All The Past We Leave Behind, Author's Notes
Although Enterprise, Montana, is obviously not a real town, and neither is Riverside, Wyoming (unless there IS one! But mine is made up. :P) many of the places and events referenced in this story are. The battle of Chickamauga, in McCoy’s home state of Georgia, is widely agreed to be one of the bloodiest of the American Civil War, second only to Gettysburg. At the time of Chickamauga, a surgeon could indeed have gone days in the same bloody gear, as cleanliness would have been seen as a luxury of personal comfort rather than a necessity for the well-being of patients. He would also have been contending with the terrible damage done by the Minie ball, a new type of rifle bullet that allowed for more rapid reloading and accurate fire than any army had been able to field before. It also damaged like never before, splintering bone and tearing flesh in a way that surgical technology of the time was frequently unable to repair short of amputation. A skilled surgeon who had a supply of chloroform for anesthetic would be able to take a limb in ten minutes-while this seems like an extreme solution, infection in a badly damaged limb would frequently lead to an excruciating death from gangrene, while the relatively clean cut of an amputation had a much better chance of healing cleanly and saving the patient’s life. It would not be until several years later in 1867 that an English surgeon named Joseph Lister published his ground-breaking work on preventing wound infection, and it would be more than a decade following that that his sterile procedure became common practice (Leonard McCoy being an unusually acute and forward-thinking practitioner, he is of course an early adopter ;) ). In the period before Lister, wounds in the torso as received by Pike were very frequently fatal, due to infection as much or more than the wound itself.
The Sand Creek massacre described by Jim was a horribly real event, as were the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers’ outcasting from the larger Cheyenne nation and their subsequent raids along the Smoky River. In my vision, Sarek, or Sénáka as his name became, left his band for the north when the greater Cheyenne society rejected the Dog Soldiers. Nero and Ayel, who became Spanish settlers in this universe, did not appreciate that the Dog Soldiers did not represent the whole of the Cheyenne. The Cheyenne expressions and names used in this piece are courtesy of this site; any errors in usage are of course my own.
Hand & Heart, along with Matrimonial Times, were real periodicals of the era; men would go out seeking gold and land, and when meeting with a degree of success that would allow them to maintain a family, would send for a woman to join them. The women who answered these ads were taking a big risk that the men who wrote for a companion were in fact who they hoped they would be, and coped with a wide variety of situations when they got there. An entertaining cross-section of mail-order brides’ experiences can be found in Hearts West, True Stories of Mail-Order Brides on the Frontier.
Finally, as touches on Sulu; without wanting to be culturally assimilatory, it’s really, really unlikely that a Japanese man would have found himself in Montana in 1872, when this story was set. However, two factors that could make this somewhat more possible are Hikaru being half-Filipino (canon) and if his father and/or mother had been Christian (not established, could be possible.) The Tokugawa proscriptions against contact with non-Japanese and Christianity in Japan lasted well into the later half of the 1800s, making either grounds for death or exile. If Hikaru’s father had been Christian and emigrated to Luzon, Hikaru’s mixed ethnicity and the possibility of having been educated by Spanish or English speakers in the person of missionaries make it at least possible that an adventure-seeking young man with no fixed place in his ‘home’ society might carve out a place for himself in a place like Enterprise, where a substantial portion of its population like Spock, Nyota, Leonard and Jim were looking for a place to escape from the restrictions and prejudices they’d grown up with.
If you've gotten this far, thank you. you've gone above and beyond the call ;)