Land Beyond

On a cold, blustery November day in 1718, three young men late of County Tyrone in Ireland's northern province of Ulster, bade the crew of the good ship Cape Fear a fond farewell before descending the gangplank onto Philadelphia's crowded wharf to begin a new life they prayed would be more prosperous than the one they'd left behind beyond the stormy North Atlantic. Three months earlier, Samuel and John MacLean and their cousin, Brian Lynch, finally made the heart-wrenching decision to leave Ireland and their loved ones in order to seek a better life in America. Like thousands of their countrymen, who the American colonists called "Scots Irish," the MacLean brothers and their cousin were now part of the mass exodus from Ulster bound for America. This great migration of Protestant Irishmen was destined to continue unabated for the next fifty years or so until America's vast, far-flung frontier stretching from western Pennsylvania south to the Carolinas would eventually be filled with fiery-tempered, independent-minded Scots-Irish whose desire for land on which to "grow their bread" and raise their blue-eyed, red and blond-haired children seemed insatiable. After four long years in Philadelphia, the three young Ulstermen, after serving the terms of their indentures, were finally able to head west in search of land of their own. The eastern, blocking-edge of the Alleghenies forced the lads to turned south into Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. It was in this beautiful valley that reminded them so much of Ireland that they built their first log cabin. In the years ahead, each one, in turn, would meet, fall in love, marry and sire children. Later descendants of MacLeans and Lynches would courageously meet and overcome challenges arising from hostile Indians, the French bent on gaining control of North America from their age-old enemy, Great Britain, and the British whose oppression they could no longer endure. This fast-paced, romantic, historically-accurate, generat