The Book of Athea (Part 1)
A large Irish family straddles both sides of the Atlantic—but what binds them together in the first place? In Part 1, a Kerry farmer sails to Iowa and disappears into stories. (Read Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.)
1
This essay began when I was a kid. Not even four, I found myself down in that cool, dank basement of ours where my dad would sit on the edge of a folding chair in front of his humming electric typewriter and pound out all manner of texts, from letters to speeches to manifestos. In this instance, late in the summer of 1975, with me listening to the rhythmic clack-clacking of his keyboard, it was a history of the Wolfe family: “Origin of the Species; or, Whatever Happened to Good Old What’s-His-Name.” Composed on the occasion of the family’s biennial reunion, the essay charted out his paternal line in a voice that was self-consciously silly and heavily ironic while also somewhat apologetic. It was almost as if he had the humorist Richard Armour perched on one shoulder, egging him on to make the next dumb joke, while on the other stood my mom, puffing on a Marlboro and reminding him that he would do well to tread carefully. It’s easy to forget, sitting way down there in the basement, slurping from your bottomless can of PBR, that not everyone will be in on the joke.
“If the writer digresses here or there and the reader should happen to learn something,” my dad typed, “he should savor this knowledge like a fine wine, lobster, or, at today’s prices, hamburger.” And then, as if in response to a smoky exhale coming from his other shoulder, he also wrote, “Certainly, no attempt has been made to embarrass anyone. The intent has been merely to put some life into something that might otherwise be about as exciting as outlining a declarative sentence for an English grammar class.”
But here, I think, the old man protested too much. There was nothing at all boring about the stories that poured forth when he got to talking, or for that matter typing, about the Wolfe family. For instance, there was his great grandfather, John Richard Wolfe, who fled the Irish potato famine and perhaps, too, the British authorities, traveling all the way to the farmland of Lost Nation, in Clinton County, Iowa. There was John Richard’s son Maurice — pronounced “Morris” — who, my dad wrote, still spoke with the family’s North Kerry brogue and carried more than a bit of the Wolfe lawlessness.
“The writer knows little about him,” Dad admitted, “but it can be assumed he became a Catholic and a Democrat at approximately the same time. It is possible, however, that he inherited some of his father’s Marxist revolutionary ideas although there is no record of political insurrection in Lost Nation or Toronto during his lifetime. It is well known in Lost Nation, though, that Grandfather Maurice attended his agrarian pursuits in spurts which he called ‘five year plans.’ His favorite tools were the hammer and sickle.”
My dad’s own father, Ray, shoveled horse manure for the Navy during World War I. “He caught no Germans,” Dad wrote, “but he did catch the flu. In 1925 he caught Gladys McGinn of Petersville. (She was only twenty-two at the time, but that didn’t stop her from continually telling her own children that no one with a grain of sense married under thirty. To gently remind her of her own age in 1925 only brought about a foot stomping and the response, ‘That was different.’)”
Gladys died before I was born, but I remain grateful for this brief but vivid portrait of her. Dad once told me that she taught him the birds and the bees by leaving a textbook of sorts on the dining room table, open to the appropriate pages. She never broached the subject again.
Ray died of cancer in 1941, leaving his nine-month-old son, his wife, and their three daughters to fend for themselves on a couple hundred acres of Iowa farmland. There, Dad lived inside his imagination. He became his hero, Jackie Robinson, by throwing balls against the barn and scooping up grounders. He found stacks of freshly mown hay to be occasions for an intense kind of dreaming. “What I remember most about farm life,” he once wrote, “was an aching feeling of loneliness.” That’s how Dad described those years in his less guarded moments — lonely and even a little scary. He raised me on stories of hopscotching tornadoes, man-eating sows, and a downed power line that nearly killed him.
There were stories, too, of the Wolfes who had settled that land, John R. and the rest, who built their farms, their churches, their large families. Perhaps because I grew up in the city and preferred, whenever possible, to remain indoors, these tales occasioned my own sort of dreaming. They activated in me a longing for this place for which I was deeply unsuited to live — not so different maybe from the way the loss of a father had activated in my dad a need to know his own family, to map it across the hills of Clinton County and all the way back to Kerry and West Limerick.
Hence the clack-clack-clack of Dad’s electric typewriter in the summer of ’75. When his parents should have been celebrating their golden anniversary, they lived, precariously, only in stories. And when Dad himself died, in 2012, I felt called to collect and preserve and even proselytize those stories — if nothing else, as a gift to him.
This essay, in other words, began then, too.
2
In 1911, my great-great uncle, Judge Patrick B. Wolfe, published in two volumes Wolfe’s History of Clinton County. In the tradition of this sort of local history, which had become popular during the centennial celebration of 1876, his book provides background on the politics, geography, education, and religion of Clinton County, Iowa, in addition to notes on the judiciary, medicine, and journalism. There are also several in-depth reminiscences that serve only to confirm my largely uncongenial impressions of life on the prairie. On page 412 of volume 1, for instance, a short account describes the “Storm of 1898,” a dark green funnel cloud about a half-mile wide that killed children and their parents and whole droves of cattle in the field, while leaving in ruins the farms of my great grandfather Maurice Wolfe and his brother-in-law Pete McAndrews.
“Sheep are seen hanging in the trees,” the Clinton Herald reported. “Not a drop of rain fell either before or after the wind storm, which is a singular thing.”
It could have been my dad telling that story — else it was something straight out of the Book of Revelations. There is a fair amount of this in Wolfe’s History, if you have the time and wherewithal to find it. The better part of the book’s nearly twelve hundred pages, however, is devoted not to events but to people, to biographical sketches “of representative citizens of this county whose records deserve preservation because of their worth, effort and accomplishment.” These include at least one woman and three members of the Wolfe family, including the Judge himself. His entry, which begins in volume 2 on page 912, is notable less for what it says about its subject than its remarkable thumbnail sketch of the Judge’s father. For most of my life, this amounted to everything we knew about the man whom my dad half-jokingly referred to as the Kunta Kinte of the Iowa Wolfes:
From this snippet of biography we spun grand tales of revolution (Young Ireland rose up in 1848), of life on the run, and of redemption claimed from the black soil of far-off Iowa. But my dad was a history teacher; eventually, he smelled a rat. In the summers, he liked to pile my sisters and me into the old Pontiac station wagon and drive the forty-five minutes or so northwest to Clinton County for what us youngsters derisively referred to as the “Dead Man’s Tour.” This included a stop at St. James Cemetery, hidden behind the church in the tiny town of Toronto and where John R. Wolfe had been laid to rest. His gray marble stone, which for years stood taller than me, reads:
Dad looked at those dates, he drove home and double-checked our Wolfe’s History, and then he wondered: why the difference? Why would a book edited by John R. Wolfe’s own son, the Judge, give us birth and death dates different from his gravestone? And this was hardly the only discrepancy. Additional research indicated that John R. left Ireland in 1847, not 1848, complicating the idea that revolution had prompted his decision to emigrate. And what about the claim that he had “helped to organize” the Young Ireland party? The archives have remained silent on any role played by a Wolfe (or, as the Irish spell it, Woulfe) in that movement, let alone a prominent one. But even if the claim were true, how does it square with the idea that “Mr. Wolfe did not take any great interest in politics”? And how does that square with the very next sentence: “He was opposed to slavery”?
As I joined my dad in the genealogical project, this represented my first historical problem, and one that I wrote papers about in college. Unfortunately, it has never yielded a satisfactory answer. Only recently did I find John R.’s name — Latinized to Johannes — in the blotchy shadows of digitized church records, yet the discovery has only confused matters more. Rather than in 1824 or 1809, John R. Wolfe was baptized in 1813, on July 3. Was he born in 1809 and then not seen by a priest for another four years? Unlikely. The fear of hell was strong in those days. In fact, his age upon arrival in the United States in 1847 is listed as thirty-five, suggesting a birth year of 1812 or 1813.
Either way, these discrepancies underscore how slippery facts can be. And memories. It makes me wonder: How much of what we think we know is wrong and in what ways would it matter?
With John R. there are always more questions than answers. I’ve never been able to learn more about his father’s relationship to the knight of Kerry or how the family fared during an Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, or what sort of education (beyond “excellent”) he received. There are no extant photographs of him and his name rarely appeared in the newspaper.
But if my great-great grandfather remains something of a mystery, what isn’t mysterious is the motivation behind the writing of these sketches in Wolfe’s History. Disguised as history, they are in fact a form of immigrant propaganda. Take the biography of John R.’s eldest son, Jimmy. “The Emerald Isle, far-famed in song and story, has furnished a large number of enterprising and high-minded citizens to the United States,” it begins, “and
Even in 1911, such special pleading was necessary for the Irish, more than five million of whom had immigrated to the United States since 1845. Most of them, like the Wolfes, were Catholic, and their religion was perceived to be foreign, subversive, even dangerous. According to many Americans, then and even now, the pope represented a threat to democracy. He was a tempter of patriotic hearts, his adherents bound to him like slaves to their master. Protestantism, meanwhile, was so deeply embedded in the national ethos that freedom of religion, at least in the beginning, had meant simply the freedom to be a different kind of Protestant. So when a huge influx of “Romanists” arrived during the mid-nineteenth century it caused an upheaval in American politics. The Native American Party, or the Know Nothings as they sometimes called themselves, organized around violent anti-Catholic feeling, burning churches, tarring and feathering priests, and, in 1855, rioting in Louisville, Kentucky. The Irish found refuge in the Democratic Party, and after the American Party dissolved in 1860, the Know Nothings swelled the base of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, establishing what historians have noted to be a curious link between anti-Catholicism and antislavery sentiment.
All of which only complicates further the biography of John R. Wolfe. It follows that his son Maurice would become, as we’ve already heard, “a Catholic and a Democrat at approximately the same time,” but it doesn’t help explain the insistence on John R.’s antislavery bona fides. Or his public identity as a “staunch Catholic” or even as a Young Irelander. (Some in the United States had expressed skepticism of the Young Ireland movement on the unfounded suspicion that it sought to replace Parliament with the pope.) So while the Wolfes seemed intent on ingratiating themselves as good immigrants, my great-great grandfather stands out in many respects.
But so too did the Wolfes in general, at least compared with most other Irish immigrants. As “two-boat Irish,” they arrived in New York and then immediately took off again, this time for the West. No big cities for them, no cops walking the beat. They opted instead for the open prairie, the attendant cyclones, the sheep hanging from trees. For all the ways in which the Wolfe family, by their mere presence, challenged the political and social order, they also participated in something profoundly American when they embarked on this second journey. It marked them as pioneers, as adventurers, as cowboys.
“Go west, young man,” my dad liked to say when it was time for me to leave for school in the morning. “And write if you find work!”
That’s what the Wolfes have always done, and you can see it expressed in the obituary of that same Jimmy Wolfe — John R.’s son and Maurice and the Judge’s older brother — published on February 3, 1916. “Where there are now prosperous well tilled farms,” it reads,
While it’s true that the Wolfes clung to the “Emerald Isle,” to Holy Mother Church and revolution, in the end they also claimed their Americanness as thoroughly as did Billy the Kid or John Ford, both of whom spoke Irish. In fact, my dad liked to whisper stories of his grandfather Maurice’s feats with a six-shooter, claiming he had once ridden with the Texas Rangers. Another Maurice Wolfe, this one a distant cousin who immigrated in the 1860s, fought Indians with the 4th Infantry. More than most he understood that the prairie had been far from “unpeopled.” In fact, the romance of Rangers and outlaws only served to obscure an essential truth: that the Wolfes, like many others, played their part in stealing this land and killing or exiling its rightful occupants. “This is a wild reckless Country,” Sergeant Wolfe wrote to yet another Maurice Wolfe, this one back home in Ireland. “… A man will Shoot another man upon the Slightest provocations, every man here Carries his brace of Revolvers and Bowie Knife in his waist belt.”
The sergeant promised to find for his cousin a fabulous souvenir, but in 1870, from Wyoming Territory, he wrote with some bad news. “I had a fine ‘Scalp’ I was going to Send home,” he said, “but the Captain asked it of me to give the Indian chief in order to have a Scalp Dance, which they gave us last night in all its glory.” Wolfe went on to describe how the visiting Shoshone Indians, numbering three thousand or more warriors and women, had danced and prayed through the night. “You may be Sure it was a grand and Strange sight,” he wrote, “to see all of them Indians by the glare of the Camp fires, in their War Paint … and if the ‘Great Spirit’ did not hear all that drumming and yelling, he must be Somewhat deaf.”
3
John Richard Wolfe — my great-great grandfather, the pioneer, the adventurer — arrived in New York City on August 23, 1847. He sailed on the Cornelia with his wife, Honora Buckley Wolfe, and their four-year-old son, the aforementioned Jimmy, along with John R.’s first cousin Maurice — the fourth of that name we’ve encountered so far — and his wife and five children (including, yes, another Maurice).
Built by Brown and Bell of New York, the packet ship Cornelia weighed 1,040 tons and was part of the Black Star Line, which ran eighteen ships between Liverpool and New York that year, sailing every six days. Newspaper records provide a bare-bones account of the Cornelia’s approximately six-week journey — passed a ship bound for Liverpool on July 20, sighted what was perhaps the John R. Skiddy on August 1, encountered a fishing boat off Marblehead on the sixth — while mentioning that 5 out of 319 passengers had died en route. Those 5 likely suffered in steerage with the other Irishmen, subject to disease and overcrowding.
The Cornelia landed on pier 30 or thereabouts, releasing the Wolfes into a city already overwhelmed with immigrants. Close to eighteen thousand had arrived in the month of April alone, and there existed no formal center to take them all in. Instead, they crowded near the water, in search of reliable maps, a boarding house, and something to eat, making them ripe for the abuses of gangs and confidence artists. Crooks might help them with their bags and speak reassuringly in their native tongues, only to take them for every coin they carried. The sick, meanwhile, usually suffering from typhus, were whisked off to the Quarantine Station on Staten Island.
Somehow John R. and his family navigated their way through this chaos, probably spending a night or two in New York before setting off for Chicago. It’s not clear how they traveled — likely some combination of train and water — but once they arrived, they spent a fair bit of time in the city, to regroup and investigate their next steps. John R.’s son the Judge was born there in 1848. By 1850, though, the family had relocated to LaSalle County, a flat, open landscape where they bought land, built farms, and established a fledgling community of rural Irishmen. Over the next few years other Wolfes followed, including several brothers (among them, Maurice no. 6) and a cousin.
All of these families settled initially in LaSalle County before spreading out (some of them, anyway) across the continent — from Iowa and the Dakotas to Wyoming, Texas, and California. They were not, however, the first Wolfes to come to America. For that story, we must rewind several decades, to 1819, when James Harnett Wolfe, the son of Maurice James (no. 7?), left his home in West Limerick and established a school in Virginia. He had been educated in the classics, probably in preparation for the priesthood, but decided a life of adventure would be more to his liking. After a dozen years in the Old Dominion, he heeded my dad’s advice and went west, all the way to Monticello, in Lewis County, Missouri. Once he found work, he wrote, informing his parents and brothers back home of his success on the land. On October 16, 1835, he made five purchases totaling more than 505 acres in nearby Marion County, and by 1836 his estate was worth an estimated nine thousand dollars. Brothers Richard and John Wolfe must have been impressed, likely showering James with congratulations and asking him about life on the mighty Mississippi River. But then the letters from America suddenly stopped.
Fearing the worst, Richard and John sailed across the Atlantic in an effort to find their brother. Once in Missouri they discovered the sad truth about their well-educated, almost-priest of a brother. In a letter home dated December 26, 1836, John wrote that “Brother James Wolfe Died In the State of mississippa the first [of the] year He went to natches the fine learned man.”
There were rumors of murder, perhaps a deal gone bad on a riverboat. One’s imagination can run hot here — “this is a wild reckless Country” — but the historical record is thin. Whatever happened, it must have been a devastating experience for the Wolfes. “There is nothing [grieves] Richard [and me] more than to Say that we Cant See, hear or find our Brother alive on his Estate,” John wrote, “after the bold Stroke we made in going to him five thousand miles from home.” And what a journey it had been! The Wolfe brothers had sailed to New York and then boarded the steamboat John Jay, traveling the Erie Canal at twelve cents per mile. They withstood dangerous seas in Lake Michigan and then floated down the Mississippi to Missouri, all at a cost of more than a thousand dollars.
“Travelling is very expencive in America,” they told their family, who were probably footing the bill.
What they found in Missouri, though, helped make those difficult few weeks well worth the trouble. The late James’s estate contained “first rate land timber oak and water Stream Lime Stone quarry” — enough to convince the brothers to stay and raise families.
A small colony of Wolfes was founded there in Missouri, and after a generation or two at least a few seem to have wandered up to Iowa. But it wasn’t until An Gorta Mór that the family sailed in numbers. Whole chunks of the family tree were lopped off and sent packing. John R., several of his brothers, and a couple cousins all left Kerry and Limerick in the 1840s and subsequent decades. But so did sisters, nieces and nephews, and another cousin whose son Maurice would be, I think, Maurice no. 8.
What lured all of these industrious relations to LaSalle County, of all places? Had my great-great grandfather scouted the area, pronounced it good, and then sent for the others? Did any of them know about the Missouri Wolfes? I have no idea. As it happens, the only ones who eschewed the West were the children of one of John R.’s sisters. They found their way instead to Newport, Rhode Island, where Denis Wolfe Sheehan went into business for himself, dealing in liquor, cigars, and groceries. He died at Eston’s Beach on August 25, 1907, probably of a stroke. He had been playing at the time with his little daughter Margaret.
“They had just gone in at the west end of the beach, somewhat separated from the mass of bathers,” the local paper reported, “when Mr. Sheehan, while in shallow water, settled down to his knees and the little girl ran to her mother’s house and told that her father had a cramp in his foot. Bathers went to his assistance as he fell face downward in the water …”
4
It’s worth pausing here for a moment to take note of one curious aspect of genealogy: its preoccupation with death. Most folks don’t show up in the newspaper until the end has arrived, and sometimes only if their last moments proved remarkable. As a result, collecting Wolfe family stories has been, at times, a gruesome business. Take, for instance, thirteen-year-old Arthur Collison, whose mother, Ann Wolfe, immigrated in 1849. He met his maker on a Sunday morning in Carroll, Iowa, when he was run over by a wagon. That was in 1903. Six years later, Maurice Wolfe (no. 9, and the grandson of John R.’s brother), along with his entire family, were killed when a hurricane struck the gulf coast of Texas and Louisiana. He had been in a boat when the tidal wave came crashing down, while Mrs. Wolfe and their six children had been at the house, presumably in a safer haven. Rescuers found their bodies days later, three miles away.
Then there’s the death of Daniel F. Wolfe, the son of John R. Wolfe’s first cousin Richard. It could have come straight out of a dime novel. Born in County Kerry, Wolfe worked as a distiller and liquor store owner in Illinois before striking out for the Dakota Territory. He ran a saloon in the town of Miller where, on November 10, 1882, he was murdered by William McComber. According to one newspaper account, a few days earlier “a robust fellow” had entered the tavern “and, as he tossed his grip-sack on the bar, announced that he had come to buy a farm.” This was Mr. McComber. The next day, when Wolfe mentioned he was going to pay some bills, “McComber asked permission to join his host in the buggy ride, explaining that he wished to get a glimpse of the country.”
A newspaper in West Virginia, the Wheeling Register, picks the story up from there. While Wolfe was driving the buggy with McComber as his passenger, the two were observed to have separated, with one remaining in the buggy and the other going on foot. “A little while after,” the paper reported, “some farmers in the vicinity, noticing that the prairie was on fire, went to put it out, and found Wolfe dead in the midst of the fire with a bullet through his head.” Authorities speculated that McComber had set the fire to destroy evidence of the shooting. The report continued:
If this bleeds a shade too red for you, then consider the more fortunate case of John R. Wolfe’s nephew, John W. Maher, who grew up in LaSalle County. After studying law at the University of Michigan, he made the fateful decision to hang his shingle in North Dakota. In 1895, one of Maher’s former clients disputed a bill of one hundred dollars for a land case that had failed in court. The feud escalated until the client tracked Maher down on the street and, according to the local paper, “emptied four chambers of a 44-caliber bull-dog revolver” into his six-foot-six frame. Amazingly, just one of those bullets found its mark, and Maher survived. He lived into his eighties, dying at sea in 1936, near the isthmus of Panama.
5
Of course, lives, too, could be eventful. Among their large brood the Wolfes counted copper miners, dairy farmers, distillers, gold-panners, teachers, nuns, suffragists, and realtors, in addition to the odd politician and more than a few lawyers. John C. Wolfe, the son of John R. Wolfe’s first cousin Maurice, made his living as a Gold Rush pharmacist. Born in Kerry, he sailed on the Cornelia and was raised in both Illinois and Iowa. In 1858, he set out for California, eventually landing in Grass Valley, the heart of California gold country and the richest, most famous mining district in the state. He found employment at a local drug store before going into business for himself.
“From time to time he added to his stock,” a state history explains, “distinct advantage being found in the fact that he manufactured many of his own medicines, which came to be known for their efficacy in the common disorders. Through the length and breadth of the county, and even beyond, Wolfe’s liniment, pile cure, worm powder, catarah snuff, and corn cure were household treasures and found their way into thousands of individual medicine chests.”
In 1872, he moved his business to tiny, still-unincorporated San Rafael, just north of San Francisco, finding success and, through his connected wife, a little taste of high society. A photographic portrait taken in his large, well-stocked drugstore shows Wolfe with a long white beard and eyes that, even from a distance, seem to burn a hole in the camera’s lens. A small stretch of steep and winding road in San Rafael — Wolfe Grade and Wolfe Canyon Road — still bears the name of the old pharmacist.
As an aside, Wolfe’s only son, Maurice (no. 10), followed him into the family business only to die on the way to work. According to a notice in the newspaper, “While going to his store a derrick used on a new building fell and struck him.” Maurice’s son, meanwhile, became the proud owner of Wolfe Paper Box Company, of San Carlos. Late one night in 1951 he fell asleep at the wheel while driving home and struck another vehicle head-on. He was gone before the police arrived.
6
Here’s another curious aspect of genealogy: the way it flattens people into their relationships, privileging the one thing they cannot help: their DNA. It simplifies otherwise complex lives, reducing us to our deaths — swept away by a hurricane, set ablaze in the middle of the prairie — or to some peculiar scrap of trivia. John R. Wolfe helped to organize Young Ireland? I’m still not even sure what that means. It certainly hasn’t helped illuminate his life, which I care about only because he was a Wolfe and because I was raised with this notion that something called family exists — that it’s not a choice or something we can easily ignore.
One morning in college I sat at the table waiting for a seminar to begin when a classmate strode in and took the seat beside me. I’d never met her or spoken to her; in fact, I’d actively avoided her. She was older, brash, not crippled by insecurity like my friends and me. Her mere presence left us all feeling a bit exposed.
After settling herself she turned and looked me over, handing down what felt like an indictment: “You’re a Wolfe, aren’t you?”
She was married, it turned out, to a second cousin of mine, someone I myself couldn’t have picked from a lineup. “I can see it in the forehead,” she explained. “The cut of the jaw.”
We carry our families around with us without always fully understanding what that means. At a funeral, another cousin, stricken with grief, graciously received me in line only to have his face suddenly bloom with laughter. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You look exactly like your dad!” And it’s true. We have the same ruddy face and graying beard. It’s as if, eerily, I reside inside his body — he has been dead for seven years now — and experience the world with his extra bit of heft, his nervous crack of the knuckles.
We can stop funerals, Dad and I. So I wonder: Did he carry his own father around in the same way? Do we both have some Maurice and John R. in us, too, or maybe our grandmothers?
Of course, DNA is only part of it. We also carry with us history, memory, place, language, and, in the Wolfe family, an insatiable love of stories. My great uncle Melvin was born in 1904. “The nurse … reports that thirty minutes after his birth he said to the assembled doctor, nurses, midwives, family, and friends, ‘Did you hear the one about …’” Dad later wrote. “The story is reported to have lasted sixteen minutes and twelve seconds by actual timing, included three delightful sub-stories, and was told in a marvelous Irish accent which has, unfortunately, disappeared among third generation Wolfes.”
Melvin spent his entire life in the tiny Iowa town of Lost Nation, which is another thing the Wolfes carry around with them. Or at least many of us do. Lost Nation is the terminus of an epic journey, a pilgrim’s progress from Ireland to Liverpool to New York to Chicago to LaSalle, and then finally home to this Celestial City of sorts, with its odd, ironic name. Wolfe’s History tells us that there is no definitive explanation for how that name came to be. “One version, not very widely credited, has it that a tribe of Indians starved and froze to death here in early times,” the Judge writes. “Many people give credence to the story that a German named Balm was looking for some relatives here in the times when the prairie was unbroken and covered with grass high as a horse, and when asked where he was going, said that he was looking for the ‘lost nation.’”
The Wolfes arrived about 1854 and made this place their own. Located 150 miles west of LaSalle County and across the Mississippi, Lost Nation and greater Clinton County boasted some of the most fertile land in the country, and it came cheap. That’s probably what motivated the move — the soil and its price — although the anti-Catholic Know Nothings were beginning to agitate at exactly this time. Perhaps the getting was good, and, if so, John R. got first. By 1856 he had purchased eighty acres of government land in Clinton County, eventually becoming the largest landholder in Liberty Township, with eleven hundred acres. By 1859, his cousin Maurice had joined him, and other Wolfes soon followed. They farmed through the Civil War and into the twentieth century, their holdings passed down from father to son to grandson.
When my dad came of age, the farm was his if he wanted it, but he’d always had more of a bookish bent. He attended college and became a teacher. Lost Nation, though, still called. Every summer we drove up from Davenport on our Dead Man’s Tour, stalking gravestones and then barbecuing with Uncle Melvin and a host of cousins. We usually gathered at the farm of Melvin’s son Dave. A big, shaggy bruin of a man, Dave possessed that high Wolfe forehead, blue eyes, and a surprisingly aggressive handshake. He was perpetually sunburnt and lightly crusted with dirt, as if one spring he himself had sprouted up in the fields, no different from the corn and beans. Earnest to a fault, Dave always seemed perplexed by my aversion to farm life, my fear of the sheep and the cows, the roosters and the smoking block of dry ice. I spent several summers laboring out there in an effort to prove to myself that he was wrong. But in the end he and his kids were of Lost Nation, while I stood just on the outside, dreaming in.
Somewhere between them and me — that’s where to find the Lost Nation of Wolfe’s history.
It’s a place of stories. On our tours, Dad would point out the exact spot his best friend Pat fell from a grain silo and died. “The tornado came down this road here,” he’d say, suddenly recalling a different memory, this one from his childhood. “We were just ahead of it in the Ford when we drove by Pat’s house. I remember the front door was open and he was just standing there. Looking at us.”
Another time a boyfriend of one of Dad’s older sisters landed his plane in the pasture. And a Greyhound bus once pulled into the drive and went all the way up to the gate before turning around and leaving. Nothing much ever happened, he said, so you remembered what did.
“Towards dusk of a summer evening, I would ride my bike out to a hay field and climb onto a hay stack that had not yet been taken into the barn,” he once wrote. “There, I would sniff the sweet aroma of freshly mown hay, then stare across the fields and into the sky, watching planes go by and imagining life far away. My imagination would soar, and I would yearn for exciting things and places totally unknown to me at that time. Dreams became my constant companion and friend, and still are these many years later. As long as I live, I’ll associate freshly mown hay with those dreams and yearnings, and I won’t know whether to be happy or sad.”
This is where John R. Wolfe came in 1854 and where he stayed. This is what he left us.
7
During the Christmas holiday in 1997, Dad was running to catch a connecting flight in the St. Louis airport when he suffered a massive heart attack. Somehow he survived, and while lying in the hospital bed he vowed to visit Ireland the next chance he got. He’d never been much of a traveler, having ridden the train to Philadelphia a few times to visit his sister and the bus to Washington, D.C., to chaperone field trips with eighth-graders. He’d never gone to Ireland, though — the ould sod, as he liked to call it in a ridiculously bad accent.
Faith and Begorrah, he’d say and we’d all cringe.
Early the next summer the two of us landed in Dublin and spent a few days testing out the Guinness before we rented a car and motored north. Dad had met some Irish folk singer in Iowa who was now booked to perform in a tiny seaside town in northern Ulster. After scheduling our entire trip around the show, we arrived there to find no sign of the singer. No posters and only bored shrugs from the employees of the hotel where the singer was supposed to appear.
Standing out on the street, Dad pulled a piece of paper from his jeans pocket and carefully unfolded it, square by square, until it was a full, wrinkled, printed-out email. He’d been carrying it around for the whole trip, apparently.
“Oh crud,” he said, scanning the page. “It’s not until a week from today.”
In that moment Dad’s disappointment stretched across all of Ulster. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Next morning we climbed back into the Fiat and drove six or seven hours south, arriving that afternoon in Listowel, County Kerry. Situated on the River Feale and surrounded by hills of limestone, Listowel was all brightly painted shops and confusing one-way streets when we arrived. In 1847, though, when John R. and his wife Honora left for America, the town was in the terrible grip of famine. On April 14, a month before they weighed anchor, the Kerry Examiner reported on the alarming spread of fever.
“The hospital [in Listowel] is crowded,” the paper wrote, “and can no longer afford shelter or admittance to numbers who drag their sickly and fever-burnt bodies to its gates.” With nowhere else to go, the poor ended up in the ditches and the bogs. A local priest found a woman named Daly “stretched in fever on a wisp of straw in a dyke,” her twenty-four-year-old daughter “dead by her side in the same wretched place.”
The Wolfes were far from starving. If the Judge’s History is correct, then John R.’s father, dead now five years, had been “the agent having charge of the property of the Knight of Kerry.” Said knight was Maurice FitzGerald, the eighteenth of his line, who kept a secondary residence near Listowel — “a mere cottage,” one visitor described it, “but gentlemanlike and comfortable.” An association with the knight likely provided a small bit of material comfort, and the Wolfes in general were already well endowed with land that they leased. It’s unclear, though, what, if anything, John R.’s father had left behind, and John R. himself was not the first son or even the second. With nothing to inherit and a biblical pestilence overtaking the land, it made sense for him to leave and bring his family with him.
“If the Almighty God does not interfere,” the Kerry Examiner wrote, “our unhappy country will be a grave, its people dead, and no priest left to intone a nation’s requiem.”
Dad and I pulled the car up onto a curb near the town center. “It’s so much bigger than I expected,” Dad whistled. “I thought it would be more like Lost Nation. Blink an eye and you miss it.” The Celtic Tiger was purring nicely in those days and the streets bustled with tourists. We wandered into the first pub we saw, a dark and smoky place where we could order a sandwich.
“We’re Americans,” Dad informed the burly woman behind the bar.
“Sure you are,” she replied politely, suggesting that perhaps we weren’t the first. “Here to find your roots is it?”
She pointed us in the direction of the old cemetery, a few blocks away. We walked it row by row that afternoon, and as we poked through the weeds, passing Stacks and Sullivans and O’Sheas and Dannahers; Enrights and Lyonses and Aherns and Barretts; Carrolls and Caseys and Dineens and O’Flahertys and Lynches and Kennellys and Mahoneys and MacKenzies, we became increasingly anxious. Where were the Wolfes?
In the end we found one, a fellow named Liam who had passed away just a few years ago. The stone’s inscription bore the omega shape of a horseshoe on it, next to the word “Bar.” We headed back to the town center and sure enough there it was: Woulfe’s Horseshoe Bar. Inside, Dad introduced himself to Mrs. Woulfe, Liam’s widow. She poured us two pints and we all chatted rather awkwardly until her attention was required elsewhere. We hurriedly downed our beers and left. Across the street, the Catholic church had no birth records for anyone called John R. Wolfe. Dad snapped a couple pictures and then we squeezed back into the car and drove away.
8
That sense of loss, of having missed something important, has stayed with me all these years. What did it mean to be a Wolfe if we could travel all the way back to Kerry and find nothing of ourselves there?
A few years after my dad typed up his first family history, “Origin of the Species,” an academic named Benedict Anderson published a study of what he called “imagined communities.” A nation, he argued, is socially constructed. It’s something we must forge with our imaginations, our stories, our “ribbons of myths,” as another historian recently put it.
“It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them,” Anderson writes, “yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”
Anderson quotes a scholar who puts it another way: “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.” But according to Anderson this is not quite right. Nations are not invented ex nihilo or fabricated; rather, and more positively, they are imagined and created. “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness,” he writes, “but by the style in which they are imagined.”
In other words, we have always lived with these connections to people we don’t see and haven’t met. What distinguishes one nation from another is how we imagine these connections. How we express them.
And, of course, the same must be true for families.
To be a Wolfe is not something rooted in American soil only; we span the Atlantic. Or so my dad thought upon returning to Ireland. That was the image of his communion.
But did Ireland’s Wolfes (or Woulfes) share in it? What does the family look like over there?
