Truth
Vs. Fiction:
 One can hardly write historical fiction without concern for preservation of truth. Yet, it is the story between the lines of written history that captured my imagination and motivated my writing and telling of this story. That is, after all, the challenge of the novelist, and to that end every event is dramatized to some degree. We will never know what these people really thought or how they always acted, but I have tried to present their personalities in keeping with what is known about the family nearly one-and-a-half centuries later. In developing character and inner conflict, I sought the writings of the men for whom they had been named, using them as an overlay for the conflict of the Civil War. If you feel I've presented your ancestors in a light different from what you believe is true, please accept my sincere apologies. The liberties I've taken were merely meant to tell this story as I found it in so many biographies, letters, diaries, and memoirs, and ultimately how I imagine it to have been.
Gary Bellford and Lila DeVitte are fictional, as are the conflicts that revolve around them. Buck Malneck and his friends were fictional characters, as were the killing events portrayed in the little knoll in Arkansas. The latter scene, however, was a dramatization of a similar incident that took place in the Arkansas area during the war. Why Socrates followed Ellen's family south isn't really known today. Whether he had a falling out with his father over marrying a divorcee is strictly conjecture, a theory pondered by some family researchers but never proved. The legal representation of Alexander Hubbard Best (Hub) by Eusebius Swift Best in a Portage Court was fiction.
In an effort to instill the sense of loss felt by my family members after these horrific battles, the actual names of soldiers from various characters' units and communities are used throughout the book. Sergeant Dowd's character is a composite. In reality, he began service as a corporal and attained the rank of first sergeant by the time of his capture at Chickamauga, but whether he was held a prisoner at Andersonville with Ed and the others is unknown. The Blue and Red Regimental Books simply state that he was captured at Chickamauga in September, then transferred to the VRC in October, which was a home for veterans with shell shock and related conditions. Simply put, these entries seem contradictory. A man named Dowd was beaten and crawled out of the stockade, thus inciting Wirtz to arrest the raiders' leaders, who were then tried and hung by the prisoners. However, there were over a dozen men by this name in the Andersonville records, and over ten thousand records are still missing. Sergeant John Gaffney of Lewiston, although presented as returning home with Ed, was actually too sick to travel, and wasn't mustered out until the end of the war. Sergeant Ole Gilbert is listed in military records as dying in Andersonville, yet W. W. Day's book states that Ole traveled with him to Florence, keeping Bill, Ed, and the others alive by his ability to work sheet metal into water buckets.
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