Pictograph and Long Knife

The photo here is of our son Todd back in the 1980’s somewhere in Arizona, or maybe Utah, on a family summer road trip.  He’s looking at a rock wall decorated with really old Indian pictographs whose meaning is lost to time.

Somewhere I have another road trip photo of a rock wall near Big Bend National Park where in 1902, 116 years ago, a couple of young cowboys scratched their names and date into the stone.

So, the question is: When does graffiti, vandalism in our world, cease being graffiti and morph into being a historical artifact? Is 100 years enough? I dunno.

The link to my writing is that I’ve created a fictitious Indian pictograph on the wall of a cave somewhere in the hill country of Texas.  The crude drawing is to document the Comanche’s fore-knowledge of a mythical giant flying lizard which has been soaring over the Texas prairie, spitting poisonous blood at buffalo, horses, and humans for a long, long time. The mythical giant beast drawn in fading charcoal on the cave wall would be Leine, the mutated horny toad with grafted batwings, one of the main characters in A Different Dragon Entirely.

Yes, it is silly. Yes, I’m have a ball writing it. Yes, conjoining the popular genre of fantasy dragon literature and historical cowboy and Indian fiction of the 19^th century Texas frontier may be a bridge too far. We’ll see.

One of the violent conflicts in my Texas dragon book will be another visit to the 1840 Battle of Plum Creek, the large-scale battle between white Texan settlers and the Comanche nation. I confess I’m drawn to the battle because it happened within sight of my house, at least when our house was on the very edge of our little town of Lockhart. Now I just see more houses between my living room window and the horizon. But thirty years ago I could see the pastures where 600 Comanches tried to fend off over a 100 pissed-off Texas militiamen. The Texans did not have a giant horny toad air force flying cover back in August of 1840, but on my pages in August of 2018, Leine and Mally will be overhead somehow supporting the defenders of white civilization.

I started my Civil War novel, Tangled Honor, with the same fight. This time the running battle along Plum Creek will be the setting for the climactic action of the new book, after Leine is well-established as a character, not to introduce her as a character like I did with John McBee at Plum Creek in Tangled Honor.

That leads to another image, this one of me holding a knife-sword while standing in the midst of a wonderful private collection of Civil War and Texas frontier artifacts owned by a rich fellow in Dallas.

The short sword—or danged long knife—is engraved as having been carried by one of the white Texans at the Battle of Plum Creek. I’ve forgotten the name on the blade, but it checks against the known participants in the battle.

I trust you all had a good first month of 2018, nasty weather here and there notwithstanding.  I could channel the spooky Snow family characters in Game of Thrones—with its delightfully sinister dragons--and drolly warn you that  ‘Winter is coming,” but around here it’s more likely, ‘Our one day of winter is over, get ready for some heat.’ Even in February.