Warrant of the Heart
Christine Kelly's family's journals inspired this captivating tale.
Her diary begins after her family was killed in a Boston riot in July 1863 over Irish immigrant enlistment. Without relatives, she joined the Union Navy as Chris Kelly and witnessed some of the war's worst naval engagements, including the Battle of Mobile Bay, with a life-changing experience during her year and a half.
With an honorable discharge, various accommodations, and no physical test, she joined the US Marshal Service to serve over 50 warrants and arrest fugitives. Chris was ordered to extradite a woman accused of murdering her husband, the owner of a successful shipping firm, to San Francisco for trial. Rogue Confederate troops seized their train, earning Chris notoriety before their westward trek by adopting a five-year-old girl orphaned by the hijacking.
Chris chose the California trail through the Sierra Nevada Mountains to encounter pristine virgin wilderness and the Cheyenne nation, who saw them as two-spirited and a mountain lion, forever changing their outlook and respect for life and cementing their relationship until their old age.
After the woman was acquitted entirely on Christine's discovery, they returned to Fort Smith, Arkansas, to collect the girl who captured their hearts and adopt another girl whose family was killed by retaliating Indians.
Even though they visited various ports, a French warship off Acapulco during their return trip to San Francisco solidified Chris Kelly's notoriety, which was carried in several newspapers.
In a time when mothers couldn't speak, their daughters became independent-thinking women. The Chinese girl had a same-sex romance with a female she met at a formal ball and became a psychotherapist till elderly death.
It was an honor to publish Rebecca O'Sullivan's granddaughter, the first girl’s narrative. The family just needed to change the book's major characters' names. We admire LGBTQ advancement, but the family felt uncomfortable sharing their identity.
This fact-based story uses fictional names. Some location names have changed through history or even have disappeared with the passage of time.
