led the Northern Coalition during the War of 1868. And eventually the Imperial Navy captured it. And I knew about the Takyang for a long time, but in my recent thread, the thing that really surprised me the most about it was that it had been built by the firm of Roosevelt and Joyce. Yes, that Roosevelt. When you say that Roosevelt, I think of Franklin and Teddy. I think you have another one in mind, though. Solomon Roosevelt, but he was on Teddy's side of the family.

Okay. So is he the original Roosevelt, if you will? You could argue the case that in the context of the 1860s shipbuilding industry, yes, he was the original Roosevelt. Thank you very much. Our guest today was Dr. Nairi Bakalyan. You can find her online at Riverside Wings on Twitter. Nairi, what else are you working on? So, as usual, I have a number of irons in the fire right now.

I'm getting ready for the countdown to my debut novel's release in August. I'm gearing up for a big public talk on Japanese folklore at a local convention here in Pittsburgh this July. And after an eight-year hiatus, I'm resuming work on my biography of Date Masamune, one of the key figures in Northern Honshu's 17th century history. He's got his own involvement with that era's international naval history, you know built his own galleon and sent a uh sent an embassy to mexico and spain but that's a story for another podcast this has really been a pleasure thank you so much for having me on sea control you're absolutely welcome i do have one more question could you go into a little more depth

on your uh the novel that you have coming out gray dawn it's like i do think that we'll have listeners who are going to find this interesting i've found it interesting sure thank you um so So Grey Dawn is ostensibly an urban fantasy novel because it involves time travel. But it's set in more or less our world, but with a twist. There are holes in space-time through which people from the past fall into the present. So this time-traveling, time-displaced Civil War soldier named Chloe Stanton, who had to disguise herself as a man in order to enlist in the Union Army's 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry, falls through time to the present. And her acclimation to the present is overseen by an employee of a fictional federal agency called the Joint Temporal Integrity Commission. her guide to the present is a modern day u.s army veteran named lee hunter and the two of them bond

over shared experience of war and yet also find each other strangely familiar and read the novel to find out why and fans of the movie gettysburg fans of the tv show outlander fans of the video game life is strange may all find something to enjoy in this story look forward to reading it for our listeners thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next week Help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley, pulling on the shimbo now. A porter of a porter gin, oh, way, hey, pulling the alley. A porter of wine, both white and red, oh, pulling on the shimbo now. So help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley, way, hey, pulling the alley.

Help me, help me, put it in the alley, put it out in Chippewa now.