Live!

02. September 2011 · Comments Off on Live! · Categories: Old West, Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Ok, so the look-inside feature isn’t bolted on yet, but the Adelsverein Complete Trilogy has gone live at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as of yesterday – and in Kindle and Nook editions. Now that it’s well-launched, I’m back to the next two projects: the sequel to Daughter of Texas – which will be called Deep in the Heart and be ready for launch at the New Braunfels Weihnachtsmarkt, which will be held at the end of November. And just in case there is not quite enough to on all of that, Watercress Press is going to do a second print edition of To Truckee’s Trail . . . which I have wanted to do, both because it would be at Watercress and at a slightly lower retail price than previously . . . and because I had found out from a descendent of one of the real-life people that I wrote about – that he had actually been to California two decades before crossing the Sierra Nevada with the Stephens-Townsend Party in 1844. The character of Old Man Hitchcock, the mountain man and fur-trapper was painted as an entertaining teller of tall tales . . . but in this one instance he had been telling the absolute truth. So – the second edition in print will be out by mid-October. And one last thing – I’ve been asked, in person and via email, if there wasn’t a way to have the Adelsverein Trilogy translated into a German edition, as there would be a terrific audience among all those Karl May fans, who absolutely eat up anything to do with adventures in the 19th century American west. Anyone know anyone in the literary agent world who pitches to German-language publishers, and wants to negotiate rights to a German translation of the Trilogy? Any agent looking to explore that option would make out like a bandit, even at 15%. Fortunes in the book-world these days favor the nimble. It may be a bit of a niche market relative to American publishing – but owning a large chunk of a niche market is not bad.

The Jumping-Off Places

01. September 2011 · Comments Off on The Jumping-Off Places · Categories: Uncategorized

 These were the places where the trails all began: the trails that lead to Oregon, to the Mormon colonies in Utah, to California, and before them, into the fur-trapping wildernesses in the Great Basin of the Rocky Mountains, and the commercial trade to Santa Fe.

 Five towns, all along a 200-mile stretch of the Missouri River;  many of which have long-since outgrown their original footprint as a river-boat landing on the edge between civilization and wilderness, leaving only the smallest traces here and there among a century and a half of building up and sprawling outwards. The modern towns of Kansas City, Weston-Leavenworth, St. Joseph, Nebraska City and Council Bluffs-Omaha, were the places where the journey began. They were once rowdy, muddy, enormously crowded in those months when the emigrant, exploring, or trading parties were preparing to set out. Primitive,  bursting with excitement, overrun with emigrants and stock pens, the crossroads where merchants sold everything necessary for the great journey, the very crossroads of the west; Indians and mountain men, Santa Fe merchants and soldiers, emigrants, missionaries and foreigners passed each other in the spaces between buildings that did duty as streets. This was the inland coast, from which the emigrants looked out upon the sea of grass and made preparations.

 Greater Kansas City encompasses no less than four locations from which these voyages into the wilderness were launched: Ft. Osage, established by the US government in 1808, was the oldest. The fur-trading Chouteau Brothers of St. Louis established a trading post at the mouth of the Kaw, or Kansas River. Known variously as Chouteau’s Landing, Kanzasmouth or Westport Landing, it is now somewhere underneath the business district of Kansas City. Captain Bonneville launched his three-year exploration from the successor to Ft. Osage. Sublette and Fremont’s expeditions in the 1830ies and 1840ies departed from Westport Landing. In turn, they were overshadowed by Independence, the springboard for the growing Santa Fe trade, which served in turn the Oregon migration in the 40ies, and was swamped by the ’49 Gold Rush Argonauts. An arrival in that year noted the presence of a daguerreotype gallery… and the appalling noise of teams and animals. There were but two public houses in the city, crammed to capacity, with everyone else having to board with local residents or camp out in their wagons. The last was Westport, a little south and a little way down the Santa Fe Trail; begun as a mission and trading post for the Indians. Francis Parkman passed through Westport in 1846.

 It eventually dawned on emigrants for Oregon and California,  that going farther north along the Missouri shortened the distance they need travel towards the Platte, that great river road to the west.  Ft. Leavenworth was established in the 1820ies, with an eye towards intimidating the Indians, and it became the locus for a number of ’49 Argonauts. They looked to avoid congestion at Independence and St. Joseph, farther upstream, and departed from the town of Weston, the ‘Ville (established by a veteran of Army service at Ft.Leavenworth) across the river from it. Weston was built on a series of steep hills; Argonauts coming from Central Europe called it “Little Switzerland”.  John Bidwell, of the Bidwell-Bartleson Party of 1841, claimed to have organized the first wagon party for California from Weston. (They arrived safely for the most, but without their wagons.) It was necessary to ferry wagons and emigrants across the river at Weston, and the town thrived for a number of years, until being sidelined by the railroad boom in the 1860ies.

 The fur-trader, Joseph Robidoux saw into the future; he saw that more and more settlers would come. A trail that began two more days farther up the river by steamboat would save two weeks on the journey to the Platte River, the great highway into the west. He called his little planned city after his patron saint, Saint Joseph, but mostly they called it Saint Joe, or Robidoux’ Landing. By 1844, according to a west-ward bound emigrant that year, it had two or three stores and one hotel. Five years later, it was the major jumping-off point for the Gold Rush; two ferries ran, day and night, and the town was crowded to bursting with emigrants that outnumbered residents four or five times over. The Pony Express ran its 10-day service from St Joseph to Sacramento for one glorious year starting in 1860. The Pony Express was the brain-child of the Russell, Majors & Waddell freighting service, which already held contracts to deliver to military establishments in that era.

 There were a number of minor crossings between Saint Joe and the Council Bluffs area, most of them utilized during the years of extreme congestion following the Gold Rush. One of the popular crossings was near the site of Old Fort Kearney, on the Missouri. A town, Nebraska City rose on the site of the old fort, and boomed in the 1850ies, supplying the Army, and those seeking riches in later gold and silver rushes to Pike’s Peak and Virginia City.

 Finally, there was Council Bluffs, the name given by Lewis and Clark to the site of their parley with the Tribes in 1804.  This was the name for the general district, which covered a number of smaller communities in existence at various times in the neighborhood of present-day Omaha.  A small fort which became a mission under the direction of Father DeSmet ministered to the Potawatomi, until 1841. Five years later, Mormon refugees from Illinois arrived nearby. They crossed the river, and established the Winter Camp, the staging area for the great migration to Salt Lake.  The area was popular with emigrants from the northern states; Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Missouri. It fed emigrant traffic  into the so-called Mormon Trail along the northern side of the Platte River. Prior to the Gold Rush and the Mormon exodus, other Oregon and California-bound parties departed from Council Bluffs, notably the Stephens-Townsend party of 1844.  Construction of the Union Pacific railroad began at Omaha in 1864, foreshadowing the end of the jumping-off places for emigrants and wagon trains, departing from along the Missouri River. After the coming of the railroads to the West, venturing into it would no longer mean a journey of six months, dependent solely on the travelers’ own resources, and the strength and good health of their team animals.

(I originally wrote this as part of the background for my first novel, To Truckee’s Trail … which is now being prepared for release as a second edition in mid-October. The Kindle and Nook editions of the first edition will be available until then.)

Here We Go Round and Round

29. August 2011 · Comments Off on Here We Go Round and Round · Categories: Uncategorized

All around the mulberry bush, now that the all-in-one hardbound version of the Adelsverein Trilogy is about to be launched. I had intended this as a first step . . . no, actually this was the second step in having my books come out through Watercress Press in second editions. (The first step was Watercress publishing Daughter of Texas early this spring.) I had planned to transition To Truckee’s Trail, followed by the single-volume paperback versions of the Trilogy gradually over the coming months, but as it turns out, I can’t be with two publishers at once. Never mind that the Trilogy was originally done by two of them – one micro-house edited and marketed, and another, a slightly larger establishment did print and distribution . . . the result is that Truckee and the single volumes of the Trilogy are from today only available as Nook and Kindle editions for the next month or two. Which is not that much of a hassle, since the all-in-one print edition will be available after Thursday on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and the Kindle edition of Truckee has been downloaded like hotcakes for the last couple of months. Since it was my first adventure in historical fiction, it was also top on my priority list to do a second edition. There were things that desperately needed to be fixed, and the senior editor at Watercress has been just itching to get her hands on it anyway. It’s my first priority to get the second edition of it out there in print, as soon as absolutely possible, so nobody panic at not being able to get a copy, unless from one of those venders who have gotten them second-hand and have it actually in their physical inventory.

So, that’s where that stands – and, hey, all the readers who have Kindles and Nooks? Carry on – tell your friends and pass the good word.

Bidwell-Bartleson, 1841

25. August 2011 · Comments Off on Bidwell-Bartleson, 1841 · Categories: Old West, Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,

 The westward movement of Americans rolled west of the Appalachians and hung up for a decade or two on the barrier of the Mississippi-Missouri. It was almost an interior sea-coast, the barrier between the settled lands, and the un-peopled and tree-less desert beyond, populated by wild Indians. To be sure, there were scattered enclaves, as far-distant as the stars in the age of “shanks’ mare” and team animals hitched to wagons, or led in a pack-train: far California, equally distant Oregon, the pueblos of Santa Fe, and Texas. And men in exploring parties, or on trade had ventured out to the ends of the known continent… and by the winter of 1840 there were reports of what had been found. Letters, rumor, common talk among the newspapers, and meeting-places had put the temptation and the possibility in peoples’ minds, to the point where an emigrating society had been formed over that winter.

The members had pledged to meet, all suitably outfitted and supplied on the 9th of May, 1841 at a rendezvous twenty miles west of Independence, on the first leg of the Santa Fe Trail, intent for California, although none of them had at the time any clear idea of where to go, in order to get there.

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Indians

19. August 2011 · Comments Off on Indians · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , ,

  A few weeks ago, my daughter drew my attention to this story in the UK Daily Mail, with considerable amusement; both for the breathless sense of excitement about the headline – about something that was very, very old news to students of Texas history – and the matchless idiocy reflected in some of the resulting comments – the kind of crystalline-pure idiocy that can only be achieved  from learned every darned thing they know about the aboriginal inhabitants of North America from having watched Dances With Wolves.  I’ve always given handsome credit to that bit of cinema as excellent and almost anthropologically detailed peep into the world of the Northern plains Sioux in the mid-1860s  . . .  did anyone else ever notice how all the tribes-folk are always doing something, while carrying on a conversation in the side? Almost without exception, they are working at something. Pay no attention to the plot, just watch the people, and realize that they are just one tribe, among all the native peoples.

Anyway, this bit of Brit excitement seems have been inspired by this book – which came out over a year ago, and is pretty fascinating on it’s own. But reading the story and the comments exasperated me yet again, reminding me of my own particular exasperations with the popular culture version of the American frontier. As far as movies and television go, pretty much the whole 19th century west of theMississippi is a big-one-size-one-location-just-post-Civil-War generic blur. And all the Indians in these generic Western adventures were also pretty much generic, too  . . .  which means that historical knowledge gleaned from TV and movie westerns is  – to be kind –  not to be relied upon.

 Because the tribes varied enormously as to culture and capabilities, as any anthropologist will tell you. I’m not one myself, but I have had to read pretty thoroughly in the course of writing about the American west – and that is one of the things that emerges almost at once; the various Tribes fell into a wide range of cultural and technological levels. This range went all the way from the hunting/gathering peoples, like the various divisions in California (who being in a temperate and generous land did very well) and in the deserts of the Great Basin (the Utes and Paiutes did rather less well) to the Cherokee of the southeast who farmed, traded, and swiftly adopted an alphabet for their language, and embraced printing presses and higher education. In between these two extremes were those tribal divisions who farmed, like the Mandan and others of the Ohio-Mississippi-Missouri River basin, and the sedentary tribes of the Southwest; the Hopi and Navaho – farmers, weavers, potters and basket-weavers  . . .  all of whom, at somewhat of a squint, were not all that remote, technology-wise, from the white settlers, although one thing they all did have in common was a lack of resistance to the diseases which Europeans brought with them.

And then there were the hunter/gatherer tribes of the high plains, those who were the first to take full advantage of the horse  . . .  the horse, which ironically, had been brought into North America by the Spanish. The various Sioux divisions, the Kiowa, and most especially the Comanche – became peerless horsemen, hunters and warriors. They took the plains as their own, hunting the vast herds of buffalo who made their home there – all the land between the mountains and forests to the north and west, the Mississippi on the east, and nearly as far as the Gulf Coast to the south. For nearly two hundred years, the horse-tribes of the plains took it all for theirs, and lived for the hunt  . . .  and for war.

No, war did not come with the white settlers – it had been there all along. The various tribes warred vigorously, frequently and with every evidence of keen enjoyment upon each other; for the rights to camp and hunt on certain tracts, for booty and slaves, for vengeance and sometimes just for the pure enjoyment. The Comanche warred with such brutal efficiency on the Apache, that the eastern Lipan Apache were nearly wiped out, and pushed along with the Tonkawa, into alliance with the new-come Texian settlers. But for about fifteen years, the Penateka Comanches held a peace treaty with Texas German settlers – as allies against other enemies – a peace treaty which held for a lot longer than anyone might have expected, which goes to show that reality is almost always stranger than fiction. From the mid-1830s on, the Comanche’s traditional enemies in Texas, Lipan and Tonkawa warriors served with the Texas Rangers on various battlefields against the Comanche. In the Northern plains, the Sioux likewise warred with the Crow – with the result that the Crows were very pleased to serve with the US Army in the west, as scouts, guides and fighters. During the Civil War itself, the Cherokee split into Union and Confederate factions. Indeed, one soon gains the impression from the accounts of early explorers encountering various tribes and peoples, that those peoples were most interested in enlisting the European and American explorers – with their strange new gunpowder technology – as allies against their traditional tribal enemy.

This all made a very much more complicated and nuanced picture. Individuals and tribal groups reacted in practically as many different ways that there were individuals and groups; the whole spectrum of adaptation, resistance, and acquiescence, or even in combination and in sequence. The stories are endlessly varied, with heroes and villains, triumph and heartbreak aplenty  . . .  on all sides.

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