This started with a dock on Lake Michigan.

A dock on Beaver Island, Lake Michigan, June 16th, 1856. A man walking down to it in the early evening as he had walked down to it a hundred times before. Two men waiting. Three shots. The Prophet-King of Beaver Island on the boards of his own harbor, shot in the back by followers he had himself converted, whipped, and driven to the last possible limit of endurance.

His assassins were welcomed as heroes. He died three weeks later in Voree, Wisconsin, where he had begun. His followers — six years of a community, a kingdom, a press, a church, a school — were given three days to pack what they could carry and expelled at gunpoint. The homes were burned. The USS Michigan, the only federal naval vessel on the Great Lakes, was in the harbor. The captain filed his report.

Nobody was ever tried.

I came to James Jesse Strang the way you come to something that doesn't make sense: slowly, from several directions, unable to leave it alone. A lawyer-editor-minister-amateur-scientist who converted to Mormonism, claimed Joseph Smith's succession over Brigham Young's objection, established a colony on a Great Lakes island, crowned himself king, organized a pirate raiding band, ran for the Michigan legislature twice and won both times, printed the first newspaper in northern Michigan, and was shot dead at his own dock by two men whose wives he had ordered publicly whipped for failing to comply with a dress code he had received from God.

The history does not resolve. That is why it is an opera.

Vera Cass arrived second — and she is the key that opens the door. The opera needed a witness of equivalent intelligence to Strang, someone who could look at him clearly and neither flinch nor follow. The historical record shows women journalists in this period establishing a presence against enormous resistance — Margaret Fuller at the Tribune, Jane Swisshelm running her own paper from Pittsburgh. Vera is fictional. She is also historically inevitable. There was always going to be a woman like her in a room like this, and the newspaper was always going to run her story without her name.

The dynamic between them is not romance. It is recognition. The specific electricity of two equally intelligent people finding each other in a room where that kind of meeting almost never happens — and the specific bitterness of discovering that intelligence does not distribute power equally, only the capacity to see the disproportion clearly. He has the power. She has the notebook. They both know which one will last.

I should say something about the two modes. Strang in the full ensemble — war drums, choir, fiddle, distorted guitar — is the prophet-king performing for his kingdom. The music believes him even when the lyrics don't. Strang alone at the piano is the man behind the prophet, stripped of machinery, the wit still present but the fear now visible underneath it. The tragedy of the opera lives in the distance between those two registers. They are the same person. The audience spends three acts learning to hear that.

And Vera, carrying everything south in four notebooks, writing the story that ran under no name at all.

The dock is real. The burning is real. The Michigan is real. The captain's report is real. The ambiguity of what the captain knew is real, and the opera does not resolve it because the historical record does not resolve it, and false resolution would be a lie about how power protects itself.

The story ran. The byline read: Staff Correspondent.

I am not interested in letting that stand without a witness.

— Julian Grant, 2026