01. November 2012 · Comments Off on Another Chapter from ‘The Quivera Trail’ · Categories: Chapters From the Latest Book, Old West

  (Another installation from the current work in progress – Isobel Becker is accompanying her new husband and a herd of cattle to establish a new ranch in the Palo Duro region of North Texas … when the herd is suddenly and deliberatly panicked by a cattle rustler, hoping to round up a goodly number of stray cattle in the aftermath. Isobel and the elderly Daddy Hurst, the trail cook are alone in the camp …)

                                                     Chapter 15 – Palo Duro

The main body of stampeding cattle ran straight for the the cookfire, the wagons, and the draft horses which pulled them now stamping uneasily at the ends of the picket ropes. Isobel cast another glance over her shoulder; tossing horns amid a cloud of dust, rolling inexorably towards. She caught a brief glimpse of a man at the edge of the herd, crouched low on the neck of his galloping horse, attempting to ride ahead of them, but in another second that sight was lost. The horses – the cattle would panic the draft horses, the picket ropes would never hold; already they had caught the contagion of panic, even as Daddy Hurst ran towards them. Isobel knew instantly what the old man intended – to calm the horses, lead them closer into camp, and into a fragile shelter behind the wagons, but another instinct told her it was not going to work; six horses would be too much for the old man’s strength. She would have to help him. She caught up a blanket from hers’ and Dolph’s bed-roll, with a mad hope of covering one of the horses’ heads with it – that’s what Mr. Arkwright had always said – Cover their eyes, Miss Isobel – if they can no’ see, then they must trust you. Now the onrush of cattle sounded like an endless roll of thunder – worse than thunder, as she could feel it, feel the ground under her feet trembling. She ran towards the horses, while Daddy Hurst struggled with the picket ropes; he had two, three of them freed from the picket-pins screwed deep into the ground … and then one of them reared, neighing so loudly that it sounded like a scream, jerking the rope out of the old man’s hand.
Isobel had never in her life before heard a horse make a noise like that – and in the midst of that horror, Daddy Hurst fell. Isobel did not see clearly what caused him to fall; she was certain that he was not kicked by the struggling horses. He simply fell, the picket ropes falling from his slack hands, and the terrified horses dashing away.
No time, no time – the cattle were nearly upon them. Isobel shook out the blanket, remembering how the hands had talked of other such stampedes, how they would wave their jackets in the face of panic-stricken cattle. She ran a short way towards them from the wagons, hardly aware that she was screaming, shaking the folds of the blanket as if she were shaking dust from its folds. Her heart pounded in her chest, but was it her heart or the earth pulsating underneath her feet? She must make them avoid running through the camp, running over where Daddy Hurst lay helpless. Now the dogs were howling behind her, and she shook the blanket again, hardly thinking of her own peril. The cattle would wash over the camp, a wave of them, as unrelenting as an ocean tide sweeping all before it… but in a flick of an instant, the tide broke and parted. They thundered past, some to one side of Isobel and the wagons, some to the other. She was enveloped in a choking cloud of dust, and sank to her knees. From the buzzing in her ears she thought she might faint from the sheer terror of it. But she did not. Slowly, she stood up, on legs that trembled violently. The main body of running cattle was beyond the wagons now. It seemed as if they had gone in all directions, gone as suddenly from her sight as they had appeared from the canyon. The three horses which Daddy Hurst had tried to lead to safety were gone; Isobel could hardly begin to see where. The other three remained, nervous and stamping uneasily at the end of their picket lines. One of them had managed to loosen the picket-pin halfway from the ground. Isobel dropped the blanket from her nerveless hands and stumbled towards that horse on unsteady legs. She managed to catch the rope, just as the horse jerked away. The coarse grass rope ripped at the flesh of her hands and the picket pin slipped all the way out of the ground. The pin flew up, the sharpened end slashing the side of her face, and Isobel gasped from the sudden pain in her palms and cheek. She held on, gasping out soothing endearments to the frightened horse. The rope slackened, as the horse calmed, and stopped pulling away from her hands, which now were slick with blood. She could never drive the picket pin in solidly enough to hold fast. She led the horse to the cook-wagon and tied the picket rope securely to one of the straps that secured the water-barrel. Now to see to Daddy Hurst.

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Basically, the same cover … but in German!

So, we’re looking for launch of the e-book version at the beginning of November, and the print version by mid-month. So now I will be internationally-known! So cool…

Growing up in California conferred a bit of an advantage in that one could be aware of all the other layers behind the glitzy modern TV and Hollywood, West Coast/Left Coast, surfing safari/Haight-Ashbury layer that everyone with an awareness level above that of a mollusk knows. But peel that layer back, and there is another layer; the pre-World-War II layer, of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, of sleepy little towns buried in orange groves, Hollywood Boulevard a dirt track and Beverley Hills a wilderness; go back another couple of layers, and you arrive at a place that always seems to have had a dreaming, evanescent feel about it to me; California in the first half of the 19th century, a sleepy little backwater at the far end of the known world, a six-month to a year-long journey from practically anywhere else on the planet loosely defined as “civilization.”

In many ways, that California marked the high tide-line of the Spanish empire in the New World: when the great tide of the conquistadores washed out of the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth century looking for gold, honor, glory and land, and roared across the Atlantic Ocean, sweeping Mexico and most of South America in consecutive mighty tides, seeping into the trackless wastes of what is now the American Southwest. That tide  eventually lapped gently at the far northern coast, and  crested in the 18th century, dropping  a linked chain of twenty-one missions, four presidios or military garrisons* and three small pueblos**, one of which failed almost immediately. Mostly on the coast, or near to it, this was the framework on which hung the charming, but ultimately fragile society of Spanish (later Mexican) colonial society in what was called Alta, or Upper California.

It was a rural society, of enormous holdings, or ranchos, presided over by an aristocracy of landowners who had been granted their vast holdings by the king, or the civil government, who ran cattle or sheep on their holdings which were worked at by native Indians. The great holdings produced hides, wool and tallow, and their owners lived lives of comfort, if no very great luxury, and from all accounts were openhandedly generous, amazingly hospitable, devout – perhaps a little touchy about personal insult and apt to fight duels over it, but that could said of most men of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The climate was a temperate and kindly one, especially in comparison with much of the rest of that continent, winters being mild, and summers fair. The missions, which in addition to the care of souls had an eye towards self-sufficiency, did a little more in the way of farming than the rancheros; with great orchards of olives and citrus, and vineyards.

Far from the eye and control of central authority, they managed a fair degree of self-sufficiency; the scattering of structures from that era which survived to the 20th century set a kind of architectural tone to the whole area. Stucco and tile, courtyards, miradors and balconies, which looked back to cathedrals in Spain and Moorish castles in Grenada were adapted in adobe and brick, copied in stucco, and hung with church bells brought with great effort from the Old Country. Richard Henry Dana’s classic Two Years Before the Mast  is an eye-witness account of the trade in hides with the rancheros, in the 1830ies, and Gwen Bristow’s novel The Jubilee Trail  offers an accessible description of what it looked like in the 1840ies, as well as the difficulties involved in even traveling to such a distant fringe of the world. The immortal Zorro movies and TV show is set in this milieu, which is probably where most people know of this little, long-gone world.

The Spanish empire slowly lost its grip, and independent Mexico fought a rear-guard action for a while. I think they succeeded for a fair number of years, keeping their pleasant and gracious outpost, because of its very isolation, but other national powers waxed as Spain waned. The British had Canada to the north, and trade interests in the Pacific Northwest, the Russians had Alaska and even a tiny foot-hold at Fort Ross, on the coast of present-day Sonoma County, north of San Francisco. There was even a vaguely Swiss interest in Alta California, due to the presence of John Augustus Sutter, who founded an agricultural establishment where Sacramento is now – which inadvertently brought and end to the gracious life of the rancheros. The Spanish who ransacked Mexico and South America looking for gold, even sending a fruitless expedition far into the present-day American Southwest, eventually gave up looking for gold on the fringes of their empire. It is the purest sort of irony that gold in greater quantities than they had ever dreamed of was found, initially discovered during construction of a millrace for a saw-mill that Sutter had contracted to build at Coloma in the foothills, as he needed lumber for his various entrepreneurial projects.

*San Jose, El Puebla Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles sobre El Rio Porcinuncula, and Branciforte

**San Diego, Monterray, San Francisco, Santa Barbara

“From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”

When I was deep in the midst of researching and writing the Adelsverein Trilogy, of course I wound up reading a great towering pile of books about the Civil War. I had to do that – even though my trilogy isn’t really about the Civil War, per se. It’s about the German settlements in mid-19th century Texas. But for the final volume, I had to put myself into the mind of a character who has come home from it all; weary, maimed and heartsick – to find upon arriving (on foot and with no fanfare) that everything has changed. His mother and stepfather are dead, his brothers have all fallen on various battlefields and his sister-in-law is a bitter last-stand Confederate. He isn’t fit enough to get work as a laborer, and being attainted as an ex-rebel soldier, can’t do the work he was schooled for, before the war began.  (Interesting work, this; putting myself into the minds of people who were seeing things as they developed, day by day and close up; with out the comforting overview of hindsight.) This was all in the service of advancing my story, of how great cattle baronies came to be established in Texas and in the West, after the war and before the spread of barbed wire,  rail transport to practically every little town and several years of atrociously bad winters. So are legends born, but to me a close look at the real basis for the legends is totally fascinating and much more nuanced – the Civil War and the cattle ranching empires, both.

Nuance; now that’s a forty-dollar word, usually used to imply a reaction that is a great deal more complex than one might think at first glance. At first glance the Civil War has only two sides, North and South, blue and grey, slavery and freedom, sectional agrarian interests against sectional industrial interests, rebels and… well, not. A closer look at it reveals as many sides as those dodecahedrons that they roll to determine Dungeons and Dragons outcomes. It was a long time brewing, and as far as historical pivot-points go, it’s about the most single significant one of the American 19th century. For it was a war which had a thousand faces, battlefronts and aspects.

There was the War that split Border   States like Kentucky and Virginia – which actually did split, so marked were the differences between the lowlands gentry and the hardscrabble mountaineers. There was the war between free-Soil settlers and pro-slavery factions in Missouri and in Kansas; Kansas which bled for years and contributed no small part to the split. There was even the war between factions of the Cherokee Indian nation, between classmates of various classes at West Point, between neighbors and yes, between members of families.

How that must have broken the hearts of men like Sam Houston, who refused to take a loyalty oath to the Confederacy, and Winfield Scott, the old soldier who commanded the Federal Army at the start of the war. Scott’s officers’ commission had been signed by Thomas Jefferson: he and Houston had both fought bravely for a fledgling United   States. Indeed, at the time of the Civil War, there were those living still who could remember the Revolution, even a bare handful of centenarians who had supposedly fought in it. For every Southern fireater like Edmund Ruffin and Preston Brooks (famous for beating a anti-slave politician to unconsciousness in the US Senate) and every Northern critic of so-called ‘Slave power” like William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown… and for every young spark on either side who could hardly wait to put on a uniform of whatever color, there must have been as many sober citizens who looked on the prospect of it all with dread and foreboding.

There are memories, as was said of a certain English king, which “laid like lees in the bottom of men’s hearts and if the vessels were once stirred, it would rise.” So is it with the memory of the American Civil War. The last living veterans are long gone, the monuments grown with moss and half forgotten themselves; even some of the battlefields themselves are built-over, or overgrown.  But still, the memories, the interest as well as the resentments linger, waiting for the slightest motion to stir them up. The Civil War is still very much with us. Consider books like Cold Mountain, The Killer Angels, and Gone With the Wind, and documentaries like Ken Burns The Civil War. Every weekend, somewhere across the United States there are re-enactor groups, putting on the blue or the grey and shooting black-powder blanks at each other.

An argument about the causes of it all tends to be just as noisy and inconclusive, and boils down to the academic version of the above. The participants agree on some combination of slavery (or its extension beyond the boundaries of certain limits), states’ rights and the competing economic interests which would favor a rural and agricultural region or an urban and industrial one. What are the proper proportion and combination of these causes? And was chattel slavery a root cause or merely a symptom?

Whatever the answer, sentiment about slavery, or “the peculiar institution” hardened like crystals forming on a thread suspended in a sugar solution for  some twenty or thirty years before the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. In a large part, that hardening of attitudes was driven, as such things usually are, by the extremists on either end of the great lump of relative indifference in the middle. At the time of the Revolution, one has the impression that chattel slavery in the American colonies was something of an embarrassment to the founding fathers. No less than the eminent Doctor Johnson had acidly pointed out the hypocrisy of those who owned slaves insisting on rights and freedom for themselves. For quite some decades it seemed that slavery was on the way out.

Of course it cannot just slip out of mind, this war so savagely fought that lead minie-balls fell like hailstones, and the dead went down in ranks, like so much wheat cut down by a scythe blade, on battlefield after battlefield. Units had been recruited by localities; men and boys enlisted together with their friends and brothers, and went off in high spirits, commanded by officers chosen from among them. At any time over the following four years, and in the space of an hour of hot fighting before some contested strong point, there went all or most of the men from some little town in Massachusetts and Ohio, Tennessee or Georgia. Call to mind the wrenching passage in Gone With the Wind, describing the arrival of casualty lists from Gettysburg, posted on the front windows of the newspaper office for the crowd of onlookers to read, and the heroine realizing that all of the young men whom she flirted and danced with, all the brothers of her friends and sons of her mothers’ friends  . . .  they are all gone. As an unreconstructed Yankee, GWTW usually moves me to throw it across the room. But Margaret Mitchell grew up listening to vivid stories from the older generation and that scene has the feel of something that really happened, and if not in Atlanta, then in hundreds of other places across the North and South.

No wonder the memory of the Civil War is still so fresh, so terribly vivid in our minds. A cataclysm that all-encompassing, and passions for secession, for abolishing slavery, for free soil and a hundred other catch-phrases of the early 19th century  . . .  of course it will still reach out and touch us, with icy fingers, a not-quite clearly seen shadow, draped in ghostly shades of grey and blue.

The creation of characters is one of those miracle things. That happens in a couple of different ways. The ones who are historical characters are easiest of course; people like Sam Houston, or Jack Hayes, or John O. Meusebach, all of whom make appearances in the various volumes of the Adelsverein Trilogy, and in Daughter of Texas/Deep in the Heart. There are biographies, and historical accounts of these characters, so it is simplicity itself for me to get an idea of what they were about, how they looked and spoke and what background they came from. This does have its distractions; I was waylaid for a whole week reading biographies and letters of Sam Houston, just to write his brief appearance in The Sowing, on the eve of the Civil War.

Then there are the ones which I made up: I start with a requirement for a character, a sort of mental casting call for a certain sort of person, usually to do something. It can be, to continue the movie imagery, anything between a starring role, down to just a short walk-on, bearing a message or providing some kind of service to the plot. I usually don’t get caught up in describing everything about them – which is a tiresome tendency I will leave to romance writers and authors who have fallen in love with their own characters. Just basic age, general coloring, tall or short; a quick sketch rather than a full-length oil painting. I also don’t bother with describing in great detail what they are wearing – that’s another waste of time. Just the basics, please: work clothes, or dirty, or ragged, or in the latest fashion, whatever is relevant. And it’s really more artistic to have other characters describe them, or mention key information in casual conversation. That way allows readers to pull up their own visualizations of the characters, which seems to work pretty well and keeps the story moving briskly along.

On certain occasions, that character has instantly popped up in my imagination, fully formed. One moment, I have only a vague sort of notion, and the next second, there they are, appearing out of nowhere, fully fleshed, named and every characteristic vivid and … well, real. Vati, the patriarch of the Steinmetz-Richter clan appeared like that: I knew instantly that he would be absentminded, clever, loving books and his family, a short little man who looked like a kobold. His family would in turn, return that affection and on occasion be exasperated by him – but he would be the glue that held his family together. Another middle-aged male character also appeared out of nowhere, Daddy Hurst – technically a slave in pre-Civil War Texas, but working as a coachman for another family.

His character emerged from the situation of slavery as practiced in Texas, where there were comparatively fewer slaves than there were in other Confederate states. Many of those so held worked for hire at various skilled trades, and also seem to have been allowed considerable latitude, especially if they were working as freight-haulers, ranch hands and skilled craftsmen. Daddy Hurst is one of them; I like to think he adds a little nuance to the ‘peculiar institution’. The only trouble with that kind of character is that if they are supposed to me a minor one – they have a way of taking over, as I am tempted to write too much about them. This was becoming a bit of a challenge with the final part of the trilogy, The Harvesting.  If I had explored all the various characters and the dramatic scenes they wanted – in fact, all but begged for – it would have easily been twice the 500 pages that it eventually turned out to be. In the name of all the trees that might have been logged to print it – I had to say No, not now. But I did take note; many of those characters, with their back-stories appeared in Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart – the Menchaca brothers, for instance, or will appear in the continuing chapter of the Becker and Vining clans, in The Quivera Trail.

Where was I? Oh, characters, the third sort, evolution of – got it. That’s the other sort of character – the ones that I have started out with a certain idea of them, winging it a bit as I sketch out a scene for a chapter. Right there, they evolve, in defiance of my proposed plans for them. In my original visualization of their characters, as the romantic couple in the first book of Adelsverein, Magda Vogel Steinmetz and Carl Becker were supposed to be one of those sparkling and amusing Beatrice and Benedict couples, striking romantic and witty sparks off each other in every encounter, like one of those 1930’s romances of equals. Didn’t work out that way – he turned out to be very reserved, and she to be almost completely humorless. Beatrice and Benedict was so not happening! Within a couple of chapters of having them ‘meet cute’ when he rescues her niece from almost drowning – I tossed that concept entirely. I did recycle it for the romantic of Peter Vining and Anna Richter. He was a Civil War veteran, an amputee and covering up his apprehensions and self-doubts with a show of desperate humor. She was the clever woman who saw though all those defenses, calmly sized him up as the man she thought she could live with and come to love – and asked him to marry her, never mind the exact particulars. It makes amusing reading, just as I had planned.

The pivotal character of Hansi Richter is the most notable of those evolving characters. He started off as a stock character, the dull and conventional brother-in-law, a sort of foil to the hero. A rejected suitor, but who had married the heroine’s sister as a sort of second-best. That was another one of those initial plans that didn’t quite turn out as originally projected. A supporting character in the first two books, in The Harvesting,  he moved front and center; had developed into a stubborn, ambitious and capable person, quite likeable in his own right – and carrying a good deal of the story forward as he becomes a cattle baron, in the years following the Civil War.