After the Civil War ended, hundreds of thousands of Americans streamed West. Defeated Confederate soldiers, weary Union cavalrymen, farmers, railroad tycoons, and more traveled Westward to make new lives for themselves. They created the Wild Wild West that many still identify with America. The lives of Jessie James, Doc Holiday, Wyatt Earp, and James West are still fodder for stories centuries later. It truly was an amazing time that revitalized a wounded nation.
Did you know dogs were beasts of burden for thousands of years? Horses weren’t used in America until the Europeans introduced them for instance. There and many other places, it was just dogs. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised everyone when the first uplifted dogs quite literally started pulling their weight and more. By the time I grew up, it was common to see army dogs walking around with heavy weapons strapped to their backs. They can be real intimidating.
The Inner Colonies are those worlds we traveled to soon after Contact. Most were still government colonies, but many of them incorporated at least some Alien technologies. More importantly, they were founded with the knowledge that we were not alone in the universe. They were our first steps into brave new worlds. Gone were the days of leaving Earth behind. We were moving out to meet our Alien friends. We did not understand the limit of our reach in those days.
The European branches of my family thought America would become a threat to the global balance of power if not addressed. They hurt us. The South did not recover from the legacy of the Civil War for generations. But in the North, four years of war production boomed into a hungry civilian sector. We exploded into the Western Territories, men and women seeking to leave the war behind them, with a drive that terrified Europe. They were right to be afraid of us.
You know most of the cultures that survived to make it to space considered dogs to be companion animals. Friends. There were some that thought them unclean, but those didn’t make it that far. And we had the Peloran example on cybers to go by. So our gengineers did not create intelligent slaves. They created friends. Another race of humanity, of a sort. Yeah, I grew up with dogs intelligent enough to know I wasn’t a god. They’re still man’s best friend.
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