Time and Memory

I was momentarily distracted a while ago, by a comment on another blog that I follow, when one of the participants made mention of historian Jacques Barzun, who had just then entered into his second century on this mortal coil. The commenter noted that Mr. Barzun not only remembered Paris during World War I, when the German Army came perilously close to bombarding the place – but how he also remembers conversing with his own then-very-elderly grandmother, whose memories went back to the 1830s. Imagine, being just a step or two removed from such memories. It reminded me also of a conversation with another writer I know, who teaches languages and music, down in Beeville, Texas.

Imagine, he said – someone of our age (we are both in the fifty to sixty spectrum) talking to the oldest person we know – who would be in their nineties. So, their own childhood memories would go back to the early twentieth century – like Mr. Barzun’s. I did have this experience once, when I was just about 18, and because 18-year olds had just then been given the right to vote and it was an election year, I thought I ought to take some interest in politics. Which I did, but it proved to be very fleeting – the interest really didn’t kick in at full-strength until the last year or so. The mild interest of that year took the form of an afternoon at alocal  political party headquarters in my home-town, doing what-I-can’t-quite-remember  . . .  but the other person minding the office that day was an elderly gentleman who said he was ninety-something, had grown up on a ranch in Montana and had been sent to school (a one-room schoolhouse, of course) every day on a horse; a very tall horse, so his father had  to lift him up into the saddle, the horse took him to school, and the teacher lifted him down at the other end, and tied up the horse. In the afternoon, the teacher put him up into the saddle – and the operation proceeded in reverse. This would have put those schooldays of his in the late 1880s, at least – but he had some other fascinating yarns, of joining the Army and being a cavalryman in the days before World War I when the cavalry still meant horses. He had been on Black Jack Pershing’s expedition into Mexico, chasing after Pancho Villa, and had deployed to the Western Front as a very new 2nd Lieutenant. I so wish I had written much of this down at the time, or even remembered his name – it was much more fascinating than stuffing envelopes and answering the phone.

But, said my writer friend – now imagine that the oldest person you know, had talked as a child to the oldest person they knew. So, a child of ten or eleven in about 1920 had talked to a ninety-year old person  . . .  and that person’s memories – since they would have been born in the 1840s – might encompass the Gold Rush, and at the very least, the Civil War. A roll of typescript among some of my Granny Jessie’s papers paralleled that kind of memory-span. In about 1910, two of her aunts were learning to use that newfangled gadget, the typewriter, and as a typing exercise they had interviewed the oldest man in Lionville, Chester County PA. Alas, I do not recall his name either, and the roll of typescript is also long gone (a wildfire which burned my parents’ house pretty well cleaned out all the family memorabilia in 2003) but his first-hand recollections dated from the early 1800s. He told the great-aunts of long-horned wild cattle being brought in from the west, and of working as a carpenter. One of the curious notations was that coffins that were built then were constructed with a peaked lid, a puzzle which had just then been considerable of a mystery to the archeologist excavating Wolstonhome Town, near Jamestown. That design turned out to be the last of an archaic custom, which the archeologist went to a great deal of trouble to unravel – but there it was, testament for the use of an ancient and disused custom, preserved in an old typescript.

Now, let’s get really adventurous – and suppose that that oldest person who talked to the oldest person that you knew, who was born in the 1840s, had talked as a child to the oldest person they knew, who at eighty or ninety years of age in the 1850’s meant they had been born about 1760 – so that their memories would encompass the Revolution. Depending on where they lived, they might have seen George Washington, or his little army of Rebels on the march, heard Paul Revere or William Dawes riding by their house, shouting an alarm, or heard the church-bells ringing to celebrate their victory.

Yes, it is two hundred and change years ago – but to think of it in terms of memories, transmitted across the generations, we are only three steps removed. It isn’t really that long ago at all. History isn’t past – as another historical commentator remarked in another context, certain memories lie at the bottom of our minds, like lees at the bottom of a cup of wine, only waiting to be stirred up again.

A Literary Interview

Some time ago for one of the author’s groups that I participated in, we each did a series of interviews with our own characters – in charater, of course. I picked out two of the secondary characters from To Truckee’s Trail, with the following results. I had quite forgotten about this post, until I was shuffling through some archives … and it is just as amusing now as it was then.

Elisha Stephens (ES) and Isaac Hitchcock  (IH) from To Truckee’s Trail

Celia H.: So, gentlemen -  thank you for taking a little time from your duties as wagon master and –  er - assistant trail guide to answer questions from The Independent Authors’ Guild about your experiences in taking a wagon train all the way to California.

ES: (inaudible mumble)

IH: (chuckling richly) Oh, missy, that ain’t no trouble at all, seein’ as I ain’t really no guide, no-how. I’m just along for the ride, with my fuss-budget daughter Izzy an’ her passel o’ young ones. Heading to Californy, they were, after m’ son-in-law. He been gone two year, now. Went to get hisself a homestead there, sent a letter sayin’ they were to come after. Me, I think he went to get some peace an’ quiet. Izzy, she’s the nagging sort!

Celia H: Yes, Mr. Hitchcock -  but if I may ask you both - why California? There was no trail to follow once past Ft. Hall in 1844. Neither of you, or your chief guide, Mr. Greenwood had even traveled that overland trail, before Why not Oregon, like all the other travelers that year?

ES: Nicer weather.

IH: Waaalll, as I said, Samuel Patterson, Izzy’s man, he was already there, had hisself a nice little rancho, an’ o’ course Izzy wouldn’t hear no different about taking a wagon and the passel o’ young-uns and going to join him. (Winking broadly)  And it ain’t exackly true that I never had been there, no sirreebob. I been there years before, came over with some fur-trapping friends o’ mine. But it was unofficial-like. We wasn’t supposed to be there, but the alcalde and the governor an them, they all looked the other way, like. Beautiful country it were then -  golden mustard on all them hills, and the hills and valleys so green and rich with critters -  you’d believe they walk up and almost beg to be made your dinner! (chuckles and slaps his knee) Missy, the stories I could tell you, folk wouldn’t believe!

ES: (inaudible mumble)

Celia H.: Captain Stephens, I didn’t quite hear that; did you have something to add?

ES: (slightly louder) Most don’t. Believe him.

Celia H.: And why would that be, Mr. Stephens?

ES:  Tells too many yarns. Exaggerates something turrible.

Celia H.: But surely Mr. Hitchcock’s experience was of value …

ES: Some entertaining, I’ll give him that.

Celia H: Would you care to explain?

ES: No.

IH: (Still chuckling) The Capn’ is a man of few words, missy, an’ them he values as if each one were worth six bits. The miracle is he was ever elected captain, back at the start in Council Bluffs.

ES: Doc Townsend’s idea.

IH: And the Doc’s doing, missy! Everyone thought he’d be the captain of the party, for sure, but he let out that he had enough to do with doctorin’, and didn’t want no truck with organizing the train and leading all us fine folk out into the wilderness.

ES: Sensible man.

Celia H.: I take that you are referring to your party co-leader, Doctor Townsend. Why do you say that, Captain Stephens?

ES: Knows his limits.

IH: Ah, but the Doctor, he’s a proper caution! He’s an eddicated man, no doubt. Took a whole box of books, all the way over the mountains. I tell you, missy -  everyone looked to the Doctor. Everyone’s good friend, trust in a pinch and in a hard place without a second thought. Did have a temper, though -  member, ‘Lisha, with old Derby and his campfire out on the plains, when you gave order for no fires to be lit after dark, for fear of the Sioux? Old Man Derby, he just kept lighting that fire, daring you an’ the Doc to put it out. Onliest time I saw the Doc near to losing his temper!

Celia H.: (waiting a moment and looking toward ES) Do you want to elaborate on that, Captain Stephens?

ES: No.

Celia H.: Very well then - if you each could tell me, in your opinion, what was the absolute, very worst part of the journey and the greatest challenge. Mr. Hitchcock?

IH: Oh, that would be the desert, missy. They call it the Forty-Mile Desert, but truth to tell, I think it’s something longer than that. All the way from the last water at the Sink –  Me, I’d place it at sixty miles an’more. We left at sundown, with everything that would hold water full to the brim, an’ the boys cut green rushes for the oxen. Everyone walked that could, all during the night, following the Cap’n an’ Ol’ Greenwood’s boy, riding ahead with lanterns, following the tracks that Cap’n Stephens an’ the Doc and Joe Foster made, when they went on long scout to find that river that the o’l Injun tol’ us of. A night and a day and another night, missy  –  can you imagine that? No water, no speck of green, no shade. Jes’ putting one foot in front of the other. Old Murphy, he told them old Irish stories to his children, just to keep them moving. The oxen - I dunno how they kept on, bawlin’ for water all that time, and nothing but what we had brung. We had to cut them loose when they smelled that water in the old Injun’s river, though. Otherwise they’d have wrecked the wagons, and then where would we have been, hey?

Celia H.: In a bit of a pickle, I should imagine. Captain Stephens, what did you see as the most challenging moment?

ES: Getting the wagons up the pass.

IH: Hah! Had to unload them, every last scrap - and haul them wagons straight up a cliff. Give me a surefooted mule anytime, missy - those critters can find a way you’d swear wasn’t fit fer anything but a cat!

Celia H.: (waiting a moment for more from Captain Stephens.) Did you want to elaborate, Captain Stephens?

 ES: No.

Celia H.: Well - thank the both of you for being so frank and forthcoming about your incredible journey! I think we’ve managed to use up all the time that we have…

American Century Mass Cas

I can pretty well figure out the source of my interest in 19th century American history; some of it can be blamed on the Little House Books of Laura Ingalls Wilder. But the larger portion can be laid squarely at the foot of my mother’s subscription to American Heritage Magazine. Which she still has, but the magazine is a pale, paltry and advertisement-poxed version of what it was when Mom first began subscribing,  shortly after the beginning of the magazine itself. There were only a handful of the   very earliest, dawn-of-time-issues which I did not know very, very well. It was a bi-monthly, or quarterly hard-back publication, with no advertisements and articles by serious, well-respected if seemingly obscure historians who managed to be interesting without being the least bit sensational. I have the impression that most of them were passionately interested in their topic - whatever it might be, and wrote with enthusiasm equal to their knowledge of subject. The articles were well-illustrated with contemporary art or historic photographs, or an appealing mix of modern photographs, drawings and artifacts. I couldn’t have imagined a better introduction to the vagaries of our national history.

These articles and essays ranged over three centuries of American history, events and movements, personalities, triumphs and tragedies great and small, obscure or well known, all mixed together, and I pretty well sucked up every word. In hitting up the library shelves over the last few years to research for my own books,  I’ve been reminded of some events that I first read about, courtesy of American Heritage. These events hit at a most peculiar nexus in our history; just at that point when a certain level of technological development combined with a decided carelessness as to consequences when people were encouraged to move to a part of the country where large numbers of people had not been before. Or in some cases, where too many people happened to gather in a venue where not so many of them could have been accommodated previously.  At the same time, communications and travel were made much easier, while the appetite for national news grew ravenous. Did anyone think that ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ was an invention of the present cynical age? Or that breathless coverage of a disaster was something that came along after the invention of radio and television?

Oh, no, my friends. From about 1870, until the beginning of WWI, our nation was rocked pretty regularly by horrific disasters, natural and otherwise. The astonishing thing is that most of them have been forgotten, save by local historians. For every one that is noted in the textbooks and in the memory of popular culture; the Chicago fire, the Johnstown Flood, the sinking of the Titanic, there are a half a dozen others.

The Pestigo Fire, for example: a tornado of fire that roared through Wisconsin in 1871 and burned a thriving lumber town on Green Bay. That fire incinerated perhaps 2,000 people. Those who survived took refuge in a river, where they had to keep ducking under water, as the fire burned all around with such intensity that their hair kept catching fire. But that fire happened at the same time as Chicago was burning to the ground, and so a major city in flames grabbed most of the headlines. Twenty-three years later, another  huge firestorm swept through another Minnesota  lumber-town; Hinckley, where about four hundred saved themselves in a nearby gravel pit and a shallow, muddy lake, while another four hundred suffocated or were burned alive. The heroes of that day were the crews of three trains, who stayed to evacuate residents until their coaches were all but catching fire from the blowtorch flames around them.

Catastrophic weather took a toll in that last bit of the 19th century, accurate forecasting being more of a dream than a reality. On a January day in 1888, the temperatures across a wide swath of the upper Plains abruptly dropped nearly seventy-degrees in a few hours. It was a mild day until early afternoon, until a sudden blizzard swept over Montana, Nebraska, the Dakotas and Kansas. Farmers doing chores were a short way from their homes were suddenly isolated, and children were trapped with their teachers in their tiny schoolhouses. Over two hundred were dead of exposure - many of them children. One of the heroines of the ‘Schoolhouse Blizzard’ was a young teacher who supposedly tied her 17 pupils together with clothesline and led them all to safety in a house a bare mile away.

Along the Texas  Gulf coast, two hurricanes ten years apart destroyed Indianola,  the Queen City of the West. At the turn of the century a third hurricane hit like a pile-driver through Galveston – it is thought at the cost of over 8,000 lives. The city fathers of Galveston rebuilt, raising the level of their barely-sea-level island behind a huge sea-wall - and the benefits of accurate weather forecasting and storm watches became clearly evident.

The loss of the White Star liner Titanic, colliding with an ice-berg in the mid-Atlantic is one of those things that practically everyone knows about –  but barely ten years before, the steamship General Slocum burned within sight of New York harbor. It was an excursion ship, hired for the day by a large Lutheran church on the lower East side, to take the families of its parishioners for an all-day picnic outing on Long Island. The General Slocum burned while the captain tried to run it aground where the fire wouldn’t endanger anyone else - while his crew discovered that the fire hoses were rotten, the lifeboats couldn’t be dislodged from their places, or lowered away if they could –  and the life-vests were filled with rotted cork. Over 1,000 people were lost; like the Schoolhouse Blizzard disaster, many of them children. Another excursion steamship, the Eastland was hired in 1915 for the employees of Western Electric Company’s annual company picnic. The Eastland was an unstable and top-heavy ship, and while taking on passengers at a Chicago dock rolled over to one side in 20 feet of water. Almost 900 of her passengers died within 20 feet of the dock - but the Eastland has nothing of the enduring grip on the imagination that the Titanic does.

This is only a partial list of these sorts of disasters; I’ve probably missed at least this many and more - but they had an effect, even if the headlines did not last as long. The inquiries into the Slocum and the Eastland disasters resulted on at least as many safety improvements as regards their operations.   The train of natural disasters caused by weather likewise resulted in such things as forecasting, and storm tracking being taken more seriously.  The loss of whole cities and a good chunk of the countryside to fires became unacceptable, after Chicago and Peshtigo fires - and especially so after the Hinckley fire. It was all cumulatively too much. People got very tired of opening their paper every few years and reading of some horrendous loss of life - and then finding out that it might have been could have been, and should have been prevented. Just blindly trusting to luck, goodwill among men, and a benevolent nature would no longer cut it, now that disaster news could fly beyond a single town, or a neighborhood and touch people half a world away.

Still, it’s curious, how few people have heard of some of these I have listed. My daughter only knew about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and only because it was her freshman history textbook.

In Translation

Ever since I finished the Adelsverein Trilogy, I’ve wanted to have a German language version out there. I’ve had emails from fans asking about it, and talked with native German speakers who assured me that Karl May (the German equivalent of Zane Grey) has an enormous and devoted Old West fan-base. This in spite of the fact that he shuffled off the mortal coil in 1912, and only visited the US once: on that occasion, he only went as far west as Buffalo, New York – but in book-world, his characters of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand were in the thick of it.

In any event, movies, television and radio dramas and comic books based on Karl May’s version of the Wild West have continued to be madly popular in Germany ever since. I have made an arrangement with a freelance translator, who provided a sample translation. If you are fluent in German, take a look at it (here on this page) and tell me what you think. If it works out as I hope, the German-language version of Adelsverein: The Gathering would be available in about a year, as an e-book and print paperback edition.

Looking Ahead to 2012

For me, the new year of 2012 is a chance to take a breath – having finished Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart, which told of the life of Margaret Becker in early Texas. I had set the release of the first in conjunction with observances of the 175^th anniversary of San Jacinto day (and indeed, the whole of the Texas war for independence) and the second in time for Christmas. Having finished all that … well, I can take a little break before commencing on the next book project.

I had projected another three books, after the Trilogy, to follow the adventures of some of the minor characters who had experiences that were just barely hinted at. Margaret’s story turned out to be too extensive and eventful to be contained in one book – that is, unless I wanted to release it as a 700 page epic, and frankly, too many readers would find the prospect a little daunting. But now her life and experiences, and the historical events of her time have been fairly dealt with, and I have learned – and hopefully relayed to readers – about a wide range of incidents and personalities in early Texas.

Which leaves me with two more books to be checked off my to-do list; one of which I have about six chapters roughed out, and the other of which I have nothing but a stack of books to read for and some notes about characters. The one with the roughed-out chapters will be a kind of sequel to the Trilogy, following – among other characters – the experiences of Isobel, Dolph Becker’s English bride as she adjusts to a life in Texas very different to that she she lived as the daughter of minor nobility. The story that I am going to try and complete first, though, is the picaresque Gold Rush adventure that I’ve always wanted to write.

Now and again in the Trilogy I alluded to Fredi Steinmetz and how he had trailed cattle to California sometime in the 1850s, had stayed there for a bit and returned to Texas. So – what had he seen, besides the gold diggings? That will be the next book; Gold Rush-era California. There was a lot going on in the far west, in the decade before the Civil War, much of it every bit as entertaining and relatively unknown as anything else I have ever written about. The Mormons were thriving in their settlements established in present-day Utah, freight and emigrant traffic was constant on the Platte River Road, and the US Army was holding their own, along the routes of communication between east and west, and all kinds of off-beat characters had made their way to California. There will be a slippery Fenian named Polydore O’Malley, and a teenaged girl disguising herself as a boy among the main characters – besides the wide-eyed teenaged Fredi himself – friendly and unfriendly Indians, vigilantes, express-riders and adventurers. Other characters will emerge from research, and as for the plot, other than ‘to California and back again’ I have no idea … yet, anyway.

Writing the Range

In a fit of boredom some months ago, as we flipped through the cable channels looking for something new and/or interesting, we stumbled across the Hallmark Channel. Hey, Hallmark – how bad could one of their movies be? – and wound up watching The Trail to Hope Rose. The premise interested us for about twenty minutes, and then we realized that although whatever book it might have been based upon may have been a very good read, the movie was a bit of a painful watch. We stuck it out, just to see if any of our predictions made in that first fifteen minutes came true. (They did – all but the kindly old ranch-owner who befriended the hero being killed by the villainous mine-owner. He didn’t – but he was deceased by the end of the final reel.)  It was just a generic western: generic location, generic baddies, card-board cut-out characters and a box-car load of generic 19th century props from some vast Hollywood movie warehouse of props and costumes used for every western movie since Stagecoach, hauled out of storage and dusted off, yet again.

It wasn’t a bad movie, just a profoundly mediocre one. Careless gaffes abounded, from the heroine’s loose and flowing hair, her costumes with zippers down the back and labels in the neckline, and the presence of barbed wire in 1850, when it wouldn’t be available in the Western US for another twenty-five years, neat stacks of canned goods (?), some jarringly 20th century turns of phrase – and where the heck in the West in 1850 was there a hard-rock mine and a cattle ranch in close proximity? Not to mention a mine-owner oppressing his workers in the best Gilded Age fashion by charging them for lodgings, fire wood and groceries, as if he had been taking lessons from the owners of Appalachian coal mines.  It was as if there was no other place of work within hundreds and hundreds of miles – again, I wondered just where the hell this story was set. It passed muster with some viewers as a perfectly good western, but to me, none of it rang true. Whoever produced it just pulled random details out of their hat – presumably a ten-gallon one – and flung them up there. Hey, 19th century, American West; it’s all good and all pretty much the same, right?

I’ve been getting increasingly picky, though. Generic, once-upon-a-time in the west doesn’t satisfy me any more, not since I began writing about the frontier myself. It seems to me that to write something true, something authentic about the western experience – you have to do what the creators of The Trail to Hope Rose didn’t bother to do; and that was to be specific about time and place. The trans-Mississippi West changed drastically over the sixty or seventy years, from the time that Americans began settling in various small outposts, or traveling across it in large numbers. And the West was not some generic all-purpose little place, where cattle ranches could be found next to gold mines, next to an Army fort, next to a vista of red sandstone, with a Mexican cantina just around the corner.

No, there were very specific and distinct places, as different as they could be and still be on the same continent. 1880′s Tombstone is as different from Gold Rush-era Sacramento, which is different again from Abilene in the cattle-boom years, nothing like Salt Lake City when the Mormons first settled there – and which is different again from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s small-town De Smet in the Dakota Territory – or any other place that I could name, between the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi-Missouri. Having writers and movie-makers blend them all together into one big muddy mid-19th century blur does no one any favors as far as telling new stories.

Being specific as to time and place opens up all kinds of possible stories and details. Such specificity has  the virtue of being authentic or at least plausible and sometimes are even cracking good stories because of their very unlikelihood. For example, Oscar Wilde did a lecture tour of western towns. If I remember correctly, the topic of his lecture was something to do with aesthetics and interior decoration, and he performed wearing the full black-velvet knickerbockers suit with white lace collars. He was a wild success in such wild and roaring places as Leadville, Colorado, quite possibly because he could drink any member of his audience under the table.

Anyway, my point is, once you have a time and a place, then you can deal with all the local characters and the visitors who came to that town at that time, have a better handle on the technology in play at the time. Was the town on the railway, who were the people running the respectable businesses – and the unrespectable ones? Who were the local characters, the bad hats and the good guys, the eccentrics and the freaks? What was the local industry, and for how long – and if not long, what replaced it and under what circumstances? What did the scenery out-side town look like? Even such details as what were the main buildings in town made of and what did they look like, over the years can be telling. Where did the locals get their food from? Their mail? Who did the laundry, even! What kind of story can a writer make of a progression from canvas tents over wooden frames, from log huts and sod huts, to fine frame buildings filled with furniture and fittings brought at great expense from the east. I had all those questions while watching this movie – and I’ll probably have pretty much the same, if I ever watch another one like it. It would have been so much a better movie if someone had given a bit more thought and taken a little more care.

Above all, if a writer can be specific with those underpinnings, of time and place and keep the story congruent within that framework – than it seems to me that you can tell any sort of story, and likely a much more interesting and entertaining one. As near as I can judge from some of the western discussion groups and blogs, many writers are moving in that direction. Eventually movie producers may move in that direction as well; supposedly Deadwood makes long strides in re-visualizing a more specific west.

But they will absolutely, positively have to get rid of those costumes for women with the very visible zippers down the back.

Happy New Year!

All right then – sweeping up the confetti and welcoming in the new year! I had two books in 2011, and can’t promise anything like that in 2012, but I will be working on the next one … and I’ll be the call-in guest on the Yankie Grant Show, on WayMoreFM this Thursday afternoon, January 5th at 3 PM. (It’s an internet radio show – check it out! I’ll be getting back to my radio roots!)

The next book, by the way, will feature the experiences of Fredi Steinmetz on the cattle trail to California in 1855, and his subsequent adventures in the Gold Rush. There will be adventure, of course, lots of interesting historical characters, chicanery, Fenians, vigilantes … and cows. Lots of cows.