Frontier life in Arkansas was good to Mac and Laurel MacLayne. Their homestead in the newly formed Craighead County in Arkansas provided a good living and the hope of a secure future for their children. Yet, Mac struggled to find peace in his Shiloh home. Too much happened too fast since he married the Spinster of Hawthorn less than four years ago. Many days, he struggled to wrap his mind around the events of his life. He married a woman he’d known four days. He and Laurel had become parents to three children, the youngest almost six years of age. The one child they had born together lay beneath a granite cross at the foot of a giant oak tree in Eden. The homestead was nearly doubled in size from the original land grant left by his grandfather. Fenced pasture was home to a herd of nearly forty cattle grazing in the bounty of the good land. Thomas MacLayne moved from Maryland to make his home in the shadow of Crowley’s Ridge to be near his son. Mac even fulfilled a dream of serving in the state legislature, helping to pass important bills to protect the homesteaders of his adopted state. Most blessings he’d experienced came in the form of a wife that he loved beyond any dream he’d ever had. The marriage of convenience he’d begun in March of 1857 had evolved into a strong union of a man and woman ordained by God. Laurel had become a true partner…his life mate…the best part of him. He knew he was blessed. Yet, Patrick MacLayne, known to his friends as Mac, failed to shake the sense of looming disaster he awoke with each morning. Negativity was not in the nature of this man. Since the time of his conversion, he’d lived in faith and believed that Romans 8:28 was the life motto God intended for him. The past three years with Laurel had begun to prove it out. And then, he’d gone to Little Rock to serve in the Twelfth General Assembly. Laurel spoke the truth to him. The man who returned was not the same man who had gone to fulfill a personal goal of political involvement. Too many issues of the time weighed upon him. Secession talk, the geographical division of the state between planters and the yeoman farmers, shady dealings of rogue land agents who cheated homesteaders of their dreams, and dissention in his own church over issues he couldn’t control had cast doubt and gloom over the dreams he and Laurel shared when they lay in their beautiful carved four-poster bed. Mac wanted his dream of home in Arkansas back, but what he saw before him were Shadows Over Shiloh.
