A New Novel About A Guy Named Constantine

It’s 2017, and the house is quiet. We have un-decorated and taken down the tree, stored the ten stockings hanging from the mantle, and stashed the talking, belching, rump-shaking naughty Santa Claus doll that scares grandson Jackson. 

Since 2016 is gone by, here's my favorite family photo of the year, one my wife sneakily took one afternoon last May. That's Jackson with the pacifier and me with the Longhorn t-shirt. It must have been a good meal.

The Dallas Cowboys are in the NFL Play-offs, and I’m pecking away at a new manuscript. Life is good.

Writing-wise, I’m leaving the Civil War behind me in favor of 1855 Texas, with the action starting just a few miles from where I’m sitting in Recliner #7.  The foundation of the new book sprung from my assigned “spirit” in last year’s local Historical Society fund-raising Cemetery Ramble “Talking With the Dead.”

I took on the role of Constantine Connolly who lived and died in Lockhart and is buried here. Over two nights, I told his life story twenty-four times, condensed to eight minutes. I feel like I know the guy fairly well now. So now, I’m writing an early Texas novel based on his real experiences as a new immigrant.

As a young man in 1855, two years after his arrival in Texas from Alabama, Constantine served a three-month stint in the Texas Rangers. He was the 24 year-old First Sergeant in Captain James Callahan’s company of Rangers during the “Callahan Expedition” into northern Mexico. 

The official purpose of the expedition was to pursue and punish Lipan Apaches who had been raiding into central Texas with growing impunity. Callahan’s unofficial agenda also included capturing as many runaway slaves living across the Rio Grande as they could.  

There’s a lot of historical back-story to Callahan’s Expedition that I’ll work into the novel plot, but the key thing is that Captain Callahan led 110 Texas Ranger militiamen across the Rio Grande River—illegally— into Mexico to punish a band of Apache raiders for the depredations they had been making into central Texas.

The outnumbered Rangers wound up in a gunfight with both Indians and Mexican cavalry, who did not welcome the Texans into their country. The Rangers  withdrew to the border town of Piedras Negras (across from modern-day Eagle Pass, Texas). 

When darkness fell, Captain Callahan ordered his men to torch the entire town of Piedras Negras, home to about 1,000 people, to provide light and to distract the Mexican soldiers, while his men were ferried a few at a time back across the flooding Rio Grande River into Texas. 

There are lots more details in the period accounts of the expedition, including how the US Army officers in Eagle Pass reacted to Callahan incursion into Mexico. To summarize, it was not the Texas Rangers’ finest hour, even if it was a popular action with the Anglo settlers in central Texas who had endured two decades of horrifying Indian raids. The home folks saw Callahan's reprisal raid as a bit of long-overdue sweet revenge.

The actual battle between Callahan’s Rangers and the combined forces of Mexican cavalry and Indian warriors is called the Battle of Rio Escondido, since the conflict took place near the Escondido River.  As far as I can learn, there’s not been any movies made about the battle by either Mexican or American film makers, but here is a poster for a Mexican film with the same river title. I’ve no clue what the film is about, but I like the art of the poster.

I’m writing the new book with a residual sense of gratification that the McBee Civil War trilogy is a done deal, as we say down here.  Perhaps it’s normal that after three years of living every day with the characters in my head, I’m still hearing their voices as I’m creating new characters.

And I’ve indulged in every novelists’ sweet dessert of putting a new book’s characters in contact with characters from an earlier book. The new novel starts in 1853, which would make the young Confederate soldiers who marched off to war from San Antonio in 1862, 10 year old boys in 1853. Two of those of those Confederate soldiers, Bain Gill and Jesús McDonald, are the main characters in Whittled Away, my first Civil War novel. They already have made a cameo appearance as 10-year-old boys in an early chapter of the story of Captain Callahan’s expedition.

So, Happy New Year to each of you. Keep reading good books.