Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

It rather seems, reading some of the movie and book criticism from various angles and for various recent mass-entertainment productions (both literary and cinegraphic) that the necessity for a female character to be a strong, fearless, unstoppable Mary Sue, without flaw and above reproach has overridden any impulse to tell a good story with believable human beings … which ultimately makes for bad and unrealistic storytelling. There’s no dramatic potential in a basically flawless character. Apparently, the audience is supposed to stand about, slack-jawed in appreciation of the amazingness of such paragons of female perfection.

Which is kind of sad, really; an offense against the concept of an author being the creator of entertaining stories and interesting characters. It limits the story-teller to just a few predictable tropes; no room for creating real, human, relatable and sympathetic characters. I do like to think I have managed to avoid such tropes, mostly because I’ve always tried to simply create characters, interesting and complicated characters, whose maleness or femaleness is just one single aspect of their character and their story arc. For my first two historicals, To Truckee’s Trail and the Adelsverein Trilogy, the standout, and tent-pole characters (that is – the characters who hold up the whole thing) were male: Dr. John Townsend of wagon train fame (who was a real person, BTW) and early Texas Ranger and Goliad Massacre survivor Carl Becker. (Created out of whole cloth.) But as essential elements of the plot, they were matched with able and strong female characters. Dr. Townsend had his wife Elizabeth, who started as a near-invalid and finished as a member of the party chosen to be part of the horseback rescue party when the wagon train was close to being stranded by show in the high Sierras, as well as the temporary single mother Isabella Patterson, determined to get her wagon and brood of children safely over the wilderness trail to rejoin her husband in California. Carl Becker was matched with Magda Vogel, the immigrant German girl, who was by way of being a tentpole character herself – backbone of her family, wife, mother and eventually the matriarch of her extended family. But she started the arc of that narrative as a slightly awkward but intellectually inclined teenager.

Carl Becker’s sister Margaret was merely a walk-on in the Trilogy, but she was the main character in the next two novels. (Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart), growing from a dreamy girl into that strong woman – but it was in progression, and for a good part of the way, Margaret was mainly motivated by suppressed fury and resentment over how she had inevitably been let down by every single significant man in her life that she had really depended on. She finished that arc in finally appreciating and loving that brainy but socially unskilled man who adored her unreservedly, and who never had let her down … and whom she had rather overlooked for years. So much for a strong woman.

All the other historical novels save one, The Golden Road, focused on female characters, front and center. Golden Road featured an older teen boy, Fredi Steinmetz, and his adventures in the goldmines and boomtowns of 1850s California – adventures which mostly meant that the other main characters were male, although at the end, one of his associates there turned out to be a girl masquerading as a boy, for reasons of keeping a low profile in a society in which women were few and far between. As that disguised girl acerbically pointed out to Fredi, in that place and time, no one paid any notice to a boy – but everyone noticed a woman. And that character had darned good reasons for wanting to be persistently unnoticed. She also had specific knowledge of placer mining and a set of her dead older brothers clothing to make the disguise good, until … well, never mind. Don’t want to give up too much plot.

The next three novels, which were follow-ons to the Trilogy focused chiefly on female leads – but none of the women involved started as faultless, perfect, and overwhelmingly charming Mary Sue types. Isobel and Jane, in The Quivera Trail began as Victorian women, straitjacketed, and strangled in the expectations which their relative social class placed them: Isobel the lady, who knew herself to be fat, clumsy, and socially inept, and her personal lady’s maid Jane, hampered by the limitations expected of her comparatively lowly background. Both managed, once they were set loose in Bicentennial-era America, to discover that they could be a bit more than what had originally been demanded and expected of them. I had enormous fun writing that book looking at the manner in which a fair number of Victorian-era ladies managed to overturn all conventional roles and still live quite satisfactory lives on their own terms. The husbands whom Isobel and Jane attracted were also fully fleshed individuals, by the way. I did get a bit of ironic satisfaction out of making their characters authentically pure in a Victorian manner – that they really did long to be married to manly men and accepted without question that their ultimate role in life was to be a wife and mother … but also as a side-line, to support their husbands as the second-in-command authority of whatever enterprise their husbands operated. Sophia, in Sunset and Steel Rails also followed that path, although with a stint of work as an independent woman in one of those businesses which did offer very fair terms of employment to women in the late 19^th century. That would be the fearsomely high-class and high-standard hospitality national corporation, Fred Harvey Company. The Fred Harvey Company was almost a hundred years ahead of anything else which could be classified as a national hospitality chain, so that book offered me an opportunity to explore that aspect of the late 19^th century frontier.

As for the most recent historical, My Dear Cousin, the whole concept is based on a matched pair of mid-century American women experiencing a world war – one as a wife and mother, the other as a military nurse, holding her own as a woman in a male-dominated sphere. Neither Peg or Vennie are wonder woman, or Mary Sue; just two young women doing the best that they can in a world which went from tranquil to perilous in the blink of an eye. Comment as you wish.

A writer friend put a promo link to one of my books on one of the major news aggregator sites last week, with the refreshing result that sales of the book skyrocketed – this was my first historical, To Truckee’s Trail, and the one which was almost the most fun and the fastest to write. I was a bit downcast when I finished it, because it meant that I was done with the story and had to say goodbye to all the characters, especially the one or two which had been created for the story out of whole cloth. Truckee must have been such a fast write for me because the whole plot was already there: the first wagon train party to make it over the mountains into California with their wagons, and not having lost a single person to the emergency of being stuck in the deep winter snow with slowly diminishing food supplies. The participants in that great adventure were all real, historic people, with the exception of the little boy Eddie Patterson, and the noble mastiff Dog; it was more a matter of teasing out what little could be deduced about what they had been like, and then and fleshing them out to become real, breathing, sympathetic characters. There had only been one diarist among that party, and that diary was later lost, and only one member of the party left a memoir later on … so I had a little bit to work with and was sorry when it was all done. I couldn’t write a sequel – the story was whole and perfect the way it was, and in any case two of the central characters, John and Liz only lived for a few years after – I still think that is why the story of the Stephens-Townsend-Greenwood-Murphy wagon train party was so little known, otherwise. John Townsend would have been an important and influential person in California, historically, and how he helped lead the party to safety from the jaws of icy death in the mountains would have been part of it.

There were three interesting connections between the Stephens-Townsend Party, and the tragic Donner-Reed Party, aside from the circumstance of both being trapped in nearly the same place in the pass over the Sierra Nevada. The first was that elements of the Donner-Reed survivors took shelter in the same little cabin by Truckee Lake which Moses Schallenberger, Allen Montgomery and Joseph Foster had built to winter over, hoping to guard the wagons which their party had to leave behind for lack of oxen to pull them. The second was that Martin Murphy’s youngest son, John, later courted and married Virginia Reed, who is usually cast as one of the heroines of the tragedy. And finally, the old mountain man and trail-guide, Caleb Greenwood, was a volunteer – in spite of his great age – in one of the organized relief efforts to rescue the survivors of the party. I did consider, when I came around to writing the Gold Rush adventure of Fredi Steinmetz in California a decade later, of having him meet briefly with Moses Schallenberger, and John and Liz’s little son, or maybe even some of the Murphy family just to complete the circle – but the plot just didn’t allow for that.

Other “after words” to my books – it was suggested that following Willi Richter’s life and adventures with the Comanche in the late 1860s, and his return to his birth family ten years later would make a ripping good yarn. But that would make necessary a really deep dive into Comanche history, life and culture, and I just didn’t feel it. Another reader suggested maybe exploring the anti-German lurch on the part of the general public around the time of World War 1, but I just didn’t feel that, either. So much came crashing down in that war and immediately afterwards – empires, optimism about the future and society generally – I just couldn’t feel that, either. Although I did reference in passing in My Dear Cousin, that Steinmetz’s family legally changed their name, because of the anti-German animus of the time; which is why Fredi and Sophia’s granddaughter went by the surname of Stoneman.

I wonder if I should have added a bit more to that book, mapping out how the post-war world treated the two cousins and their husbands. The couple that I based part of Peg and Tommy’s lives in Malaya on, eventually had to leave their rubber plantation for their own safety because of the Communist insurgency. They had children by that time, and the constant threat against all of their lives – threats carried out to the point where they had to fortify their main residence – forced them to leave. I rather think that Peg and Tommy, with the children that they had after Tom and Olivia (and they would have had more children) would have eventually relocated to Australia and rebuilt a secure life there.

For Vennie and Burt, I have a feeling that they would have had a rockier road. I couldn’t see Vennie settling down to be the perfect wife of an up and coming academic at a moderately snooty west coast private college. I think that they would have separated – but not divorced — after a couple of years. I could picture Vennie going back into nursing, serving as a military nurse in Korea. She had a rather overdeveloped sense of duty. And eventually, Burt would have taken up another position, somewhere in the intermountain West, and he and Vennie would reconcile, perhaps adopt a couple of war orphaned Korean children, before having a couple of their own. So that’s how that ‘after word’ might have gone – but I don’t believe I’ll be writing it out – the story was complete as it was.

Now, to finish the Civil War novel, which is half-done, and leaving Miss Minnie Vining as an established lecturer on feminist and abolitionist causes … a writer’s work is never done.