Historical Novels & Short Stories

Posted By Celia Hayes on March 3, 2010

It is a good omen for the cover of a book intended to tell the story of the great emigrant trails across the far western frontier, to feature an illustration of a covered wagon pulled by the appropriate numbers of the appropriate draft animal. The cover art for all too many works of fiction about the California/Oregon trails appear to feature a huge covered wagon hitched to two horses, an arrangement as impossible in practice as it was historically inaccurate. The unvarnished fact was that most emigrants crossing to California or Oregon prior to the Civil War hauled their worldly goods there in relatively small wagons, pulled by at least three yoke of draft oxen – for it was a brutally wearing journey, where there was often not much of a road at all, and horses were too fragile and expensive to serve as team animals. Having written my own novel about a wagon-train party, venturing to California in the early years, I can attest that having an accurate cover is a promising start for readers hoping to learn more about the wagon-train emigrants.

This young-adult historical  follows the Symons family – father Jedediah, mother Mary, eleven-year old Jeremiah, little sister Bitsy and an assortment of old friends and new-made acquaintances, as they leave their farm in Tennessee and take to the trail for Oregon. They do so with the advice of Jedediah’s brother Peter, a knowledgeable veteran of the far west, in the days when everything west of the Mississippi-Missouri was a trackless wilderness. In fact, the character of Uncle Peter affords a graceful means of acquainting young Jeremiah and his family with many of the old mountain men, such as Jim Bridger, and of relaying bits of western lore, and practical wisdom of the trail. The family is also religiously devout, in a way that is true to the historical record, although displaying a more 20^th century degree of tolerance towards other faiths.

In a fairly straight-forward way, this account fills in many little details of the wagon-train pioneer’s journey: the politicking which went on, all along the trail as bands of travelers elected leaders, found fault with them and elected new leaders, dealt with lawbreakers, split apart into more congenial group and negotiated a safe passage for their families and wagons with potentially hostile Indians. “West to the Sun” is also a full and heartbreaking account of fatalities from accident and disease encountered by the Symons party. It was a rare wagon party which did not leave a member, or sometimes several members of it behind, in a lonely and unmarked grave along the Platte or the Sweetwater.

I would criticize this book on only one account, which would be that the narrative voice sounds a little too modern, occasionally dropping into 20^th century turns of speech which struck me as more than a little jarring. This would have been a quite satisfactory read if Jeremiah had sounded a little more like a 19^th century ‘voice’; if his narration sounded more like Tom Sawyer’s or Huck Finn’s – or even Jaimie McPheeters.

Category: Book Reviews, Historical Westerns | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By Celia Hayes on February 24, 2010

The westbound trail split at Fort Hall. From then on, the Murphys, the Townsends, the Millers and their infant daughter, Old Hitchcock and his daughter and all the others would be on their own, finding their own trail in the faintest of traces left from a small party of wagon-train emigrants  who attempted the California route the summer before.

(To Be Continued…)

Category: Events & People | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By Celia Hayes on February 2, 2010

In his one-volume history of Texas “Lone Star”, T.R.. Fehrenbach cites one particular reason for Texas having such a distinctive culture relative to the other states. There is a distinctly different “feel” to living here; of all the places in the States where I have lived or visited; only Utah and Hawaii came even close to it, for similar reasons. Hawaii is an island, and was once itself an independent kingdom. So was Utah, metaphorically speaking: an island of Mormon separatists in empty vastness of the Great Basin. They are still generic American places, although one has frangipani and fabulous beaches, and the other has spectacular mountains and religious conformity.

Texas is more of a reduced and concentrated American essence; a demi-glace as it were. Like Utah and Hawaii, Texas started as independent political entity and did experience a certain degree of isolation, especially in the early years of settlement by Spanish, Mexican and American arrivals, but Fehrenbach cites one more reason; that Texas was at war for a good fifty years.

This war was fought mainly on one front (occasionally varying the program with other hostile factions), and a bitter and protracted fight it was too, beginning with the early days of Stephen Austin’s colony in the 1820ies. It had something of inevitability about it, for it was fought mostly against the Comanche Indian tribes; only in the early days of the American colonies east of the Appalachians  had there been a war as prolonged and vicious. In most of the other territories which later become states, either the Indians were not particularly warlike, settlements were sparse and easily defended— leaving the resident Indians to withdraw to the back country— or such conflict between settlers and tribes was briskly concluded within a few years and to the settler’s decided advantage. But in Texas, war with the Comanche Indians and their allies lasted until the last ragged band surrendered to the reservation life in 1875; a period of fifty years during which no settler ever felt entirely secure, even in the center of what were larger towns at the time.

There was a dreadful inevitability in the collision of restless Anglo-American borderers, many of them that contentious Scots-Irish breed of whom it is usually said that they were born fighting, with the Comanche. But the Anglo-Texan borderers occasionally took a break from fighting; to farm, or ranch, to plant cotton or practice some more peaceful trade; the Comanche never did. For the Comanche lived entirely by war, by ransom and plunder—especially for horses, which they valued over practically anything else. They were restless and ever-moving, accustomed to hardship, feared by other tribes, whom they pushed out of the way, taking what they wanted, when they wanted it. There was no other occupation; no other means of advancement save by being a fearless warrior and raider. Such a harsh life eliminated the unfit brutally, as brutally as they eliminated their own enemies. At the high noon-time of their peak, they were the lords of the harsh and beautiful country of the southern plains, from the Arkansas River, to the Balcones Escarpment. They ranged and raided as far as they pleased, although restrained now and again by a fragile peace treaty.

One of these treaties came to a spectacularly violent end, in the middle of San Antonio in the spring of 1840, during the course of what had been intended as a peace conference. In token of their good faith, a contingent of Penateka Comanche chiefs were supposed to surrender a number of captives, and sign a treaty. They turned over only a few, one of them a teenaged girl who had been savagely abused during a year of captivity. She told the Texan officials that the Comanche held more than a dozen other captives, but intended to extort a large ransom for each, one by one. When the chiefs and the peace commissioners met in a large building known as the Council House, the commissioners asked after the other captives who whose release had been promised. The leader of the chiefs — who had promised to bring in all the captives— answered that they had brought in the only one they had. The others were with other tribes. And then he added, insolently, “How do you like that answer?”

The short answer was the Texans did not. There were already soldiers standing by: they were ordered to surround the Council House, and the chiefs informed that they would be held hostage until their warriors returned to their camps and brought back the rest of the hostages. Almost as one, the chiefs drew knives and rushed the soldiers guarding the doors. The fat was then in the fire, as the warriors who were waiting outside in the yard entered the fray, and a short and vicious running fight erupted in the street leading down to the San Antonio River. The Council House fight vigorously re-ignited the war between Comanche and Texan. That fall, a huge Comanche war party came down from the hills, sweeping down the empty country between the Guadalupe and Lavaca Rivers. They terrorized the town of Victoria and burned Linnville on Lavaca Bay. The citizens of Linnville watched from the refuge of boats offshore, as the Indians looted the warehouses and homes. They departed, with two hundred horses all laden with plunder, but what happened on the return from that spectacular raid set in motion a gathering of forces and personalities who would eventually reduce the proud lords of the Southern Plains to a handful of desperate, starving beggars.

For their part, the Texans were not entirely defenseless against a surprise attack like the Great Linnville Raid. Poor in cash, poor in practically everything but land, the conditions of the frontier had attracted large numbers of the restless and adventurous, who were not inclined to accept any sort of insult lying down. With no meaningful standing army, defense of local communities depended on their militia… usually composed of every able-bodied male. The sheer size of Texas and the nature of war waged by the horse-lords of the Southern Plains made it imperative that at least a portion of the militia be mounted. Over the twenty years after the founding of Stephen Austin’s colony the practice evolved for a mounted militia, ready to ride in pursuit of raiders within fifteen minutes after an alarm being sounded. Sometimes they were able to catch up and retrieve captives, or stolen horses. More often, the raiding Indians split up and melted like smoke into the wilderness, leaving their pursuers frustrated and fuming, their horses exhausted. It became quite clear, as more Anglo settlers poured into Texas, that the best defense was in the offense, to field a mounted patrol out ranging the back-country, looking to forestall Indian raids.

Such a Corps of Rangers was formally established on the eve of Texan rebellion against Mexico. Distinct from the militia and the regular army, the mounted ranging companies continued to serve after the war, in various forms and degrees of effectiveness, most of them locally supported. The citizen-rangers of the local companies assembled for short periods of time in response to specific dangers, their numbers ever-flexible. They supplied their own arms, horses and equipment. By the time of the Linnville Raid, most of them were veterans of the War for Independence, and had years of experience in the field otherwise; men like Mathew “Old Paint” Caldwell of Gonzalez, and the McCulloch brothers, who had handled Sam Houston’s two artillery pieces at the Battle of San Jacinto. Ben McCulloch had even been trained in outdoor skills by no less than Davy Crockett himself. Companies from settlements along the Colorado assembled under Edward Burleson, including Chief Placido and twelve Tonkawa Indians, who had their own score with the Comanche to settle, and twenty-one volunteers from Port Lavaca. Other volunteers gathered from Bastrop, Cuero, Victoria and other towns scattered along the river valleys between the coast and the start of the limestone hills.

A week after the burning of Linnville, companies of volunteer Texans closed in inexorably on the withdrawing Comanche raiding party, at an open plain by Plum Creek, a tributary of the San Marcos River near present-day Lockhart. Burdened by loot, captives and a slow-moving herd of stolen horses and mules, the raiders, a huge party of Penateka Comanche, led by a war chief called Buffalo Hump, had not split up and scattered as was their usual custom. Unknowing, Buffalo Hump’s war party were closely pursued by part of McCulloch’s Gonzales company, who began seeing exhausted pack animals shot and left by the wayside. Caldwell and the other leaders had deduced the route by which they were returning, and had arranged their forces accordingly. They let the Comanche column pass, under a great cloud of dust and ash, for the prairie had recently been burned over.

Not until the Texans rode out from cover in two parallel lines converging on them, did the Comanche warriors even know they had been followed. Some of their gaudily adorned chiefs rode out to put on a show, intending to cover the withdrawal, taunting the waiting Texans, riding back and forth. A Texan sharp-shooter brought down the most flamboyant of the chiefs, and when several warriors rode out to carry his body away, the order for a charge was given. The Texans smashed through the line of Comanche fighters from both sides, and into the loot-laden horse and mule herd. As the herd stampeded, the whole raid dissolved into a rout, a hundred bloody running fights, with the Comanche fighters penned in and ridden down. The battle ran for fifteen miles, with some of the survivors chased as far as Austin. It was later estimated that the tribe lost about a quarter of their effective fighters. They never raided so far into the settled regions of Texas again, in such numbers… and after the Plum Creek fight learned to give a wide berth to volunteer Ranger companies.

One such company was based in San Antonio, composed of local volunteers and funded by local businessmen, many of whom also participated in the patrols. The captain of that company was a surveyor by profession, born in Tennessee and raised in Mississippi, who would live to a ripe old age as a politician and lawman in California. Quiet, modest, self-effacing, Jack Hays became the very beau ideal of a captain of Rangers. He was among the volunteers at Plum Creek, but made his name in the decade afterwards, astounding people who knew only his reputation upon meeting him for the first time. He was slight, short and refined in appearance, and looked about fourteen years old. But he was a also gifted leader of irregular fighters, possessed an iron constitution, and procured for his men an innovation which allowed them to carry the fight against the Comanche Indians on something like equal terms… the Colt Revolver.

The Rangers of that time were nothing like their present-day iteration… an elite State law-enforcement body. Under Hays’ captaincy, they became more than just the local mounted volunteer militia, called up on a moments’ notice to respond to a lightening fast raid on their settlement or town by Indians or cross-border bandits. Hay’s company routinely patrolled the  backcountry, looking specifically for a fight and hoping to forestall raids before they happened, or failing that, to track down raiding parties, recover loot and captives, and to administer payback. There was only one abortive attempt to have them wear uniforms. Ranger volunteers provided their own weapons and horses, and usually their own rations, although the State of Texas did supply ammunition. They were famously unscathed by anything resembling proper military discipline and polish, as the regular Army would discover to their horror during the Mexican War. A contemporary newspaper caricature of a typical ‘Texas Ranger” featured a hairy and ragged creature resembling “Cousin It”, slumped on a horse and wearing a belt stuffed all the way around with knives and pistols.

All that Hays asked of his Rangers was that they follow him… and fight. And so they did, for Texas attracted young and restless males with a taste for adventure, a bit of ambition and no small propensity for administering violence when called upon. They came like moths to a flame, before, during and after the Texas War for Independence; many of them gravitating like a trout going upstream into an enlistment as a Ranger or service in the local militia. During the early 1840s Hays commanded a company of fluctuating size, operating out of San Antonio, which turned out to be extraordinarily effective, and made his name a legend in Texas.  In between forays and patrols he drilled his company tirelessly in shooting and horsemanship, copying many of the tricks of fighting from horseback used by the Comanche and other Plains warriors.

Meeting the Comanche on anything like equal terms in a fight at short distance had to wait on a single technological innovation, and Hays was the first to put it to effective use. Until 1844, the Rangers fought primarily with the same kind of weapons that Americans had always used: single-shot flintlock or percussion rifles of various type and design, augmented by single-shot pistols. While such rifles in well-trained hands were punishingly accurate, they were awkward and slow to reload, and nearly impossible to use from horseback in a running fight. Even single-shot pistols took time to reload, time during which an opponent with a bow and arrow could get off any number of accurate shots. But in 1839, motivated by some mad, god-only-knows, pie-in-the-sky, by-god-it’s-crazy-but-just-might-work impulse, the State of Texas ordered a quantity of 180 patent .36 caliber 5-shot revolvers from Samuel Colt’s factory in Paterson, New Jersey. A portion of them were actually issued to certain Texas Navy fighting ships, where they served about as well as expected, but they began to be largely used by the Texas Army… and increasingly by Ranger units, to astonishing effect.

The early Paterson Colts were delicate, and needed constant care and maintenance: loading the cylinder and reattaching it to the barrel was a finicky and careful business. To modern eyes they are over-long in the barrel, heavy and clumsy in appearance. In 1843, they were expensive… but worth every penny to the men who carried them into a fight with mounted Comanche warriors. Being able to fire five shots before needing to reload evened the odds considerably; and Hays’s Rangers usually carried two; it was also possible to purchase extra cylinders, have them loaded and change them out quickly. Colt’s reputation in Texas was made, especially after Hays and a party of fourteen Rangers armed with Paterson Colts charged and routed a party of eighty Comanche, in a running fight along the Pedernales River.

A subsequent design improvement for military use in the Mexican War saw Ranger Samuel Walker working with Samuel Colt on improving the original design. This new design, a six-shot .44 revolver which weighed a whopping four and a half pounds made Colt’s reputation and his economic future secure. Subsequent iterations of the Colt revolver proved enduringly popular in Texas to this day. Traveling there in the early 1850s, Frederick Law Olmsted wrote “There are probably in Texas about as many revolvers as male adults, and I doubt if there are one hundred in the state of any other make.”

For all it’s various shortcomings, the Paterson Colt, and its descendents filled a very particular need— the need of a horse- mounted fighter for a repeat-fire weapon that was relatively accurate at short range, rugged, easy to use, and capable of evening the chances of survival against a hard-fighting, and similarly mounted enemy. In the hands of Rangers, soldiers, lawmen and citizens, a Colt revolver was all that.

Except on occasions where a shotgun was called for, but that’s another story.

Category: Events & People | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By Celia Hayes on January 10, 2010

I’ll be hanging in there for several reasons – sheer stubbornness and the fact that I bought all four of them for pennies on the dollar at various library book sales being chief among them – but I just wanna say that at this point, me carrying on with reading Dead Man’s Walk, Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo is already shaping up to be a long and, I fear, ultimately frustrating slog through the deserts of the metaphorical southwest. I might very well get to the end of it all, rejoicing and acclaiming the author as one of the epochal bards of the Texas frontier … but at this point –  having completed Dead Man’s Walk,  about a third into Comanche Moon, and half a dozen chapters into Lonesome Dove - the odds are about even that I’ll pack it in and go get some anaesthetized root canal work done instead, or maybe watch the whole season run of Bridezillas. Hey, at least there, I can root for some of the more sane family members and friends of the bridal party and hope that a much-harassed and totally-out-of-patience MOH will haul off and serve up the ‘Zilla-of-the-moment with a richly-deserved knuckle sandwich. This hope will string me along for at least a good few hours – with Bridezillas and McMurtry alike. Drama, baby – it’s all about the drama.

I just keep hoping that something similar will happen, somewhere along in the Woodrow Call/Gus McCrae cycle. I so dearly hope it will, because everyone else says such wonderful things about it all, including some of my very own dear fans who have, most flatteringly compared my books to his – on the basis, I think, that I wrote about frontier Texas, and had a hero who was an early Texas Ranger, and included lashings of war, local and historic color, tragic romance and the fading of the Old West. Of course, the lucky author, Mr. McMurtry got a whole couple of TV miniseries made from his books, (with surging royalties and residuals and all, and reissued paperbacks with stills of the stars on the covers, all of which would make his agent worth every penny of the 15% of which Mr. McMurtry earns out of his labors as a creative scribbler and raconteur of the Old West) and so it isn’t all just sour-grapes from an aspiring author, hardly blessed or even barely noticed by the literary-industrial complex … ohhh, do I get any recognition for having written a totally complicated and sort-of-run-on-sentence in the Grand Victorian Tradition? (Oh, guess not, not this time around – better move on, then.)

The first hurdle in my path of eventual acceptance is – that so far, it’s all build-up and character, but no actually delivery. I am sorta-intrigued, but not-really grabbed by interest, in the characters so delineated. I keep wondering why the deadpan flat, detached affect? Why should I care about various characters if the author doesn’t seem to give a damn about them, or even display much interest, other than in the strictly clinical? As a reader I am also a little exhausted by following the constant leaping one character’s POV to another, and another within the same chapter, and just when I have recovered from the last of them and remember who it is, exactly that I am supposed to be interested in – then I trip and fall flat over a large chunk of expository back-story, which doesn’t much lead to anything much happening. A friend of mine, also a fan of both McMurtry and I explained to me that this is very much a Texas thing, to meander and meander, and wander … eventually to come around in a circle again, without anything very much having happened. Apparently, the process of the story is supposed to be the main bit of enjoyment. So how was a couple of hours of heavy petting, leading nowhere other than a chaste kiss of the hand at the doorway supposed to be rewarding – when you have been led in happy anticipation to look for something a bit more energetic? When this happens, romantically, one tends to be a bit disappointed, think of the other party as a dreadful tease, write off the evening as a waste of time and make-up, and resolve to let the answering machine pick-up next time. With a best-selling, and to all appearances, very popular author, who started off Lonesome Dove with one of the very best opening sentences evah … well, maybe one should be a little more indulgent.

Alas – I have a bit of trouble with another aspect of the cycle, especially the earlier books, in being a bit of an amateur specialist in history. That is, amateur in the antique sense of a person who zestfully acquires knowledge for the sheer love of the field. I have no academic training, other than that required of English majors three decades ago, not even a minor in history, or any fancy qualifying initials after my name – only a burning passion to learn as much as I can about any particular aspect, and to get it right, and to weave that knowledge into my stories. Which is all very well, but has absolutely ruined me for watching westerns on television; don’t even get me started on the fantasy west, of pulp novels and TV series and movies. I’m too apt to notice that there is a zipper down the back of the heroine’s dress, that the traveling cowboy is camping with a lot more gear than he could have packed into a teensy bedroll on the back of his horse, and to wonder where in the heck in the old West that a a deep-rock gold mine could be located right next to a cattle ranch?

Plowing gamely through the first two books has been a bit of a disconcerting experience, as I keep running across names, historic characters and incidents of Texas history but as if someone had jumbled them all together in a small box, and then emptied them out in random order, omitted some pivotal incidents and people, exaggerated others for effect, and now and again threw in something completely bizarre, just rang off-key for me. The real Buffalo Hump wasn’t a hunchback, if the description of him at Meusebach’s peace conference is anything to go by. The real Bigfoot Wallace lived to die of ripe old age; he drew life from a jar of dried beans in Mexican captivity  … which incident happened to the survivors of the Meir expedition, not the Texan attempt to take Santa Fe a few years later.  Austin was never raided, looted and burned over by a Comanche raiding party – that happened to Linnville, in 1840 – and the aftermath of that involved a massed force of Rangers, local militia and volunteers giving as good as they got in the Plum Creek fight. And there really was a formidible whore nick-named “The Great Western”, so it all makes me wonder why McMurtry needed to make anything up, when what really happened historically would have made at least as much of a good story. And it is a bit of puzzlement, wondering how the early Rangers in the first two books are pretty consistently pictured as being neophytes, hopeless little golden carp in a sea of hungry sharks – a tasty mouthful for every passing predator … which reminds me of the character who was neatly scalped of all of his hair by Buffalo Hump going past at a gallop. I’m almost sure scalping someone took a little bit more than a single swipe with a knife from horseback, although if anyone had perfected the art of a ride-by scalping, it would have been the Comanche.

It sounded a bit improbable to me, anyway – and the hapless recipient of it appearing to be as disposable as any of the red-shirted crewmen on Star Trek, beaming down to an alien planet and being killed in the first act. And that sort of disposing of a character, and other characters, and having characters appear and disappear, and such strange and improbable turns of the plot, such as having a naked English noblewoman with leprosy and a pet snake sing a Verdi aria to bluff a party of hostile Indian warriors into letting a our heroes pass by … well, that was just too television for words, and I came to that realization with a certain shock of recognition. I know they’ve made the books into movies, or into miniseries, and that’s more right than readers and watchers could possibly have known – because it is more like one of the old television westerns than has been along in years! A jumble of historical events and happenstances, check – interminable, episodic adventures – check. Handful of basic, easily identifiable characters – check – some vicious and inscrutable villains (some of them with baroque torture chambers and suitable evil henchmen) – check. Rotating stable of supporting characters, and endless supply of disposable extras – check and check again. And a disconcerting tendency for certain startling shifts in the cast to occur between seasons …or between books . . . or even chapters within books. And there you go – it’s a TV western writ large; no wonder the Lonesome Dove cycle has so many fans. Having come to this conclusion, I will probably carry on for a bit, keeping it in mind… but isn’t Bridezillas on tonight?

Category: Controversy & Opinion, Events & People, Historical Novels, Historical Westerns | No Comments »
Tags: