As Isaac walked along the deck of the Colorado Queen, mostly he remembered her, Rachel, as he had with the blossom of each dawn, the descent of each sun and much of the time in between.
Isaac Silver was one of six sons born to Ephraim and Sarah Silver, Polish Jews in the province of Lubin, then ruled by Czarist Russia. On the day after his sixteenth birthday, his mother, father and four of his brothers were slain by Cossacks for their part in an attempted revolution; Isaac and his surviving older brother, Jacob, fled across Poland, Germany and France before finally arriving in England, where the prime minister happened to be a Jew named Benjamin Disraeli.
Isaac was tall, handsome, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed and fair-haired; Jacob, the antithesis of his brother, was small, dark, feisty and funny. The two brothers worked together, saved together and stuck together, but they did not study together—Jake was schooled in the streets and alleys, while Isaac put himself through the University of London.
There he met and fell in love with Rachel Morgenstern. She was tall, slender, intelligent, and beautiful, so beautiful that Isaac’s heart and brain hammered at the first sight of her and within minutes of their meeting he knew, they both knew, that for each, there could be no other. There were three years of married harmony and bliss. She bore him two sons: first Jedediah, and last, Obadiah—last because Rachel died while delivering her second son.
Life in England could never be the same for Isaac after the death of his beloved Rachel.
This time he fled halfway around the world—he and Jacob and the two infants, Jedediah and Obadiah—across the Atlantic, then around the Horn to the gold coast of California.
That was where and when Isaac Silver became “Big Ike” and Jacob Silver became “Uncle Jake.” They went into the business of providing the booming mining camps with food and goods, and prospered doing so. It was a hard life, but rewarding. Then Abraham Lincoln became President of the United States, but the states were far from united.
Big Ike left his brother to take care of his sons and went to fight so there would be a United States, earning the rank of captain and fighting until he was wounded at Shiloh.
And now, a fistful of years after the Civil War, the four of them, Jake, Big Ike, Jedediah and Obadiah, were heading for a new frontier, dangerous and unsettled—but at that moment he was heading for a stateroom to say good night to his two sons.