» Fri Dec 09, 2011 4:16 am MOJAVE TRIBUNE
7 April 2304
By Greta LYNCH
Zoe Rosewood, founder and first president of the New Vegas Republic passed away peacefully last night after being bedridden for the better part of a decade. Madam Rosewood, often called ‘Silvertongue’ by friend and foe alike, was forty-nine. Long-time friend and personal physician Arcade Gannon confirmed her death, citing cardiac failure.
Little is known of Mdm. Rosewood’s early life as she was famously reticent to discuss her past. Her political enemies have at various times suggested that she was an ertzwhile brigand, NCR fugitive or prosttute, while radio and stage dramatizations of her early life that exploded in popularity after her assassination attempt in 2294 often depicted her as an escaped slave of Caesar’s Legion.
Whatever the true story of the first twenty-seven years of her life was, the first confirmed record of Mdm. Silvertongue is dated to the extraordinary year of 2281-2. Emerging out of the wasteland as a courier for the Mojave Express, she soon gained public prominence as an agent of the mysterious Robert House (then the overseer of New Vegas) and the occupation forces of the New California Republic. It was in this period that she gained the reputation for being a consummate diplomat.
This much we know as a matter of public record. Zoe Rosewood has gained such a mythical reputation over the years that it is difficult to separate truth from folklore and propaganda, especially for the chaotic months leading up to the Second Battle of Hoover Dam. NCR veterans of the Mojave Occupation tell amazing tales of how Silvertongue singlehandedly wiped out a Legion stronghold at Cottonwood Cove, turned the tide at Nelson and put down an inmate mutiny at the NCR Correctional Facility. The more colourful tales have her infiltrating the regional Legion headquarters at Fortification Hill as a bed-slave and assassinating the eponymous Caesar, and credit her with inciting the bandit gang known as the Great Khans to carry out the suicidal Charge of the Khans (since immortalized in numerous works of popular fiction) at Hoover Dam. Though the brass of the NCR Army officially denies that Silvertongue had anything to do with stopping Caesar’s Legion at the Colorado, it’s clear from numerous interviews with the rank-and-file veterans that they hold her in extremely high regard.
This is all the more remarkable considering the coup orchestrated by Rosewood at the Second Battle of Hoover Dam. After blunting the Legion’s assault on the dam, she and a mysterious squad of power-armored warriors battered their way into the camp of the Legion commander Lanius and, in a typically brilliant stroke of diplomacy, convinced the Legate to retreat. Then, backed by a large army of Securitrons that seemed to appear out of nowhere, she repeated the feat on the NCR’s General Oliver, convincing him that holding the Mojave was a fools’ errand. With this double coup de grace, Rosewood suddenly became the most powerful person in the Mojave.
If she had done nothing else, it would still have been an impressive achievement, and she would have entered the halls of legend with the likes of the Vault Dweller and the Chosen One, but for Rosewood, it was merely a means to an end. In an effort that again demonstrated the aptness of her nickname, Silvertongue spent the next few months canvassing support in the environs of New Vegas for a Mojave-wide republic, eventually hammering out a workable compromise among the disparate factions in the region by early 2282. On 26 September 2282, the settlements of Westside, Goodsprings, Primm, Novac and Bitter Springs joined the Strip in declaring the formation of the Republic of New Vegas, with a constitution based on that of Shady Sands. The ragtag Senate of the newly-minted republic promptly elected the twenty-eight year old Rosewood as their first President.
In the following month the NCR withdrawal from the Mojave was formalized in the Treaty of Primm, where the NCR gave up their claims to New Vegas, Hoover Dam and the rest of the Mojave. The withdrawal of NCR troops, and with it the NCR’s authority and manpower, might have resulted in a widespread collapse of trade networks and general anarchy under different circumstances, but thanks to Rosewood’s good relations with the Mojave chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel, the power-armored Paladins agreed to help patrol the major roads connecting the constituencies of the republic. Aerial reconnaissance by the Boomers, with whom President Rosewood also had a good rapport with, also ensured the timely discovery of a major raider camp in the ruins of Nipton. When a contingent of Securitrons promptly rolled in and wiped out the raiders, the show of force was widely publicized, further discouraging potential vultures. “The energy and diplomatic genius of Rosewood,” claimed biographers Avellone and Sawyer in their Rosewood biography, Silvertongue, “was the single most important factor […] in the survival of the early New Vegas Republic.”
With the NVR’s most uncertain, volatile days behind it, President Rosewood now turned her attentions towards consolidating the embryonic republic’s hold on the region. From the newly-refurbished McCarran House, Rosewood worked with the Followers of the Apocalypse to provide steady electricity to residents throughout the Mojave, a task made vastly easier by the possession of both Helios One and Hoover Dam power plants. With the Fiends, who had so troubled the NCR, scattered and without leadership, Rosewood began resettling South Vegas with refugees and slum dwellers from Bitter Springs, North Vegas and Freeside. When the Vegas Senate balked at funding this venture, Rosewood paid for the project from her own considerable fortune.
Among other things, the opening of South Vegas for settlement began to make a real difference in improving the conditions in the notoriously-impoverished slums in the outskirts of Vegas, and in 2283 the “Kings” of Freeside joined it to the NVR. North Vegas and various autonomous communities in Outer Vegas soon followed suit.
Validated by the dramatic success of South Vegas, Rosewood had no problem pushing through the Mojave Resettlement Act in the New Vegas Senate. Stimulated by government funds, Nelson, Nipton and Cottonwood soon became self-sufficient communities. Jacobstown, the Super Mutant refuge in the mountains northwest of Vegas, joined on a provisional basis in 2285, and at Rosewood’s insistence was granted full citizenship two year later. By 2287, only the Boomers and the Brotherhood of Steel had not joined the New Vegas Republic. When the elderly matriarch of the Boomers died in 2287, the famously-xenophobic Boomers demonstrated their high regard for Rosewood by finally opening Nellis to the outside world at her request, though full annexation would have to wait till 2294.
In its initial years, the NVR relied heavily on caravan imports from New California, but in 2285 Rosewood managed to talk the leaders of the NCR into an alliance, by pointing out that the New Vegas was a shield against Caesar’s Legion. Though some segments of NCR society resented Rosewood for wresting the Mojave from them, fear of Caesar’s Legion eventually won out. By the terms of the Treaty of Sloan, the NCR embassy on the Strip was reestablished, and tariffs for NCR merchants were reduced, in exchange for expert advisors on heavy industry and a guarantee of assistance should the NVR be attacked by Caesar’s Legion.
The threat from the east, however, never materialized as a dozen Legates declared themselves Caesar upon news of Edward Sallow’s death, and the Legion shattered into a multitude of squabbling warlords who were too busy raiding one another to prove a real menace to Vegas. When Lanius crossed the Colorado in 2289 with a diminished force and sacked Cottonwood he caused widespread panic but was easily and decisively defeated by Vegas’ Securitron army at Clark Field. When a real threat to the New Vegas Republic did come, it came from within.
The Mojave chapter of the Brotherhood of Steel had been on good term with Rosewood ever since she broke with Mr. House instead of turning against them, a favour which the Elder McNamara returned by supporting the NVR in its crucial first months. However, the continued reliance of the NVR on its advanced Securitrons was a constant source of friction between Rosewood and the Brotherhood. Furthermore, with the Treaty of Sloan, the NVR began to acquire heavy industrial capability, and by 2292 the state-sponsored New Vegas Steel was well on their way to successfully reverse-engineer the T-51b power armor.
Things finally came to a head in when a Brotherhood cyber-infiltration attempt aimed at disabling the NVR Securitrons was intercepted by the Strip’s resident AI, who then piggybacked it to lockdown the Brotherhood bunker at Hidden Valley, essentially holding its leadership prisoner. Though Rosewood relented and ordered the AI to cancel the lockdown, the treacherous Brotherhood then ambushed the president’s entourage on her way to Shady Sands. All but one of Rosewood’s entourage was killed, and only the heroism of the member of her guard (one Boone) prevented her from meeting the same fate.
However, she was seriously injured, and only the most advanced pre-War medical equipment in the Lucky 38 kept her alive. Though she has occasionally regained consciousness she has never left the Lucky 38 Tower since. Rosewood had been almost universally popular in the Mojave, and her assassination attempt and incapacitation turned public opinion violently against the Brotherhood of Steel.
Numerous Rosewood historians have commented, especially in the wake of the 2294 assassination attempt, that the greatest blunder of her career was allowing the Brotherhood of Steel to survive and recover from their defeat at the hands of the NCR, when she could have destroyed it once and for all in 2282. The biographer Bergman has speculated that Rosewood’s consistent soft spot for the Brotherhood of Steel was due to a Brotherhood friend she made in 2281. Whatever the reason, the Brotherhood War of 2294 devastated large swaths of the central Mojave, particularly Black Mountain, and cut down a brilliant visionary in her prime.
When Zoe Silvertongue founded the Republic of New Vegas in 2282, the Mojave was a disunited, war-torn region teetering on the edge of total anarchy. She left it a stable, prosperous and democratic state, with a shining future ahead of it. There is perhaps no greater embodiment of Silvertongue’s legacy than in the fifty-foot Lady Vegas statue that stands in Rosewood Plaza today. Commissioned by the grateful people of New Vegas and sculpted by Michael Angelo, the beatific likeness of a young Zoe Rosewood looks benevolently down on a thoroughly gentrified Freeside, holding the scales of justice in one hand and a stylized atom in the other.
