Don't Worry Nate or I'm Off to Look For America

Sometime earlier this year I wrote a blog post saying modern backpackers are pussies compared to the average Civil War soldier on campaign carrying his gear and food without any aluminum tent poles, nylon tents, freeze-dried food packages, goose-down vests, or fancy thick soled light weight boots.  In 1863 hikers and soldiers had wool, wood, canvas, and leather to make all the stuff they carried and wore.

Today, I’m reversing myself and applauding a young couple who “ain’t no pussies.”  They proved that by bicycling 3,000 miles over 62 days from Boston, Mass. to Sunnyside, a little farming town in Washington state.  My hat is off to Nik Walther and Molly Heyman, who resigned from their jobs in Boston, she as a special education teacher and he as a brewer at Harpoon Brewery, stored their belongings, and crossed America on two high-tech vehicles whose only motors were the couple’s legs.

Nik grew up in Lockhart next door to us and his parents are close friends of three decades now. In the summer of 2014 we spent a great week in Boston to attend Nik and Molly’s wedding in a park.

Even though I’m stuck these days vicariously living in the 19^th century through writing about and reenacting the Civil War, I’m forgiving Nik and Molly their use of nylon and high-strength light-weight steel bikes and other such modernisms, because they rode roads and crossed states that didn’t exist in the 1860’s.

Thanks to the wonders of digital technology they blogged several times a week and kept their family and friends engaged with their trip.  Their blog is “Don’t Worry Nate” on Google’s blogpost. Here’s the link if you are curious enough to read a bit about their trip to find America.  Simon and Garfunkle would be proud of them.

http://dontworrynate.blogspot.com/

Nik and Molly camped some nights in parks, one night behind a gas station in a town in Wyoming. They stayed with extended family, friends, and friends of friends, and begged showers. They discovered craft breweries and local beers in every state crossed. Mostly, they pedaled and pedaled and pedaled and pedaled through towns and cities, forests and crop land, over America’s tallest mountains, and across wide, wide prairies. I’m impressed. You’d have to be dead not to be impressed.

The end days of their trip were through an area in Idaho where forest fires are a major issue. The threats of the fires caused them to eventually get off their bikes and hitch a ride in a local couple’s pick-up truck when the smoke was too heavy to continue pedaling and breathing, even with their paper masks.  

They didn’t write if they ever saw flames in the trees, but if they had blogged that they did, or posted such a photo, both mothers would have been unduly stressed. So the question of “Just how close were you to a forest fire?” will have to be answered later. Probably with cold Texas beers in hand.

And now I’m compelled to go back forty-three years to 1972 and mention Nita’s and my trip across America when we were newly-weds and young people still listened to Simon and Garfunkle music.

A month after our wedding we took off on our version of pedaling across America, except we did it using the gas pedal of a 1964 Chevy pick-up with a homemade plywood camper shell on the back painted blue and green on the outside and yellow and orange on the inside. Our families thought we were nuts because we too had quit our jobs for the trip and I’d not yet finished my college degree.

We probably traveled some of the same roads that Nik and Molly rode. We stopped in parks and the driveways of extended family to sleep in the camper.  Both couples traveled through Yellowstone National Park and marveled at the geysers and wildlife. I won't mention that in 1972 Nita slipped a Fig Newton cookie through a crack in the truck window to a bear while our dog went beserk.

We enjoyed borrowed bathrooms and showers as much as Nik and Molly did. Well, probably not. We both took about two months to complete our trips.  I expect Nik and Molly will have the same warm lifelong memories of their trip to find America as Nita and I still have, and they'll have better looking legs.

In 1972, we came back to Texas and worked in Nita’s mom’s family café in Dallas to earn enough seed money to return to Austin and resume our pre-trip lives. To the surprise of my parents, I did finish college.

I expect Nik and Molly will flirt with moving to one of the wonderful places they discovered on their pedaling journey, and might even return to Colorado or South Carolina to try a new life. Or the siren call of Boston may pull them back. Because even after two months of discovering America, there’s no place like home.

There’s no Civil War or novel writing point to this post. Maybe next week.

This week I read a John Grisham thriller, The Racketeer, and kept thinking, damn, this guy can write.

Channeling Scarlett?

On Monday evening Nita and I shared a celebratory bottle of champagne as we stared at the completed manuscript of Redeeming Honor. It is still a draft which will be edited, but every chapter is written. I don’t know if I’m getting better as a novelist, but I’m getting faster. I wrote this third book in just nine months, compared to sixteen months for the second one, and about four years to write my first novel.

Regardless of the number of months spent at the keyboard, I still get a warm feeling of accomplishment when I finish. Holding and looking at the first paperback proof copy of a new McBride novel is even better than standing across the street, looking at my freshly mowed lawn on a hot summer day, drenched in sweat and enjoying a cold one.

Last night, while Nita was gone to her ladies’ book club gathering, I watched a film made in 1989, about filming Gone With the Wind, which premiered in Atlanta, Georgia in 1939.  I have mixed feelings about GWTW, the novel and the epic movie.

First, I read 90% of the book while I was in high school, but quit when I finally had had enough of Scarlett’s self-absorbed bitchiness. Second, when the film was re-released in 1966 and played at the Arlene Theater in Longview, Texas, where I grew up, I went to see it. It was my first date with the cute girl who sat at my table in our high school art class. Her name was Cheryl and we never had a second date, probably because I fell asleep during the movie and my lolling head drooled on her shoulder before she elbowed me awake. It’s cute when six-month-old grandson Jackson drools, wasn’t so much when seventeen-year-old Phil did.

Later, in 1999, I worked a few days as a movie extra in my Confederate soldier reenacting duds for a new movie being filmed in central Texas, American Outlaws. It’s not GWTW, but it is a fun, entertaining movie. No Scarlett. Anyway, I heard the man who was handing out stock Confederate uniforms from the big costume trailer tell another worker that these uniforms hadn’t been out of the warehouse in Hollywood since they were cleaned after the filming of Gone With the Wind.  I don’t know if he was joking or not, but the two long racks held dozens and dozens of Confederate uniforms, each hanging in their own plastic bag and each one was artfully “ragged” in appearance. My mind immediately went back to my unfortunate date with Cheryl, and the one movie scene I was awake to see and remember: The heartrending panoramic view of the hundreds and hundreds of dead and wounded Confederate soldiers laid out in rows in Atlanta. It was easy to imagine that some of those extras wore these same costumes sixty years before.

That's not a movie poster of American Outlaws, but is a frame from the movie of a real actor wearing one of the possible GWTW costumes, with me wearing my own Rebel suit right behind him. Son Ben was working at the local movie theater here in Lockhart when American Outlaws came out, and the movie owner clipped a couple of frames from the copy of the film he received and made a gift of them.  Nice guy. 

With that background regarding GWTW, I’ve worried for two years that my Faith Samuelson character channels Scarlett O’Hara. That bothers me because I’ve intended the McBee novels to more in the vein of Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe series, not GWTW, and while I appreciate Scarlett’s gritty survival instincts, I didn’t like her.

By the end of the first McBee book I wasn’t too sure where Faith stood on my mental “Scarlett-meter.” By the end of Redeeming Honor, and after seeing the documentary about GWTW last night, I’m feeling better that I haven’t created a copycat Scarlett. I’ve decided they merely share a few of the attractive personality traits exhibited by magnetic young women. Never mind that both books are set in the south during the Civil War and both women have “men issues.” Never mind that GWTW was a phenomenal best seller and my books are barely selling.

Now, in the third of the McBee series, I need to make sure Faith doesn’t drift into Scarlett-like bad girl selfishness, while she copes with similar end-of-the-war survival needs that Scarlett faced in GWTW.

And if you have read this far and concluded Phil’s being pretty uppity to compare his writing and characters to Gone With the Wind, you’re right. The world won’t be going gaga over McBride’s Civil War novels like people were over GWTW in the 1930’s. But my grandchildren will be able to pick up a stack of tattered paperbacks someday and say, “Damn, granddaddy wrote these. I wonder if they’re any good?” They might even read one or two of them. And if they do, they’re going to like Faith.

The Comanches' Gettysburg

Today marks the 175^th anniversary of the Texas Comanches’ “Gettysburg.”  The Battle of Plum Creek, fought right here near little Lockhart, where I live, was the beginning of the end for the most feared Native Americans of the southern plains. 

Like General Lee, the Comanche’s had great confidence in their abilities and their reputation. In their pride, like Lee, they simply reached too far from their secure home base in the hill country of Central Texas. 

Here is what the “Today In Texas History” daily e-mail message has to say about it:

“On this day in 1840, Gen. Felix Huston, Col. Edward Burleson, and others, including Ben McCulloch, fought a running battle with a large party of Comanche Indians. The battle of Plum Creek occurred as a result of the Council House Fight, in which a number of Comanche leaders were killed. Chief Buffalo Hump led a retaliatory attack down the Guadalupe valley east and south of Gonzales. 

The band numbered perhaps as many as 1,000, including the families of the warriors, who followed to make camps and seize plunder. The Comanches swept down the valley, plundering, stealing horses, and killing settlers, and sacked the town of Linnville. The Texans' volunteer army caught up with the Indians on Plum Creek, near present-day Lockhart, on August 11 and soundly defeated them the next day.”

That summary is scant on details, some of which are humorous, some sad, some gruesome. A fine historian, Donaly Brice wrote “the book” about the Battle of Plum Creek in 1987, back before the internet changed everything. Now there are primary sources on the net in addition to the sources Donaly had access to, but his book is still the one to read.

The first chapter of Tangled Honor is my version of the battle seen through the eyes of young John McBee, who was then a new immigrant to Texas. I had great fun with the story, interweaving historical and fictional characters.

As to some of the details missing in the summary set forth by the Texas Day by Day website, here’s a sampling:

The 200 or so Texans were aided by 13 Tonkawa Indians, who ran next to the white men’s horses over thirty miles from Bastrop to Plum Creek where the militia caught up to the Comanches.  The ‘Tonks’ were recorded as having indulged in a bit of ceremonial cannibalism after the battle, fallen Comanches being the main course.

One well-to-do captive woman wore a whalebone corset which apparently frustrated the braves who initially tried to ‘have their way’ with the lady, so they tied her to a tree. When the battle began, an Indian warrior shot the woman with an arrow, but the corset provided enough of a shield to keep the arrow from fatally injuring her. She was rescued.

During the raid on Linville on the Texas coast, the Comanches plundered a warehouse, finding a plethora of finery, much of which they wore or used for the rest of their raid. Braves and chiefs are recorded as wearing top-hats, carrying silk parasols, and one chief wore a black cutaway coat backwards. Long brightly colored ribbons were tied to horse manes and tails as decoration.

The number of Comanche braves, most likely over 500, might well have been sufficient to reverse the outcome of the hotly fought battle, except that most of the warriors were more interested in driving their herds of stolen horses and mules into the hill country than they were in turning to fight the Texan pursuers.

The Texans recovered a substantial herd of livestock, which they deemed proper payment for their valiant military service, as they divided the recovered mules and horses among themselves.

The running battle covered several miles, including a determined stand by a group of warriors in a grove of live oak trees that still provide shade to cattle just over a mile from where I’m sitting at home writing this.

I’ve not been criticized for starting the first McBee Civil War novel with a huge Indian battle, but I confess it was a stretch. Yet, the Plum Creek Battle story did introduce my main character as a youth twenty years before he became a middle-age (overage) Confederate infantry captain. And it grounded the book in Texas, even if the rest of the action happens in Virginia and other states up that way.

Finally, to end this post with a little crude humor, about ten years ago our local school district built a new elementary school not far off the path of the battle, and had a contest to name the new school. It wound up being “Bluebonnet Elementary,” a fine, if unoriginal, Texas name. I’m a bit hurt, though, that my ideas never got a fair shake. Nobody else seemed to want a school named “Tonkawa Feast Elementary,” “Whalebone Salvation Elementary,” or even a more general “Dead Comanche Elementary.” What a loss. Just think of the storytelling that would have followed for years as teachers, parents, and students explained to others what the name meant.

This week I finished reading The Fateful Lightning, a fine Jeff Shaara historical novel about General Sherman’s march through Georgia. It’s a well written and somewhat disturbing account of the punishing “total war” that Sherman’s army levied upon the civilian population of three southern states. It’s the sort of story that makes it easy to understand why some southern memories have lasted far beyond the lives of the participants.

It’s over a 100 degrees every day now in these parts. Hope your thermometer is being a little kinder where you are.

Old Soldiers' Letters, Modern Prisoners' Books

It’s breakfast time and I’m sitting in a motel room in north Atlanta, here visiting family to celebrate my mom’s ninetieth birthday. In my e-mail in-basket this morning sat a message from a lady in San Antonio who I’ve never met. I don’t know if she’s seventeen or seventy, but she’s an e-mail friend with whom I’ve corresponded about a topic of mutual interest. Our shared topic of interest being the men of the real “Alamo Rifles,” the militia company from San Antonio in the 1850’s.

Historically, those men became Company K, Sixth Texas Infantry Regiment, after the Civil War started. Back then, whole companies were formed of friends, family, and neighbors from the same community. It made for tightly-knit companies of men who cared for each other and would be more likely to help each other through the hard patches, of which the Alamo Rifles encountered their fair share.

 My first novel, Whittled Away, follows the historical path taken by the Sixth Texas Regiment, the book title coming from the Alamo Rifles steady loss of men, going from fifty-six soldiers who marched out of San Antonio in the spring of 1862, down to two soldiers who were present for the final surrender of their regiment in April of 1865.  A steady whittling away of the young men through three years of war.

In real life, only two members of the Alamo Rifles lasted until the final laying-down of their muskets at the war’s end. One of the two was a young fellow named Antonio Bustillos. I’d heard that one of Bustillos’ letters home, written while he was soldiering in Georgia, resides in the archive collection of the Alamo. Going to see the letter has been one of those things I “need” to do. Perhaps I’ve not done it because I figured there’s a good chance that the letter is written in Spanish, a language I don’t read or speak.

Regardless, my first happy surprise for the week was the e-mail message from my "virtual friend" with transcriptions of two letters Private Bustillos wrote home to family in San Antonio. One of the letters was written in May, 1864 in Dalton, Georgia, and the other in August, 1864 in Atlanta, Georgia, just a few miles from where I’m sitting at this moment.

Civil War soldiers wrote lots and lots of letters home. Military historians value soldiers’ letters as “primary sources,” - words put to paper by men whose eyes had actually seen the battles and events they describe.

However, the reality is that most soldiers’ letters, Bustillos included, addressed things nearer to the hearts of soldiers than the battles they’ve fought or the hardships they’ve endured. They wrote about the welfare of friends who were also soldiers, inquired about family, and routinely wrote things like, “Tell Sweet Mary and Mama I miss them.”

So letters, even as primary sources, tend to be of spotty value to military historians.  But they are still fun to read if you are trying to get into the heads of men who lived 150 years ago in order to bring their personalities to life in a novel. Now, I wish I’d read Bustillos’ two letters before I wrote Whittled Away, because I’d have included him as a likable character- and one I wouldn’t have to kill off along the way.

The second happy surprise this week came from my brother, who is also in Atlanta for our mom’s birthday celebration. Brother John is a retired teacher and volunteers one day a week teaching a class about religion at a prison in north Georgia. The prison sits just across the highway from the Chickamauga National Battlefield Park. The battle at Chickamauga is a big part of the story in Whittled Away, the first mega-battle where the Alamo Rifles were engaged.

A few months ago John asked if I had spare copies of Whittled Away and Tangled Honor that I might send to him to share with the prison inmates in his class. I sent six copies, three of each title, and forgot about it. Yesterday, John told me that the books are popular with his students, and are being passed around. 

There’s not much religion in my novels, except for the lightning strike that killed some soldiers during a revival service being held in a thunder storm-an event that really happened. But the inmates can perhaps connect somehow to the fact they are pretty much living on top of the battlefield featured in Whittled Away.

It’s not a big deal, nonetheless I am very happy that my novels are being read in that most unlikely of places, by such an unlikely audience. So, my thanks to John for being his brother’s “bookman,” taking a couple of good war tales to men who are serving hard time in prison for poor choices made somewhere along the way. 

If the stories of Jesús and Bain, and Captain McBee, Levi, and Faith, can entertain, maybe teach a little American history, and make some of those fellows’ long days pass faster, then those are six book copies being darned well used.

Finally, I have to thank Brother John a second time for giving me a quick tutorial on sword drill - fencing. John used to fence and coached high school fencers for a decade or more. I told him I need to write a scene involving sword drill for McBee and the other company officers in the  regiment, men who were elected to their positions,  but had never been to a military academy, yet were now expected to carry swords every day, and actually fight with them if needed.

So, John and I stood in his son’s living room with ten-inch long plastic straw swords so he could show me what “closing your line” means, and how to “bind” your enemy’s sword before he pokes you through the heart. Fun stuff like that.

I wrote the sword drill scene this morning and he gave me a brotherly stamp of “it’ll do.”

 And that’ll do for me. Talk to you next week sometime.