The Civil War was a time of great experimentation. It is interesting to note that while many technological advances were made on both sides of the War Between the States, most if not all of these wondrous devices were lost to the tides of time and the uncertain guarantees of safety their creators acknowledged.

One such machine whose existence was only recently verified is Anoush El-Hajj’s Zaman Safara. Commissioned by Field Marshall David Kemperly of Arizona’s 5th Temporal Corps, this Persian immigrant may well have invented a means of time travel. While the functionality of the device is still in question, much of the evidence points toward such a conclusion.

Anoush El-Hajj was born in Tehran, Persia in 1798. As a devout follower of the divine religion of Zoroastrianism, he struggled to reconcile his faith and the fact that he was a carrier of the dreaded Gay Gene. Thought not to have mutated into its contemporary malignant form as recently as 1991, El-Hajj inherited the Gay Gene from his mother, a schoolteacher and part-time nurse. After suffering the slings and arrows necessarily aimed in his direction for 20 years, the burgeoning inventor and technician fled to a country more accepting of his sexual orientation: Mexico. He lived in relative peace outside of present-day Flagstaff, Arizona until the Mexican-American War forced the glorious Emperor of Mexico himself, Cristobel XII, to cede all lands north of the Rio Grande River to the United States.

El-Hajj was only able to live in constant sexual congress with the gender of his choosing by working for the United States government and providing their armed forces with inventions such as the Aluminum Scimitar, the Reticulating Slingshot, and Botulism. When the Civil War broke out, El-Hajj was all but retired and living comfortably with his state-sanctioned life partner, a Navajo Indian named Elk Forest. However, due to a lack of leadership among the Federal Armed Forces, El-Hajj was commissioned for a secret task: bring the greatest General in the history of the United States back for one last fight.

El-Hajj was a reasonable man, and not as religious as in his youth. However, he still had some misgivings about plucking George Washington from the murky waters of the past with an incomplete time machine. Besides, his faith in the rule of Zoaraster gave him pause, for the resurrection of the dead in any form was, as the Germans are fond of saying, ztrictly verboten. However, he began work on the Zaman Safara, a locomotive which, when reaching speeds of 88 miles per hour would send all passengers to a remote date in times past.

When work was complete in the summer of 1863, Anoush announced to his commanders that he would be sending Elk Forest back on the Zaman Safara to retrieve General Washington. However, as has been discerned from El-Hajj’s recently discovered diary, his lover’s true mission was to prevent the conquest of Arizona by the United States decades before. El-Hajj had never forgotten the compassion of his Mexican neighbors, which colored his recollections of the intolerant, though burly and roguish American soldiers who had displaced his Latin neighbors. With the chronometer set for 1831, Elk Forest began what is believed to be the first instance of time travel in American history (and certainly not the last).

What malfunctioned and whose fault it was has yet to be determined. However, the timeline of the United States remained intact, and General Washington would not reappear in 1863 as planned (though he would eventually aid the U.S. in World War I, which is detailed in a missive different from this one). Instead, Elk Forest returned with a man, dressed in the fur of an animal and boasting a greatly pronounced forehead. Responding only to and able to utter nothing but “Grog,” this man was greeted with the confused uncertainty of the Union Army’s leadership. Quickly realizing that General Washington would not be back to “whip some sense into those olde Southern scalawags,” they acknowledged the desperation of their situation and commissioned Grog into the Federal Army with the rank of Major.

The United States soon found Grog to be a capable and exemplary officer. Though not able to speak English (or any other discernable language) and at his most content when masturbating in public and eating grubs and worms dug from the field of battle, Major Grog had a knack for the positioning of men during skirmishes. Quickly promoted to the rank of General, Grog is now posited to have been responsible for all the victories which history has attributed to General Ambrose Burnside. In fact, many credit General Grog and his quiet strength, low intellect and hirsute body as the model for “White Fang” in Jack London’s similarly-named novel.

It is towards the end of the Civil War that Grog disappears from all historical account, both well-known and esoteric. Anoush El-Hajj and Elk Forest are said to have ventured into the future on the Zaman Safara, seeking acceptance for homosexuals and reasonably-priced neckerchiefs. Many photo-analysts and cryptozooologists have a theory regarding the fate of Grog. It is generally acknowledged that Grog bore an uncanny resemblance to President Abraham Lincoln. And history has yet to adequately explain how Abraham Lincoln was able to travel into the future and liberate the Falkland Islands in the 1980’s. One popular theory: it was in fact Grog, working as Lincoln’s double and most trusted advisor who was killed in Ford’s Theater on that infamous summer evening. Though no place of burial exists at which to mourn Grog and his contribution to the American Empire (if this account of his life indeed rings true), allow this humble author to suggest the following epigraph for a fallen hero:

Twixt fallow vale and hill enriched

Doth time perchance exude.

Can this we render sensible

To every caveman dude?

Histories compiled by Alex Butzbach