Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

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.

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.

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.

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.

The time has come, so my daughter says – to haul the box of ornaments out of the garage, and put up the Christmas tree. My own ornament collection  is …  eccentric.  I’ve usually been celebrating the season on my own, since 1977 – and have all the memories of where I acquired them.

There are the two little yarn-doll ladies, with colorful crocheted skirts: they came from Denmark, through Great-Aunt Nan. They are the oldest: second to them are about thirty Styrofoam balls, covered with velvet or felt, trimmed with lace, gilt ribbons, fake seed-pearls and jewels, which  I made them in 1977 to adorn the little plastic tree in my barracks room.

In the 1980s, I bought a single box of ornaments from a high-end catalogue every year. The paper-mache globes covered with red and green curlicues, the stuffed teddy-bears with little scarves, and the vintage wooden airplanes are from that period. The airplanes  hang from the ends of the branches, as if they were whirling in some endless tree-shaped dog-fight.

The terra-cotta ornaments from Portugal which look like ginger-cookies are that vintage, and so are the wooden musical instruments.

I have a handful of Anri flying angels, bought when we drove across Europe in 1985, and dozens of traditional German wooden ornaments are from the 1990s. Santas on the backs of whales, or in the basket of a dirigible, angels and little sleds with piles of presents –all those came from TDY’s to Germany. The three little brass and glass lanterns – miniatures of a traditional Turkish lantern – came  from the NCO Wives Christmas bazaar, at Zaragoza AB.

So did the wooden ornaments cut out of flat scrap of wood and painted to look like a pineapple, the traditional Colonial American symbol of hospitality. All very traditional and conventional  . . .  and then until we get to the three Enterprise spaceships with their tiny blinking lights.

I bought the first of those when we came back to the States, the very year they first brought the Star Trek ornaments out. The little angel mouse with a dove in her hands is from Utah: a craft shop in the local mall.

The various other Hallmark ornaments were picked up on sale, usually just after Christmas. The Noah’s Ark is one of my favorites, being so very intricate and elaborate, with two pairs of tiny animals, and a miniscule dove with an olive-branch in it’s beak, flying around and around.

The little red handbag with a double string of beads for a handle – that was from a Christmas gift swap with the Red Hat ladies’s group.

Oh, it took all afternoon to set this all up, twine three strings of lights around it, set the poinsettia flowers in all the gaps left by the artificial branches, and hang the total accumulation.  But I don’t mind; it’s more than a Christmas tree – it’s a family history, a history that only families know.