Just a brief note – I am one of the historical fiction writers mentioned in this post, at the Christian Fiction Historical Society! The local historian whom I owe so much to for the background of Daughter of Texas is Victoria Eberle Frenzel, and her book is Gonzales: Hope, Heartbreak, Heroes.
The pivotal battle of the Civil War was fought 150 years ago this week, in the hilly countryside around the little Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. Vicksburg fell to the Union also on July4th, but the eyes of everyone focused on the titanic struggle at Gettysburg. This is a link to an interactive map of the three days’ battle, showing how it developed, and concluded with Pickett’s charge against the Union position – a charge which broke Lee’s Army, and decimated the Texans of Hood’s Brigade – to include my fictional Vining family. Of Margaret Vining Williamson’s four sons, only the youngest, Peter, would survive.
After Gettysburg, Lee’s Army would fight on – but never on the offensive again, always in defense.
Well, the early critical reviews are out and the knives are in: the latest movie remake of The Lone Ranger looks to be tanking like the Titanic,(the original ship, not James Cameron’s movie fantasy) although the some of the reviews posted at Rotten Tomatoes are favorable, most of them are entertainingly vicious. Jerry Bruckheimer again goes over the top from the high-dive with a half-gainer and a jackknife on the way down, all with the noisy special effects, Johnny Depp was promised that he could wear bizarre hair and a lot of makeup and it appears as if the ostensible lead character is just there…
There have been so many iterations of The Lone Ranger, on radio, television and in the movies, and each one added its conventions, characterization and images that now it has become a creaking tottering edifice built of clichés. No more growth is possible, just a recitation of the same old verities. I believe that we can do better by the old Wild West, and so I propose a very, very radical solution; to reboot the Lone Ranger by amputating it from the post Civil War never-never-land of mid-20th century imagining and transplanting it squarely back in pre-Civil War Texas, with forays perhaps into Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana, and to New Mexico – perhaps even as far as California. John Reid would be the sole survivor of a ranger unit ambushed and wiped out by – oh, whoever would be the villainous gang of the time; a scalp-hunting gang, villainous Comancheros, cattle and horse thieves from the Nueces Strip. Really, any sufficiently well-organized gang of baddies from the period would serve. He could even be a survivor of the Mier Expedition, escaped from Mexican custody and found near-death in the wilderness by Tonto … who could be a Lipan Apache or Tonkawa scout.
And thereafter, the two would roam the southwest as it was at that particular time, with attention to actual historical figures and facts. They could do all the fighting of evil-doers and injustice that the plot would require; a pair of fearless and adventurous friends. (Ix-nay on any suggestion of gayness, mostly because I’m damned tired of that particular character development.) Keep the horse named Silver, though. But lose the silver bullets, the white hat and the mask. Sorry – but the first is impractical, given the weapons of the time, second given the custom of the time … and in the days before wide circulation of photographs, you could be a total stranger once you were five miles away from where you lived and worked. One didn’t need a mask – in fact, in the real Wild West that would have made the lone Ranger even more noticeable. “Hey, who was that masked man? Did you ever see the like? Oh, I heard tell of him …” Whereas, sans mask: “Hey, who was that guy? Oh, just another saddle tramp, passing through; don’t pay him no mind…”Keep the sense of honor, though – the chivalry, the sharp-shooting and the unwillingness to kill, unless there was no other way. I know this seems radical – and loosing the mask might be seen as heretical – but the situation calls for radical steps. Look, this latest version had Tonto with a crow squatting on his head, so I believe we have reached the point where something must be done to resuscitate our popular cultural heroes.
(Crossposted at Chicagoboyz.net and at www.ncobrief.com)
The last words of the final chapter of The Quivera Trail were written this evening at about 6 PM. And is it a load from my mind, to have it done in mid-June, leaving the time from here until November for final polishing, shaping, editing, tweaking and otherwise fine-detail work.
I hope to have The Quivera Trail rolled out officially at Weihnachtsmarkt in New Braunfels, on Friday and Saturday, November 22 and 23rd, but it will be up on Amazon and B & N (and as an eBook in Kindle and Nook versions) by then for people who just can’t make the trip to New Braunfels.
An explanation of the title is here. The relevance to my story is that the plot concerns a number of characters who are all looking … looking for something; for love, acceptance, security, a future in 1870s Texas. I’ve described it as ‘Mrs. Gaskell meets Zane Grey.’ It might also be seen as a sequel to the Adelsverein Trilogy, as it picks up with Dolph Becker’s marriage to the very English Isobel Lindsey-Groves … a marriage not of convenience, but of pity and desperation. He feels sorry for her; a plump and rather awkward girl, bullied by her domineering mother until she is absolutely desperate to marry … anyone at all. But Isobel does have qualities which might serve her well in Texas. On her journey to her new home, she brings her personal maid, Jane Goodacre … whose own talents and ambitions are suffocating under the limits and expectations of someone from a lower social class in Victorian England.
There’ll be some historical characters wandering in and out – although not as many as there were in Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart, which was rather a literary Grand Central Station of famous early Texans. A lot of scenes are set in San Antonio itself, which is a switch from previous books, in which I took my characters practically everywhere else. I have tried as much as possible to make each of my books free-standing, so it is not required to read all of them in sequence to make sense of anything – but those readers who have read my other books will find appearances by characters who are old friends; Magda, Liesel and Hansi, Peter and Anna Vining, Hetty and Daddy Hurst, Jemima-Mary Fritche and Don Porfirio.
So how is the next book going? Pretty well, actually – I finished two chapters last week, and tallied up what I have so far; a little over 400 pages, but only about another two plot twists and set-piece scenes to go. I’ll do my best to bring it at or around 450 pages. A severe re-read and edit will probably shave it down some, at least I hope so. Brevity is the soul of wit and economical story-telling and characterization is a goal devoutly to be aimed for. It has not escaped my notice that Truckee is my shortest book, and also my best-seller over time. Back to basics, eh? Truckee covered the space of a single year, and had a fairly simple, straight-forward plot and a relatively small cast. My subsequent books were a lot more complicated, but it’s pretty clear that elephantiasis of the narrative is not widely appreciated, although there are exceptions. I will do my best to restrain myself.
This next book is supposed to focus on the next generation of the characters from the Adelsverein Trilogy; Dolph and his English Isobel, of Sam and Lottie Becker, and Lottie’s suitor, Seb Bertrand – all of whom were babies, children or just very young adults by a point halfway through the Trilogy. Time for them to pick up the chore of carrying on the plot, in and around the Centennial year of 1876 – although some of the older characters, heroes and heroines of the earlier narrative make occasional appearances now.
1876; a little more than ten years after the end of the Civil War, which I think was a great scar across the American psyche – as 1914-18 was for Europe. Everything was different, afterwards, although many of those things that made the difference so marked had already been put in train before that marking point. Many who had been rich, or even just well-to-do before the war were impoverished afterwards. But many who had been impoverished before were well-to-do or rich after it through mining, wholesale ranching, transportation, manufacturing and developing new and useful technologies. That very technology made the post-war world a different place; the telegraph brought far places closer, the railway brought them closer still. Before the war, it was pork which had been the favorite meat on American tables; ham, salt pork, bacon. Afterwards, beef from western ranches and shipped to the stockyards and slaughterhouses in the mid-West began to predominate.
Before the war, it was a wagon-journey of six months to get to California from the mid-West, or a long, bone-cracking stagecoach ride of twenty-four days. When the transcontinental railroad was completed – a traveler could go from Council Bluffs to Sacramento in about a week and in relative comfort. Should the traveler possess a parlor car and sufficient funds and connections, the journey could even be done in considerable luxury – instead of the dangerous and difficult trek it had been a mere three decades before. I worked in this transition for the last chapter of Truckee; an elderly man who had been a small boy on the emigrant trail in 1844 traveled east over the route that his family had followed – and noted that it wasn’t have the labor and adventure it had once been. The steam engine brought Europe closer to the US; now it was possible to travel relatively easily, and comfortably. Regularly scheduled steamship packet lines transformed a miserable, cramped journey of a month or six weeks (or even more) to barely a week from New York to Hamburg, or Southampton. I pointed up this transition again, in the Trilogy, comparing the hardships suffered by Magda’s family on their journey from Germany on a on a sailing ship – and how, thirty years later, it was only a week on a steam packet from New York to Hamburg. And in the new book, there is a chapter of the Richter and Becker clans traveling across Texas in their own parlor car; think of the change this represented to those who lived long enough to see and experience it! But there was a shadow over all of this; the shadow of the war.
Another author in the IAG has reminded me of this – that someone visiting the United States ten years later would have noted effects of it, most especially in the South. There would have been the ghosts of the dead from a thousand battles haunting the living with their memories; the badly scarred and disfigured, the chronically ill – and the chronically criminal. Even more visible were those amputees with their crutches and empty sleeves, the widows wearing black, and the young women who never married at all because the boy they loved was buried in the Wilderness, at Gettysburg, or Shiloh. Progress came at a price; and although one can’t say one caused the other, it made the handy demarcation point of a life that for most Americans had been rural and agrarian.
And that’s what I am working around, in The Quivera Trail … then there is the difference between England and Texas, which one has to admit, is still pretty marked. There is a reason that I am describing it to readers as ‘Mrs. Gaskell meets Shane.’
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