Mr. Farnam's Guests

About the book:

Preface by Dick Stahl, the first Quad City Poet Laureate:

The Grand Excursion of 1854, a combination rail trip from Chicago to Rock Island and steamboat trip from Rock Island to St. Paul, was organized to celebrate the completion of the Chicago and Rock Island Rail-Road, the first railroad to reach the Mississippi River. Sheffield and Farnam, the Connecticut contracting firm that built the railroad, invited many people, including celebrities like ex-President Millard Fillmore, national historian George Bancroft, writers Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Elizabeth Oakes Smith, landscape painter John Frederick Kensett, Yale professor Benjamin Silliman, Sr., and about fifty prominent newspaper editors, to a free excursion from Chicago to Rock Island and then to the Falls of St. Anthony. Others included statesmen, judges, lawyers, scholars, businessmen, scientists, ministers, and poets. Over 600 rode the two trains; 1200 boarded six steamboats for the trip up the river. No wonder the Chicago Tribune championed the trip as 'the most magnificent excursion, in every respect, which has ever taken place in America.'

"The Grand Excursion of 1854, a combination rail trip from Chicago to Rock Island and steamboat trip from Rock Island to St. Paul, was organized to celebrate the completion of the Chicago and Rock Island Rail-Road, the first railroad to reach the Mississippi River. Sheffield and Farnam, the Connecticut contracting firm that built the railroad, invited many people, including celebrities like ex-President Millard Fillmore, national historian George Bancroft, writers Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Elizabeth Oakes Smith, landscape painter John Frederick Kensett, Yale professor Benjamin Silliman, Sr., and about fifty prominent newspaper editors, to a free excursion from Chicago to Rock Island and then to the Falls of St. Anthony. Others included statesmen, judges, lawyers, scholars, businessmen, scientists, ministers, and poets. Over 600 rode the two trains; 1200 boarded six steamboats for the trip up the river. No wonder the Chicago Tribune championed the trip as 'the most magnificent excursion, in every respect, which has ever taken place in America.'

Mr. Henry Farnam, the chief civil engineer, acted as the gracious host (Mr. Joseph Sheffield, his partner, was not in attendance) of the Grand Excursion. Every person on this excursion, prominent or not, saw something, felt something, imagined something, said something, remembered something that heightened the magic of this journey into the New West. In Mr. Farnam's Guests, I have created the voices of some of the excursionists, both those of real people identified in the titles of the poems and those who are inspired to speak without being identified. In addition, some voices reflect personified nature. Overall, I have imaginatively recreated their thoughts and observations and feelings to invoke the celebratory spirit of the Grand Excursion of 1854."

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