Chapter One

In the Beginning

The Origin Story

On a sticky summer day in 1861, Charles Lindbergh’s grandfather, August, accidentally cut off his left arm. It happened at the local sawmill. While guiding a log into the spinning blade, the young man slipped. Blood splattered across the room, and he saw both his arm and a slab of his back lopped off before he hurtled across the room. His neighbors wrapped him in a quilt, delivered him to his bed, then went for the preacher. They expected him to die.

Lying there, gripping his shoulder socket with his right hand to stanch the blood, he stared out his bedroom window at the farm he’d carved from the Minnesota wilderness. August would not permit himself to die. His wound, he knew, was bad, so deep it exposed his beating heart and part of his lung. But he believed dying was the lazy way out, and August Lindbergh was anything but lazy.

He’d come to America two years earlier to escape prison. Back in Sweden, where he’d been called Ola Månsson, he’d been a wealthy dairy farmer, as well as a member of the Swedish parliament and—­through his government position—­an officer of the state bank. But in 1858, political opponents accused him of embezzlement. Ola had responded to their claims with his typical irreverence. When prosecutors handed him a sheaf of legal documents in court, he’d ripped them in half, dropped his trousers, and used the pieces to wipe himself. The judges found him guilty.

Ola, however, was not in court to hear their verdict. To everyone’s shock—­most especially his wife and children’s—­Ola had run off. With him went a solid gold medal once given to him by his constituents as a token of their esteem, as well as his twenty-­one-­year-­old mistress, Lovisa, and their seventeen-­month-­old son, Karl.

Ten weeks later, Ola resurfaced in another courtroom, this one in Minnesota’s Sixth District. Declaring his desire to become an American citizen (and “forgetting” to mention he was a fleeing felon), he gave officials his new name—­August Lindbergh. His wife, he said, was Louisa Lindbergh. And their son was Charles August Lindbergh, called C.A. for short.

Thrilled to be in America rather than a Swedish jail, Ola-­now-­August settled into pioneer life. He traded his gold medal for a plow, built a log cabin, and began clearing trees. Lovisa-­now-­Louisa planted a garden, milked the cow, gave birth to a baby girl, and cried a lot. But to August’s mind, life was good—­until the day of the accident.

For months afterward, August lay in bed, refusing to give in to either pain or death. Because he was poor and isolated, with no medical care beyond an unlicensed and itinerant doctor, nothing could be done for him. When he was finally able to stand, he demanded to see his lost limb. Four-­year-­old C.A. brought it to him. Entwining the healthy fingers of his right hand with the stiff, dead ones of his left, August said to his arm, “You have been a good friend to me for fifty years. But you can’t be with me anymore. So good-­by. Good-by, my friend.”

After placing his arm in a blanket-­lined box, he buried it in the garden.

Then the stubborn farmer rigged up a belt with pockets and rings into which he could fit the handles of his plow, and got on with harvesting his crop. Soon he was doing as much with one arm as he used to do with two.

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Charles Lindbergh never knew his paternal grandfather. August died ten years before...