Chapter 167: Setting the Wheels in Motion

The next day was exactly as I feared. A simple non-stop parade of meetings, reports and petty squabbles; welcome to governance.

I had woken up wrapped in the arms and legs of the beautiful Mouse but it was very obvious that ‘Hanky-Panky’ hadn’t been part of our bed time ritual. Hell I still had my pants on and it was starting to become obvious to me that ‘Consummation’ would definitely not include intoxication.

I wasn’t hung over but close enough to keep me from being a ‘bright morning cheerful’. I did get a moment to visit with Brin and Lunch before the meetings started but breakfast call was the call to my first meeting of the day. A day of very long meetings and endless lists, I had to figure how to kill all reports and just get an executive summary by someone absolutely trusted. The meetings drug on, I was buried in reports verbal and paper, there were so many details flying at me it was impossible to keep up.

Fun this definitely was not, I had to restructure to support the larger group that we now were. More importantly we needed to focus on supporting our growth which explicitly meant self-defense and preparation for winter. We could spend time over the long winter arguing plans for spring the caveat being we had to survive that long winter if we wanted to see spring.

To get construction fully underway we needed get our base industries working; lumber was already half-way there and bricks had to come next. We had a lot of folks who had made hand-made bricks before but I pulled in our three engineers and tasked them with sorting out the most efficient procedure to produce the most reliable masonry. We needed brick to build the efficient kilns to create iron and steel.

One the masonry was running and we had reliable production we could work on construction and start to build our town. Lumberjacking was an entirely separate effort and would employ a large section of our group just to clear the land for our homesteads and fields. Clearing and stump removal was brutal work but we needed the land and we needed the lumber. Heck we simply needed a lot of things and while buying them would remain an option we still needed to build for now.

The real fun was in knowing that a week from now I’d be hearing squabbles about staffing and who got who for what. I also knew I needed to focus on recruiting and gathering more talented people. Right now I had a total of two people who might be able to do the patent work I needed but without that work we’d lack the long term cash flow we needed so I’d have to run that team for now.

I laid that all out (well, except for the patents) to the council in as agreeable of terms as I could come up with. We did take several votes and the most important was that Commodore Timmons was to start the supply runs from St. Louis as soon as possible. We had a lot of stuff in warehouse down there and we needed it ASAP.

I made hay cutting our top priority, we’d be shifting most every person on to hay for the first cutting in a couple of weeks. We needed that hay to survive the oncoming winter, every day that went by I felt the pressure of those icy cold winds blowing on my soul, I guess I was truly a child of the Great Plains.

Just as we went to close the meeting and get on with the party Pete decided to remind us that the buffalo would be here soon and we needed to prepare for the hunt. I had to second that and then I sent for our butcher.

We finished up with what was meant to be a quick riding tour of the improvements that had been made in my absence. ‘Quick’ turned into kinda of a joke, half the folks on the Council weren’t horse savvy and just getting them all in the saddle took the better part of an hour. Lunch and I were ready to go in minutes, after that we merely pranced around waiting for a chance to get out together again. Lunch had two stages of happiness; unbridled and racing free across the open land or saddled up and racing together for fun. Standing around waiting was not in Lunch’s personal plan of happiness.