At first glance, the piece gives no clue to the curve it will throw the reader. The title points toward another memoir of wartime, like others The Californian printed, although the educated reader in a time only four years after Custer and his troops had been famously "massacred" might recognize it as an allegorical reference. The Battle of the Wabash had historic roots in a 1791 conflict between about 600 American forces and a larger number from several Indian tribes. It took place in the Northwest Territories, in present-day Ohio, along the Wabash River. The Americans were routed and virtually wiped out; the soldiers suffered 97% casualties. About one-quarter of the entire U.S. Army was lost in the battle. It remains the worst defeat American forces have ever suffered, and surely had been frequently brought up after Custer's similar loss.

 

Thus primed, the otherwise bizarre introduction begins to make sense. As so often in fiction of the 19th century, the entire story is purported to be from a letter, but one found in a rock crevasse on top a mountain in "scarcely human" handwriting. Who would write such a missive? Perhaps only "the mountain gnomes, those invisible police that are said, by Spanish tradition, to frequent that peak on moonlit nights, and to whom the past and future are alike accessible." Other pieces of fiction in the same issue have dialogue and characters as we would expect; this narrative is a different form seldom seen today, in which the narrator, a mere mouthpiece for the author, declaims a long recitation of events. Many, many early tales of fantastic events were written in this style, which alone would be a giveaway to the contemporary reader.

 

The letter begins with the gnome visiting a Chinese historian in the year 2080. That world is broadly depicted in ways that would be familiar to any American of 2015.

 

Cities had grown till their broad and far-reaching streets stretched away for miles; villages had become cities; rivers had, in many places, assumed the straightness of canals, while the whole face of the country, from San Francisco to Boston, was threaded by a net-work of railroad lines. The people had become numerous as the leaves of the forest or the sands of the shores; the wastes of Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Arizona were populous with cities, and blooming with fields that smiled like gardens. The deserts of the alkali and sage-brush had disappeared, and in their stead broad fields of yellow grain waved in the sunlight to the rippling notes of the lark and whistle of the quail. This way and that, toward every point of the compass, trains, laden with the treasures of commerce, thundered at the rate of one hundred miles per hour. The gas-light had disappeared from the streets, while the electric glow, soft as moonbeams, but brighter, flooded the nights; but upon the streets, as I gazed upon them, a million lights moved in a fire-fly dance, through the artificial gloaming, more numerous than the stars of the sky.

 

Florid by modern standards, perhaps, but that's fine writing. No wonder that a syndicated review of that issue of The Californian, appearing in widely-spread newspapers, said that the style betrayed "Lorelle" as "a well known writer." Too bad the critic couldn't go a bit further in betrayal; the identity of Lorelle has been completely lost.

 

Lorelle also shows his or her skills by the subtle way the two hundred years of history is approached. The early parts of the historian's seven-page account treat Chinese-Californian relationships from the Chinese perspective, a wholly accurate enumeration of the many slights, prejudices, and hostility heaped upon them by the white majority, making their peaceful, cultural retaliation as they grew in numbers and power sympathetic. Not until close to the end does Lorelle's true agenda overwhelm the narrative. It's their Mongolian blood that's the issue. The Chinese, even over generations, remain true to their blood, never assimilating, always breeding within their group, never adopting American ways, always distinguishable not by their skin color - yellow is never used - but by their racially pure bloodlines. Yes, the always-looming horror of miscegenation is there - white woman look to the now rich and powerful Chinese for marriage, but as always the threat is unidirectional. Similar to the one-drop-of-blood rule, any progeny of such a couple is considered Chinese. (Blacks, always referred to that way, are essentially written out as Others. For unexplained reasons their numbers dwindle over the centuries to near nothing.)

 

Because of America's unparalleled lure, millions of additional Chinese emigrate to the U.S. over the years (and nobody else does, for plot reasons), adding to their majority. By 2080, they outnumber whites two-to-one and plan to disenfranchise them. This leads to the climatic civil war, in which the native fifth column of Mongolians are assisted by 5,000,000 troops sent over by the Emperor of China in 2500 huge warboats.

 

And here's where food pills raise make their unlikely and totally irrelevant appearance. The Chinese troops live on them, giving them an unbeatable edge over the Americans.