Glasgow, Tyrone, and the Mohawk Valley · 1720–1850s
Two Roads West
How a Scottish linen family and a New England merchant family both ended up in the Utah desert by entirely different routes.
The Pollock road runs from Glasgow to County Tyrone during the linen trade, then out through the Irish famine emigration of the late 1840s — Atlantic crossing, eastern port, and then the long inland haul.
The Stevens road starts in New London, Connecticut, and moves inland to the Mohawk Valley, the corridor that carried New England families west through New York before the canal and the railroad.
Both roads converge in the same places: Winter Quarters, the Platte, South Pass, and finally the Salt Lake Valley and the desert settlements south of it. Neither family knew the other existed.
This is the structural spine of the novel — the reason it is told in two voices instead of one.