Rick Lai's Secret Histories: Daring Adventurers by Lai Rick

Author:Lai, Rick [Lai, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Altus Press
Published: 2014-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

The Sgt. Jaeger Chronology

Manly Wade Wellman wrote three stories about Sgt. Jaeger, a soldier who fought on the Union side in the American Civil War. After encountering the supernatural in an Arkansas town, Fearful Rock, during the war, he decides to be a self-ordained preacher in there in order to combat evil. The entire adventures of Jaeger consist of “Fearful Rock” (Weird Tales , February, March and April, 1939), “Coven (Weird Tales , July 1942) and “Toad’s Foot” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction , April 1979). All of these stories were collected in Fearful Rock and Other Precarious Locales: The Selected Stories of Manly Wade Wellman, Volume 3 (Nightshade Books, 2001). Sgt. Jaeger utilizes a real-life book of Christian spells, John George Hohman’s Pow-wows or Long-Lost Friend. This book also appears in Wellman’s John the Balladeer series and other stories. Perhaps Wellman’s most notable usage of Hohman’s tome was in the non-Jaeger Civil War story, “The Valley Was Still” (Weird Tales , August 1939) in which the book is altered by a sorcerer to cast evil spells in the name of Satan during the summer of 1862. Of Jaeger’s pre-Civil War life, we have scant details. As a youth in Pennsylvania, he was a serious boy with a penchant for mincer pie. During the 1850’s, he supported the anti-slavery forces in Kansas. The Jaeger stories have one minor chronological inconsistency regarding the heroic soldier’s movements in April 1862. I have reconciled this inconsistency by shifting some of Jaeger’s activities to March 1862.

Chronology

1862: Mid-March - the early events of “Fearful Rock” (chap. 1-5). Sgt. Jaeger participates in an expedition led by Lt. Kane Lanark in Fearful Rock, Arkansas, to unsuccessfully track down Quantrill’s raiders. The Union soldiers slay two sorcerers, the acolytes of a Nameless God whose idol has no face (perhaps H. P. Lovecraft’s faceless god, Nyarlathotep). Wellman claims this expedition happened during April 5-6, but Jaeger was clearly at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee on April 7, 1862. It’s impossible for Jaeger to have traveled from Arkansas to Tennessee in a day. Therefore, the expedition is moved to a few weeks earlier. The Fearful Rock expedition supposedly transpired shortly after the Battle of Pea Ridge (March 7-8).

1862: April 7 - The early events of “Coven” (chap. 1). During the Battle of Shiloh, Jaeger and a Confederate soldier, Cole Wickett, track down a female vampire.

1865: May - “Toad’s Foot.” Jaeger becomes a preacher in Fearful Rock, and defeats a witch.

1866: Spring - The remaining events of “Fearful Rock” (chap. 6-15), Jaeger is reunited with Lanark (now a retired Major) in Fearful Rock. They discover that the two sorcerers from 1862 have become “living dead” monsters. After vanquishing the re-animated sorcerers, Jaeger re-christens the town of Fearful Rock with the name of Welcome Rock.

1876: Fall - The remaining events of “Coven” (chap. 2-7). Cole Wickett comes to Welcome Rock. He assists Jaeger in a battle with cultists who have summoned the Flying Horned One, a devil-like creature from another dimension.

According to “Fearful Rock,” Sgt.

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