The wrong side of history

 

When we talk today about people on the wrong side of history, we generally mean those alt-right types who would take us back to the nineteenth century when misogyny and slavery flourished, men could do no wrong, and the rich got rich while the poor suffered. But it occurred to me recently that I, who always consider myself liberal and progressive, am also on the wrong side of history.

I got back edits on a manuscript in which my language had been dramatically changed. My Indians became Native Americans, my settlers were Euro-Americans, and my slaves became “enslaved persons.” I objected, partly because of what the changes did to the flow of the language but more because they changed the story I thought I was telling.

My rather long writing career has focused on the experiences of women in the American West—Anglo women, those women who followed their men west, raised their families, saw too many babies die young, endured the terror of Indian raids, prairie fires, drought, and famine. And brought civilization to the West, settled towns, built schools and churches. They were strong women, and I admire them.

But since the 1980s the “new West” historians have told us how wrong these women (and their men) were. They didn’t “civilize” the West—they exploited it, conquered the natives, destroyed one civilization (yes, the native tribes had highly complex civilizations) to build another. And that, we are now told, is wrong.

It’s time to play “What if?” What if settlers had never come west? There be an unbelievable population jam on the East Coast. Time to go back a step, “What if Puritans had never landed on Plymouth Rock?” Well, yes, natives in North America might live in an undisturbed paradise, but what would have happened to the rest of the world? And if Columbus had never discovered America? (Okay, I know he really didn’t, but I used him figuratively as the symbol.) You see where I’m going? Maybe history just rolls along, one civilization replacing another. We’re too close to see it today, but our technological civilization has replaced that of the Industrial Revolution. Is that cause for rewriting history?

Two of the heroes of my life were C. L. “Doc” Sonnichsen, who called himself a “below the salt” historian, and Texas novelist, the late Elmer Kelton. Doc, a Harvard-educated native of Iowa, took on the job of teaching English at the Texas College of Metallurgy and Mines (now University of Texas, El Paso). Elmer was the author of probably over sixty novels, many award-winners, that chronicled the settlement of Texas and the American West from the early 1800s until the end of the twentieth century. One of lessons I learned from both men was the importance of text, fiction and nonfiction, being appropriate to time and place. You couldn’t, they both believed, blame Grandpa for plowing up the prairie and making possible the great dust storms of the Depression, because Grandpa was doing what in that time and place, he believed was right.

I like to apply that theory to my writing about the nineteenth century. Back then, an Indian was an Indian. That doesn’t diminish my respect for today’s descendants of the Kiowa or the Comanche or the Apache. But it speaks honestly about history.  What happened, happened, and changing the language or tearing down statues won’t change the past. The Monroe Doctrine, which called for extending American dominance over the land from coast to coast? Sure, it seems wrong and insensitive today, but in that time and place the American West was considered a bounteous wonderland just waiting for men to settle it and make their fortunes. We can’t rewrite history.

I admire the women I’ve written about, and I’ll keep telling their stories in my own way. Though there’s a caveat—several of them were married to men who were failures. George Armstrong Custer led his men into a trap and lost his golden curls; John Charles Frémont was a failure at almost everything he tried, from the conquering of California (he returned east in chains and disgrace) to his unsuccessful run for the presidency. But that’s another story.

Rant over.

PS: It’s now why I wrote this blog, but my historical novels, Libbie (Elizabeth Bacon Custer) and Jessie (Jessie Benton Frémont), will be available in reprint this May. And no, the language in them was not changed. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

Sundance, Butch, and Me

          

  Anyone have any need for a “never before used” set of notes for a talk on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as seen from Etta Place’s point of view? I jut happen to have such. My calendar said I was to speak on my book by that title next Wednesday, but I had heard nothing and couldn’t reach the contact name I had. This had all been arranged a year or so ago, when I was less confident of my health than I am now. Turns out the group sensed this lack of confidence and scheduled someone else.

I am never one to be unprepared, so while I was in limbo about this, I roughed out some notes. And remembered how much fun I had writing that book and telling that story. Yes, the Hole in the Wall gang story has been told many times, but I was then writing several fictional biographies (I may just have invented a genre) of women prominent in the nineteenth-century American West, and I saw a chance to tell the outlaw story from the female point of view. I confess that as I wrote I constantly saw Robert Redford and Paul Newman in my mind. Who doesn’t know and love that movie?

Etta Place was and remains a mystery character. No one know where she came from—she just appeared at Fannie Porter’s house of pleasure in San Antonio. Even there history is murky—I choose to believe the story that she was never one of the “working girls” but was Fannie’s protégé. And even historians of the West are not quite sure what happened to her. Did she die of appendicitis in Denver, after the South American shootout that supposedly killed Butch and Sundance? Or did she, as local legend has it, come to Fort Worth as Eunice Parker and run a respectable boardinghouse? The wonder of writing fiction is that I got to choose from those possibilities.

But history tells us about Etta’s life between San Antonio and Fort Worth. She rode with the gang, she held the horses in train hold-ups, she robbed banks and endured grueling getaway rides. After endless research, I could, twenty years ago, have told you where Etta, Butch and Sundance were at any time, the hideouts they used—Hole in the Wall in Montana and Robber’s Roost in Utah—and when they visited Fort Worth, which they did several times.

Some of the stories are hilarious—this is the only one of my books that moved one son-in-law to outright laughter. There’s the time Etta wanted to go back to get a ring she saw on a bank customer—Sundance told her firmly “no.” And there was the bank robbery where patrons in the bar across the street were alerted by seeing bank customers with their hands raised in the air. Or the outlaw who was captured hiding in an outhouse—the gang eventually had to break him out of jail.

Butch Cassidy was somewhat of a Robin Hood figure. There’s the time he robbed a banker who had just taken a widow’s savings to pay the mortgage. Butch turned right around and rode back to give the money to the widow. But I hold no candle for the gang—they were outlaws for the thrill of it, Etta included. Somehow, in American, we often make heroes of our outlaws.

Note the title: Butch’s name is between Sundance and Etta. That’s in recognition of what I saw as a clear bond between Butch and Etta. Sundance was self-centered, his affair with Etta purely one of passion; there was genuine love between her and Butch. At least, that’s my interpretation.

The book is a companion to three other titles about women in the American West: Libby (Elizabeth Bacon Custer), Jessie (Jessie Benton Frémont), and Cherokee Rose (based on the life of Wild West cowgirl Lucille Mulhall). Join me for a trip back to the days of the Wild West—fascinating time and place.

Sanitizing the South

All across the South there’s a move to take down Confederate statues. They are symbols of a dark blot on our history—slavery, the plantation system, an era of extreme human bondage, cruelty to humans. I do not believe that these monuments were built to terrify blacks, as one editorial this morning claimed, but they were built to glorify men who today we do not consider heroes. That they have become rallying points for hate groups probably means that they should come down. But I view that destruction with sadness. It’s like trying to erase history.

The plantation system, with all its inequities and unbelievable cruelty, helped shape the South as we know it today—a region most of us recognize has a rich heritage of literature, music, art, food, and manners. The Civil War, fought to preserve slavery or that culture (depends on your point of view), shaped our country in ways we can never fully appreciate. It moved us beyond slavery to the land of equality our forefathers wanted. To remove those statues is to attempt to remove history, and we can neither erase nor rewrite history. Those men who fought for the Confederacy were part of the great war which molded us, albeit they were on the wrong side..

Let them stand today as reminders of the schism in our country, the positive outcome of the war, the progress we have made toward being civilized. The hate groups that rally around these statues (with tiki torches, no less—how inappropriate is that?) are beyond the understanding of most of us. But rather than spend money, effort, and time taking down statues, let us direct our energies to combatting hatred in our country. What can we do to reach out to those people, understand them (there probably is no understanding), help them change and rid themselves of anger? If I were convinced tearing down statues would help, I’d be for it. But I think it will only further enrage them—that is, of course, why they were in Charlottesville, to protest the scheduled teardown of a statue of Robert E. Lee.

If we sanitize the history of the South we might well begin to look at other parts of the country. The cowboy myth of the American West wasn’t particularly violent, but the clashes between settlers and native American were awash in cruelty on either side, unbelievable barbarianism and cruelty. Shall we destroy statues to pioneers and Native American leaders, besmirch Daniel Bowie and others? History has given us a re-interpretation of Custer’s Last Stand, one in which the general doesn’t come out well at all. Can we not apply that lesson to the South without destroying monuments?

And what about New England? Those Puritans could be extremely cruel and insensitive to those who didn’t think as they did. Shall we ban The Scarlet Letter from school reading lists?

When we try to rewrite or erase history, we start down a slippery slope. Surely, we can be more constructive. I am proud to be an American and proud of our heritage. I decry those who would pervert that heritage and use it for hatred. But, as a literature and history student, I want to preserve our history intact.

This was hard to write and didn’t come out the way I wanted at all, but I have done my best. Many of my colleagues and good friends will disagree vehemently, and I understand that.

I’m my own guest

I usually welcome a guest author on Wednesday, with the suggestion that he or she tell us a bit about their life and work. This week, I have no guest, so I’m going to be my own guest and tell you how I ended up writing almost 60 books, a Chicago-born Midwesterner living in Texas.

I think I always knew I wanted to write—wrote my first short stories at about eight, submitted a story to Seventeen in high school (gosh, did it come back in a hurry) and in college began writing nonfiction articles for small magazines. The zenith of my magazine career was a small piece on adoption in McCall’s. By then I was the parent of two or three adopted children. I am now the proud parent of four, grandparent of seven.

I got my interest in the American West while working on my Ph.D. at Texas Christian University. One of my professors taught a class in Western American lit.—I liked him and liked the class. And I’m glad to say nearly fifty years later, he’s still a good friend.

After I got that degree, I stayed home, wanted to write and had no idea what to write about. By serendipity I read several novels that featured young girls as protagonists, and I knew what I could do—turn my friend’s mother’s memoir into a novel. It was a great leap for me, since I’d had no training in creative writing—they didn’t teach it back then.

But I did it. I wrote After Pa Was Shot, which was published by the then-prestigious New York house, William Morrow. A succession of young adult novels followed—I was cast into that pigeonhole. Most were published in Texas, but one, Luke and the Van Zandt County War, won the annual award for the best juvenile from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Then I decided to write for adults, and my first attempt, Mattie, was published by Doubleday in their Double D Western series which I truthfully think was sold to a subscriber list of mostly prisons and maybe some libraries. But it won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America and today it does nicely on Amazon these days. I published another Double D and then moved (up?) to Bantam, where I published longer historical fiction—lives of Elizabeth Bacon Custer, Jessie Benton Frémont, Lucille Mulhall (under the name Cherokee Rose), and later Etta Place—from another publisher.

The western market, at least the one I’d written for, seemed to either wither or pull away from me. I’d all along written a bit of non-fiction for young-adults—companies that published for school libraries--and in the early 21^st  century, that was all I did. But I itched to write novels, so I eventually turned to mysteries.

 

But that’s another story for another day.

Note the contorting covers for Libbie--above is the Bantam version, which shows Libbie looking like a 19th-century version of Madonna, standing in a Kansas field of lush grass fenced with barbed wire--never mind that barbed wire had barely been introduced by the time General Custer died and there was no way that Kansas was fenced. Behind her is the ubiquitous West of Arizona's red, dry land--but with a stockade fort. Libbie made the point in her writing--and so did I--that she was surprised that forts had no walls, fences, etc. Of course, the West had no sturdy logs as shown in the illustration--those might have been found a century earlier back east when the "dangerous" Native Americans were the Mohawks or Mohicans. Below is a more historically accurate cover.