researching for writing and fun

 Montezuma's Castle, Arizona 1972

When I finish Rose's story for the Arizona historicals, then I will finally begin writing the fourth Arizona novel. When writing an historical, there is figuring out the characters but also getting the history right. Research, lots of research even if what I learn doesn't get used.

This heroine was introduced in the third Arizona historical. She is an anthropologist with an interest in doing an archaeological dig in the Southwest. This was before the Southwest was having so many digs. The big interest in 1900 was in Europe. The ruins had been seen, of course, but people didn't know what to make of them or the ones who had left them rather precipitously.

With a serious interest in finding ancient Pueblo settlements there were those who like Virginia McClurg, a journalist at Mesa Verde in '82-85. She found several of the dwellings and many artifacts.

A family of ranchers in southern Colorado, the Wetherhills, are credited with finding most of the big ruins at Mesa Verde. The Native Americans of the regions told them of the dwellings, which they said had been built by the ancient ones. It was December of 1888 when Richard Wetherhill and Charles Mason found Cliff Palace. If you have ever been there, you know what an impressive dwelling it is even today.

 Pueblo Grande 1976 Arizona

Across the southwest are these kinds of dwellings which have intrigued many with their beauty and mystery. Why build such elaborate and often graceful structures and then leave them with often their pots and tools as though they might return? These are the questions archaeologists try to answer by doing the kinds of digs that reveal the items and when they were put in place. They do this through soil analysis and detailed notations to leave the information for future scientists to take farther.

From the beginning of their being found, coming to these sites were the curious, artifact seekers, vandals, and gold hunters. Many didn't care what damage they did to the structures. Some archeologists had goals like Indiana Jones-- What can I take away. A good example of this was Gustaf Nordenskiöld, the son of a polar explorer.  Nordenskiöld was a trained mineralogist who did introduce scientific methods to his collecting, recorded locations, photographed, diagrammed, etc. but he took what he found and sent it to Sweden where the artifacts found their way to a museum in Finland. This inspired the United States to make Mesa Verde into a park to protect it.

I've been to many ruins across the Southwest and always find them fascinating. Even with a crowd of people, you can feel the energy in such sites. Mesa Verde is, of course, spectacular, but Chaco Canyon has the advantage of letting you go through the structures with no one around. I've hiked into ruins hidden away without names. Always, if I can sit long enough, I begin to feel the energy of those who had come before, can imagine living there in an ancient time. Between these sites and petroglyphs, I've had a life long interest in archaeology (my daughter is an archaeologist although currently she is not working in the field).

 Mesa Verde 1981

When I begin writing the fourth Arizona historical, I will set its dig in a little known site... actually an imaginary one because I like the freedom of that. My heroine will be ahead of the time archaeologists became interested in the Southwest. She is looking for artifacts, of course, but more it's the story she wants to prove or discover. For her though, there is an even more personal reason, which will be brought out in the story.

This book will also involve an outlaw family which led to more to research regarding the Outlaw , Hole in the Wall, and Robber's Roost in Utah. My hero has an outlaw father and his three predatory brothers (imaginary names, of course) who he has spent his life trying to get shed of. His skill with a gun has complicated his life time and again. Keeping most of the characters fiction makes it easier to write what I wish-- but I like to know the real stories of these outlaws and how the community regarded them-- often with great favor. Times don't change as much as we sometimes like to think!

So research has been a big deal for me lately. I've been sidetracked by my real life but also other things I came across in history which I can't use but will share as who knows maybe someone else reading this will be interested in creating their own historical. History was one of my minors in college and has been a lifelong interest. There just aren't enough hours in the day to cover all that fascinates me. Kind of neat to have it be that way as it means I am never bored-- well rarely.

using history in an historical

If you have never thought of how complicated writing an historical can be, just think about how much our means of communication has changed in our lifetime. As soon as you set a story in another period, little things like the mails become issues. If you base your story where a lot of records are available, it helps (other than how history often has two views of the same events). 

My third and fourth Oregon historical romances were set in Eastern Oregon from 1865-67. This was a time of great change, inaccurate maps, and little real information even in the many small museums in the area. Read the newspaper columns from then and you quickly get how hysteria and misinformation in journalism is not new to today.

Even when I visited local museums, I found real information in short supply. They would have physical items from the earlier period but that doesn't really help a lot for the kind of story I was writing. How does the post office operate, how often to mails go through, how about the stage route-- daily or weekly? etc.

The complications of research can be shown by these images-- both of Watson but one Camp and the other Fort. 

My hero was serving as captain of this post on Fort Creek which is over one hundred miles southeast of The Dalles and a little less than forty miles west of Canyon City. When he served there, the post was called Camp Watson. 

There actually had been two Watsons.  One was Fort Watson for the 1st Oregon Cavalry, all volunteers who were assembled in 1862 to deal with the Indian problems.  They were disbanded in 1865 when the Civil War was over and federal troops were sent West. At that time, the fort was moved east and called Camp Watson. Or so might be the case and it lasted until 1869 when it was abandoned. If you read that link, you see the problem in all this-- many versions of the same 'fact.'

So the probability is this diagram of the fort is of the first Watson. The drawing might be Camp Watson. I have been in several old forts but all were considerably older than Watson as well as bigger. I looked for other sketches of small posts, the likely layout and found nothing quite as detailed. 

The story goes that the first Camp/Fort Watson was abandoned as it did not have a good source of water. That would indicate the diagram of the fort's quarters is really Camp Watson... (I think the military downgraded some of these to camps to lower costs as after the Civil War, money was an issue). The photo below is during the period where Watson was a lumber camp.

My story is fiction. It is historical romance, not historical novel, but still I like it to be as close as possible to what life was like. The problem is how do we, today, decide what that was? It sounds good to do research, and I totally believe in it. The enjoyment of research is why I like writing historic romances. but it's not always easy to figure out what was a fact and what was an assumption.

Give or take a lie or two

 If you ever saw the film, Sunset, which was about Wyatt Earp and Tom Mix solving a murder mystery in early Hollywood, the above line was one Earp (played by James Garner who had earlier played Earp in a western) said to Tom Mix about the stories told of his time in Tombstone. It suits a lot of history anecdotes.

The fascinating thing about Western history (or any history), is how many versions you can find with backup for multiple positions. It's one of the things that I enjoy about True West that it has these stories, giving both sides and looking at the evidence. This is such a story and what likely happened.

For a brief period of time in the Old West, a certain type of man felt his reputation was enhanced by victorious gunfights. It explains a lot of what seems senseless behavior where one man overpowering or killing another in a fair fight might make him seem more intimidating to others-- or was that more tempting.

Such a story was the one of John Wesley Hardin and the man known as Wild Bill Hickok with one version told by Hardin in his own book written in 1896. True or not? In True West, a segment called Investigating History by Mark Boardman, it looks as though it was not.

So in Hardin's version, it was Abilene, Kansas, 1871, the 18-years old Hardin claimed Hickok who was then 24 told him to give up his guns as he'd been getting loud, and it was against the law to carry them in Abilene. In his telling of it, Hardin claimed they went outside where he got the best of Hickok by doing a border roll but then didn't shoot him leading to the two men becoming best friends, 'knights of the prairie cut from the same cloth' so to speak.

Did it happen that way? Not according to research done for a book, Violence in the Old West, by Chuck Parsons and Norman Wayne Brown. Until this book, Hardin's was the only account of the confrontation with no witnesses or news stories backing it up. To further make it questionable, Hardin only told the story after Hickok had been killed in 1876.

The authors looked at other lies told by Hardin, Hickok's demonstrable ability with guns, and that Hardin had killed other lawmen; so why believe Hickok would be foolish enough to not be careful with a gun around Hardin?

There are even more reasons to doubt it when someone who was in Abilene that day told a different version in the saloon where Hickok walked in saying, "Arkansaw (his nickname for Hardin) you better put that pistol up before you let it go off and hurt somebody." According to the witness, Hardin did and that was all to the story. Not very exciting though to enhance an autobiography was it? Hence the embroidery.

It was true-- give or take a lie or two.

doing research

Whether a writer is placing their book in modern times or going into history, research is a part of almost every book being written. There are always those things you need to be sure you have right and that could include a setting. One terrific way to do settings is  go there-- great excuse for travel to a place you love or always wanted to spend time.

Going there for historicals means visiting the sites of the book, stopping at any ghost town, and time in old cemeteries reading headstones. The physical part of trying to better understand what life was once like is enriching. It can involve taking photographs or just sitting somewhere and letting the energy of the place soak in. Sometimes a historical is set where we have also had a history and that can be used.

Besides being where it happened, feeling the energy of the land that will go into your story, there are books, magazines and online research materials. Where it comes to magazines, there's one I like a lot for western history-- True West.

For years I'd buy copies at one of my favorite used bookstores, Bookman's in Tucson, Arizona. Finally I bit the bullet (proverbially speaking) and took out my own subscription. Whether what I read is something I'd ever use in a book, it's always interesting to me. It's also filled with a lot of old photos to enrich the stories. It's especially good at helping readers understand the West as it was more than how it's so often been painted in movies or fiction. It covers not only real historic events, often little known, but current places to go for a long week-end or when you happen to be somewhere and find there is an interesting side trip.

The latest edition has a lot of stories with the emphasis on Soiled Doves. I have books on prostitutes across the West, books that pretty well show the up and down side of such a life, which sometimes was the only alternative a woman had in an age where jobs weren't plentiful for females.

The hero in Arizona Sunset grew up in a brothel because of who his mother was (more on that story comes with Tucson Moon). His experience pretty well fit what I have read about the life of whores back then.

A complaint was made regarding Arizona Sunset's heroine riding astride as it was so improper and historically inaccurate. Well for the sake of the research, here's some instances of when women did ride astride. It's amazing what you can find online.

When women first rode astride

But my heroines are rarely proper sorts of ladies anyway and certainly not the one in Arizona Sunset where she is breaking all kinds of rules. If she was a proper lady, she'd stay home in Tucson, polish her silver, and embroider.

For the reader who wants a lady who follows all the rules, my books aren't likely the right ones for them. Me I grew up with a mother who, on our farm, did the things men are supposed to do. I followed suit with my own life (at least until I got too old to swing a bale of hay around). I raised my daughter to be that sort of woman and prefer writing about such. I'll let the proper ladies be saved for other writers ;). My women have a strong sense of ethics and morality but where it comes to rules on what's appropriate for a woman to do-- they knock over the traces.