Jaws, The Underground Railroad and Camels

Happy Mid-Summer,

After two years of writing and fretting over the story, A Different War Entirely is finally for sale on Amazon and I’m here to jaw about it. As before, I apologize for this blatant self-promotion of my new novel, but sadly, that’s a key way word spreads about ‘craft’ novels like mine.

Some teasers about the plot:

In 1974, 50 years ago, Peter Benchley published his novel Jaws. A fine scary novel, a great even scarier movie.  One of Benchley’s great-great grandfathers was a Massachusetts state senator from Boston, way back before the Civil War.  He didn’t write a spooky novel about a big fish with big teeth, but as a widower he did move from Boston to San Antonio and opened a music school. Grandson Peter has mentioned that he suspects Grandpa Benchley’s music school was a front for the underground railroad in Texas, his building a layover for men who’d escaped from Texas plantations and were running for Mexico. After a while, Benchley closed the school and returned to Boston for unknown reasons.

In 1856 the U.S. Army imported about eighty Arabian camels to see how they’d do as pack animals on Texas prairies. They did fine, but that’s another story.  A year later a cotton planter imported another eighty camels but they were blocked from being off-loaded in Galveston for weeks because of suspicions the camels’ stench was masking an even worse smell seeping from the ship’s lower cargo hold. A powerful fecal smell coming from kidnapped Africans brought across the ocean in chains to be enslaved in Texas.

In 1857, before railroads connected Central Texas to the Gulf Coast, white men hauled freight between the seaports and San Antonio in mule-drawn wagons. Competing for the same trade, Hispanics carried freight along the same rutted road in huge ox-drawn two-wheeled carts. More and more businessmen protected their profits by hiring the larger, slower, but cheaper ox-carts instead of mule-drawn wagons.

To regain their dominance of the Chihuahua Highway a band of angry white muleskinners turn to deadly violence. In disguise they become night raiders attacking trains of ox-carts, destroying and stealing cargo, smashing carts, killing men and beasts.

After two wars with Mexico, much of the Anglo population considered the Hispanic cart trains a threat and sympathized with the night raiders. Regardless, business leaders pressured the governor of Texas to form a new company of Texas Rangers to stop the attacks. Milo McKean and Jesse Gunn, my main characters in A Different Country Entirely once again answer the call to ride as Texas Rangers, this time to stop the night marauders. A vicious "Helena knife duel', night gunfights, waylaid riverboats and inexplicably, ownership of a string of Arabian pack-camels result.

At the same time, a secretive underground railroad is aiding men escaping enslavement on the plantations along the Colorado River. Milo unintentionally becomes entangled in a suspect music school and faces hard choices as his moral compass is challenged. 

And Jesse becomes a ‘cameleer.’  Such is my tale of the Texas cart war of 1857.

Here is the link to the page on Amazon where it’s available as an ebook or a paperback.  Hope you’ll give it a look and a read.

https://www.amazon.com/Different-War-Entirely-Novel-Texas-ebook/dp/B0DBJ5KL9V?ref_=ast_author_mpb