Introduction-- How to Resuscitate an Ancestor from a Bygone Age

To myself, a great-great grandson, learning about Grenville Dodge is also learning about the epic age in which he lived and for whose progress he devoted his entire life. The map you see in the background Dodge had hanging in his office to help keep track of the events going on in his life. Unlike the Dodge map, the Google map you will shortly see next, replete with the 48 states, has not changed so much overall since the time of Dodge's death in 1916. The marked difference between the Dodge and Google maps portrays the massive changes that occurred over Dodge's lifetime, when and where it found Dodge almost always near the center of these changes.

My attempt herein tries to go beyond just understanding who Dodge was and what he did. It also tries to put who Dodge was and what he did next to the subsequent events of our time . This should eventually bring us into the later age which he tried so hard to influence during his lifetime.

But the obvious point of departure here is to start early within Dodge's long lifetime in the West with the 1850s in Council Bluffs. Ever present then was the challenge of extreme dynamism: the drastically different and challenging ecology and socialization posed by Western expansion, the subsequent social and political disintegration of a Civil War then underway, followed by the massive technological change at the frontier and of the nation through implementation of the Industrial Age.