“Promised Land was settled shortly after the war,” Wash said. “Officially.”
“Officially?” I asked.
Wash tipped his hat back and looked out over the fields. “Unofficially, this was one of the latest and last endpoints of the Underground Railroad.”
CHAPTER 14
PROFESSOR TORGESON GAVE WASH A DISAPPROVING LOOK. “You might have mentioned that earlier, Mr. Morris,” she said, and then started right in asking questions. Wash spent the rest of the ride answering them.
A few years before the Secession War, the abolitionists who ran the Underground Railroad had started having problems hiding and protecting the slaves they’d helped escape to freedom in the North. Some of the Southern plantation owners started putting tracking spells and control spells on slaves they figured were especially dangerous or likely to run away. A bunch of abolitionists got arrested as a result, and a whole batch of people who thought they’d gotten away ended up being sent back into slavery.
So the Northern abolitionists decided they needed some help. They went to the anti-slavery advocates from New Asante and Tswala and all the rest of the Aphrikan colonies in South Columbia. The South Columbians had been working on stopping the slave trade for years. Some of them wanted to stick to diplomacy and economic methods, but there were plenty of others who were willing to send money and magicians to help out.
The first thing they did was find ways to interfere with the tracking and control spells so that slaves could get away safely. Then they had to figure out where to send them, and someone thought of the Western Territories.
Back then, nobody but a few squatters lived west of the Mammoth River. The magicians in the Frontier Management Department were still working on inventing protection spells to keep the wildlife away from settlers and travelers, and there was still a good bit of safe land east of the river that hadn’t been settled yet, so most folks felt that heading West wasn’t worth the risk.
But the South Columbian magicians had developed their own ways of dealing with the wildlife, on account of not having a Great Barrier Spell to protect part of their colonies, and everyone agreed that no one would look for runaway slaves in the West. Even if someone followed a slave up to the river, they’d figure that once he crossed, the wildlife would get him for sure, so they’d quit looking.
The abolitionists started sending runaway slaves west to hidden settlements in the unexplored territory. Seven different South Columbian colonies sent money to pay for seed and tools, and magicians to teach the Aphrikan magic they used to protect their own towns. The settlements did pretty well for being new and unprotected; Wash said they had fewer deaths than the first few years’ worth of settlements that the Settlement Office approved later on.
When the Western Territories opened up for settlement right after the Secession War, some of the hidden ex-slave settlements applied for official recognition. Others pretended they were ordinary groups of settlers applying for allotments. There was some trouble over it, until the Settlement Office pointed out that all the ex-slave settlements were so far away from the Mammoth River that nobody else wanted to live there, anyway.
Promised Land was one of the last batch of hidden settlements that the abolitionists and ex-slaves had set up. It was founded in the 1820s, just before the Secession War. By then, the abolitionists and the South Columbians really knew what they were doing, so the settlement had done well right from the start. They’d picked a site along one of the creeks that fed the Red River, where there were plenty of trees for building. Just below the town, the creek flattened out into wetlands full of black rice that the settlers could harvest, and they had the trading camp up the river, which became St. Jacques du Fleuve, where they could trade furs for tools and seed with Gaulish trappers who didn’t care one way or the other about them being former slaves.
To hear Wash tell it, the settlers were actually pretty relieved when the Secession War broke out, because once it did, they didn’t have to fret over the Southern states getting the Frontier Management Department to send any ex-slaves they caught back to the owners they’d run away from. The settlers were even better pleased when President John Sergeant signed the Abolition Proclamation forbidding slavery anywhere in the United States of Columbia or its territories.
After the war, Promised Land was one of the first of the hidden settlements to get all official with the new Homestead Claims and Settlement Office. They’d been growing at a good clip for the past nineteen years, some from the childings I could see running around and some from new settlers moving up from the Southern states.
By the time Wash finished up all his explaining, we were close in to the settlement, and I could tell that the houses weren’t bushes after all. The walls were made of twigs woven together, like the chairs some of the lumbermen made, and the houses were short because they were partly dug into the ground. I wondered what they were like in winter. The settlement was about thirty years old; they had to be warm enough, or people would have changed to a different kind of building.
“Folks here look to be a lot better off than most of the settlements we’ve been to,” I said.
“Promised Land didn’t have quite such a bad time of things with the grubs,” Wash said. “They only lost about half their regular crop, and they had the black rice to fall back on.” Seeing my curious expression, he went on, “Black rice grows in shallow water; any grubs that tried to get at it drowned.”
“Only half the crop,” Professor Torgeson said thoughtfully. “That’s interesting. I wonder why that would be? The woodlands here are as dead as everywhere else.”
Wash shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “Promised Land was settled before the magicians in Washington worked out the settlement protection spells, and they weren’t official, anyway, so they had to work out other ways to keep safe from the wildlife. What they do must not have been quite so interesting to the grubs as the regular spells.”
“Are the other settlements established by the South Columbians in similarly good shape?” the professor asked.
“I’m afraid I don’t know, Professor,” Wash said. “Most of them are down in the Middle Plains Territory, or even farther south. This is the only one on my circuit.”
The professor hmphed. “And probably the only one affected by the grubs, then; I don’t think the dratted things got down to the Middle Plains. Still, we’ll have to look into it. Do you know what spells these people use in place of the standard settlement protection spells?”
“You’ll have to ask them,” Wash said.
The professor narrowed her eyes at him. “I’ll do that, Mr. Morris.”
Right about then, six childings came running toward us, yelling Wash’s name. Their ages ranged from six or seven to around sixteen, I thought, and their skin tone from a deep tan to black as widow’s weeds. Wash pulled up and called out, “Lattie, Tam, all of you — stop right there! You know better than to chance spooking a horse.”
The childings slowed to a walk, but they kept on coming. “Stop, I said,” Wash told them. “Else I’ll stable these horses myself, and send you all off to tell Mr. Ajani and Mrs. Turner exactly why I’m slow coming to see them.”