One of the odd little secrets of American history is that the Appalachian mountains scared the snot out of the early Americans.  Nowadays except in a few parts of the country Appalachia treated like a joke, with tales of moon shiners, Hatfields and McCoys, and lumped into other symbols of backwardness.  Maybe it was labeled backward out of resentment, out of how much the Appalachian mountains penned up the early Americans against the coast.  Filled with Indian tribes whom by that time realized the settlers were here to stay and had very little respect for anyone but their own property rights, the Native Americans had figured out rifles were way better than bows and arrows and that perhaps putting some holes into the occasional trespasser may actually slow the settlers down.  Without steam locomotives or other power assisted tools, cutting through the thick, old growth Appalachia forest (now long gone) was insanely difficult (ever tried to use a hand-axe?  You can raise blisters on your hands after a hour of using one.  Imagine trying to use one on a Appalachia hardwood tree several feet in thickness.  For days.) And while the Appalachia were not the Rockies, you can't grade any of the approaches over them, because no one had invented dynamite or even Nitroglycerin to blow apart the rock.  Just using shovels and pickaxes.

There was also the additional problems that the English in Canada were not filled with the warm fuzzies towards their recent colonies and did not feel like letting them into what is now the Midwest by letting settlers swing north through their territory, which would otherwise give access to the Great Lake region.  The Brits were starting to think that they may want to keep some parts of North America, irregardless of whatever agreements had been signed post Revolutionary War.  Plus, we kept on trying to 'liberate' Canada from the British which did little to endear us to either the British or the Canadians.  The French on the other hand, liked the bits of Midwest that had acquired by working their way up the Mississippi river from New Orleans, and while they liked when the American caused trouble with the British, the French still were not wild over giving over what they perceived as their hard-earned territory to anyone.

Nobody ever remembers the Articles of Confederation, the original government of America.  A loose confederation, after a decade it was realized that it was insufficient for the needs to conquering the wilderness, making sure that the states didn't turn onto each other (let's just say the early states were not especially fond of each other either.) or making sure the Brits, the world superpower, decided to come knocking.  The Constitutional Convention was originally anything but that, with the original idea to update the Articles of Confederation.  Eventually everyone there (well, some left when they realized where things were going) threw up their hands, gave up on the Articles and wrote the Constitution. Which was then dumped it onto the states as their only choice, but filled with enough compromises and confusing language that anyone could read what they wanted into it.

Even after it was adopted, there was still a lot of hemming and hawing.  The formation of political parties was not something that was originally envisioned by the founders and immediately threw things out of whack. The powers of the new government were uncertain, with the Louisiana Purchase being controversial because no one had any idea whether the new national government even had the authority to make the purchase.

Life and history is a series of small decisions, individually aggregated and worked out.  Only in hindsight does it appear to make sense.  Which sort of the point of an earlier workblog entry.

Why I am bringing this up other than for using this column as an excuse to call my Smithsonian and National Geographic subscriptions business expenses?  Because in order to make Skytrain even have some relationship to possible reality, the furthest back that I could push it was maybe 1880, with it limited by French hot air ballooning and some of the early gasoline engines.  Any further back would require a lot more hand-waving that I felt comfortable with something that even had a tangential connection to reality.  But if I didn't have to worry about making aircraft, I can push the timeline as far back as 1810-1820, as the early experimenters with steam power fell on their faces a lot until they succeeded.  Steam coaches never took off because horse drawn carriage companies had a lock on British Parliament and were able to basically legislate them out of existence long before the rise of the railroads.  In Philadelphia (the largest US city until NYC took that title in 1835) in 1804 an engineer named Oliver Evans was denied an opportunity on work on steam powered Conestoga wagons after building a steam powered amphibious dredging machine. 

By pushing it back to this time period, by making the US weaker by still working under some variation of the Articles of Confederation, it opened a lot of things up.  The British/French competition in the Midwest gave the story a larger geo-political background but with some interstate conflicts.  By this time period steam powered vehicles are possible, but since this is before the creation of the Bessemer process, mass producing steel rails remains decades off.  If you have steam power but no rails, you have steam powered wagons.  That appealed to my steampunk aesthetics, and allowed me to meld the frontier aspect, of striking out and going and creating something new, with the inherent rebellion of the steampunk genre.

But calling the story Zephyr Wagon didn't sing to me.  But going through online thesauruses and wikipedia, trying to find inspiration, I came across the word dray, an old word used for carts...

Zephyr Dray. 

It sounded right.

But where do the characters fit into all this?