AUTHOR FAVOURITES: SKELETONS by JULIETTE DOUGLAS

Award-winning Juliette Douglas tells me she really enjoyed writing SKELETONS, the third episode of her acclaimed Freckled Venom trilogy, because ‘I got to blow stuff up.’ Her heroine, former bounty-hunter Lacy Watson, is now married to Marshal Rawley Lovett and settled down in Wyoming. Then her son and daughter, and other children, are kidnapped by Joe Kannon. Kannon plans to sell them to a slave trafficker in Mexico, but doesn’t reckon on Lacy pursuing, or the kids themselves.

As SKELETONS touches on school teachers (who were almost always women) in the Old West, I thought I’d talk briefly about the remarkable ‘culture bearers’ who helped tame and civilise the west not with guns but with learning and by spreading knowledge.

Before the American Civil War school teaching had been largely a male profession, but after the war they abandoned it for better paid work. Many of the women who replaced them were young, some as young as 15, but their results could be impressive: between 1870 and 1900 Nebraska and Kansas boasted some of the highest literacy rates in the U.S. That was despite a serious lack of resources.

Schools themselves were usually one room affairs, sometimes converted bunkhouses, shacks, log cabins, even brush arbours. Teacher SARAH NEWMAN recalled her room being ‘maybe 10 by 12 feet.’ Classrooms were often over-crowded, with teachers managing as many as 45 pupils. Only eight grades were taught, and usually you’d have children in all eight grades in the one room of the schoolhouse.

A schoolhouse Woods, Oklahoma 1895

ANNA WEBBER in Kansas in 1881 lamented the lack of ‘benches, seats, blackboards or writing desks… for seats we have 2 boards placed on rocks.’ Classes tended to focus on the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic, history, spelling and penmanship - difficult to teach when you didn’t have slates, paper or pencils. The Bible was often the only book a family had to send to school for reading practice. For many years, the main textbook was the McGuffey Reader. With this shortage of books, teachers had to improvise. Lessons were largely memorization, recitation and oral drilling. ELIZA MOTT was a teacher who taught the alphabet using the inscriptions on tombstones! Spelling bees were also popular.

School was usually only open four or five months a year out west. Children in farming communities were expected to help with planting and harvesting. So they might only be available for school between planting and harvesting time – which in Nebraska meant school ran from October to May.

Schoolhouse, Nebraska 1889

The frontier sometimes threw up specifically western challenges for these young women teachers. In 1872 SISTER BLANDINA SEGALE, a nun of the Sisters of Charity order, was sent from Ohio to teach in remote Trinidad, Colorado. It was a rough mining camp, and Sister Blandina once had to save the father of one of her pupils from a lynch mob, which she bravely faced down.

When the ‘Great Blizzard’ of January 1888 swept the Great Plains, 19 year old Nebraska school teacher MINNIE FREEMAN led thirteen children from her schoolhouse to the safety of her home, half a mile away. It’s believed she tied the children together with twine or clothesline during the blinding snowstorm, carrying one child in her arms.

‘Song of the Great Blizzard: Thirteen Were Saved’ or ‘Nebraska's Fearless Maid’, was written in her honour by William Vincent.

I dipped into blogs by KATHRYN ALLBRIGHT and ANNA KATHRYN LANIER for some of this information.

A school mistress out west is one of the main characters in what is generally regarded as the first real western novel ever published – ‘The Virginian’ by Owen Wister. 

Diane Lane plays a western schoolmistress in 'The Virginian' (2000)

Kids on the frontier feature in TV shows like THE MONROES,

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE and THE RIFLEMAN

The Rifleman

and in movies like BAD COMPANY, THE MISSING and THE COWBOYS.

'The Cowboys' (1972)

Reviews of SKELETONS:

‘Thrilling’

‘Fun and gritty Western’

‘Even more spit and vinegar than its predecessors’

‘Heart-wrenching’

‘Douglas is a master story teller.’

https://www.amazon.com/Freckled-Venom-Skeletons-Juliette-Douglas-ebook/dp/B00ZCQE760/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

AUTHOR FAVOURITES: COPPERHEAD by JULIETTE DOUGLAS

Juliette Douglas mentioned 3 favourites of her own books to me. She tells me COPPERHEAD, the first of her ‘Freckled Venom trilogy,’ is dear to her heart because it was her first book. And it did win the Laramie Award for best debut western. Juliette’s heroine in COPPERHEAD is Lacy Watson, a female bounty hunter pursuing outlaws who is also pursued by demons in her own past. She joins up with Wyoming Marshal Rawley Lovett to bring three psychopathic brothers to justice.

I’ve blogged about bounty hunters before, a staple of western fiction although hard to find in the real history of the Old West – male or female. One gun-toting western woman who was real was CALAMITY JANE – real name MARTHA JANE CANARY (or CANNARY.)

Much of Jane’s life – like the origin of her nickname - is shrouded in legends of her own making. She was born in Missouri, although her given birth year of 1852 has been questioned.  She claimed to have been a muleskinner working for the U.S. Cavalry. Captain John G. Bourke, who was on General Crook’s campaign against the Sioux in 1876, wrote: ‘It was whispered that one of our teamsters was a woman, and no other than ‘Calamity Jane’ a character famed in border story.’ Jane claimed also to have been an army scout who fought Indians, but another cavalry officer, Captain Jack Crawford, stated: ‘Jane… never was in an Indian fight. She was simply a notorious character, dissolute and devilish, but possessed a generous streak which made her popular.’ As a sign of her generosity, she once gave a destitute woman her shoes.

There doesn’t seem to be any hard evidence that she worked as a guard on a stage coach. She was acquainted with Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood shortly before his murder there in August 1876, but as to whether she secretly married him or gave birth to his child… who knows? The story that she confronted Hickok’s murderer, Jack McCall with a meat cleaver also can’t be verified.

Jane did appear in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in 1893 as a story-teller. It would appear that she lived in various locations in Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota and did work as a laundress and a prostitute, drink heavily, carouse loudly and sometimes wear men’s clothes. She also married several times and had two daughters. She died of pneumonia in 1903.

Jane has been widely portrayed in romanticised form by actresses from Doris Day, in the musical named after her,

to Stefanie Powers in an episode of ‘Bonanza’ (where she has an unhistorical relationship with Doc Holliday!)

Stefanie Powers  (as Calamity Jane) with Michael Landon in 'Bonanza'

Anjelica Huston’s portrayal in ‘Buffalo Girls’ (1995) was undoubtedly nearer the truth.

Sharon Stone in the movie ‘The Quick & the Dead’ isn’t exactly a bounty-hunter, but she’s the nearest to one I could find!

The last time I looked all reviews for COPPERHEAD are 4 and 5 star.

‘A gripping and compelling western with an engaging heroine’

‘Truly outstanding’

’The dialogue was wonderful’

‘I’d like to see it made into a film’

https://www.amazon.com/Freckled-Venom-Copperhead-Juliette-Douglas/dp/1502566028

AUTHOR FAVOURITES: WINTER’S WAR by MATTHEW P. MAYO

Matthew P. Mayo won the Spur Award for TUCKER'S RECKONING. He tells me one of his favourite of his own novels is WINTER’S WAR. A characteristic of Matthew’s work is a great opening, and WINTER’S WAR certainly has one. Here Niall Winter, ranching in the Wyoming Rockies, finds his ranch burned down and his wife kidnapped by an enemy from his past. Niall goes in pursuit, even as a blizzard rages.

Life in winter could be brutal on the cattle ranges of the 19^th Century West, particularly in mountain country and/or on the northern Great Plains. Indeed one particularly severe winter, known as the ‘Great’ or ‘Big Die-up,’ more or less destroyed the so-called ‘Open Range.’

The Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming suffered a drought-stricken summer in 1886. Then November became a month of relentless snowfall – it snowed every day. The ranchers had neglected to stockpile feed. So when snow and blizzards hit, cattle had to use their hooves to dig through the snow to uncover what meagre grasses they could find. The already thin animals grew weak from hunger. After a brief reprieve when a ‘Chinook’ blew in, temperatures plummeted again to -50F and the greatest blizzard in living memory struck the northwest.

Starving livestock invaded the outskirts of towns, eating whatever shrubs and bushes they could find. Over half of the cattle alive in October, 1886 were dead by April, 1887, probably about a million animals. Rotting carcasses were scattered all over the landscape and dead animals fouled the creeks and streams. 

Many ranchers went bankrupt, and the rest struggled to hang on. So ended the days of the ‘open’ unfenced range and a whole way of life.

A cowboy rescues a calf from a blizzard

For more on the great ‘Die-up’ see Jacquie Rogers’ excellent blog on the subject:
http://unusualhistoricals.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/disasters-great-die-up.html

A number of western movies have snowbound and/or wintry backdrops, among them: ‘Track of the Cat,’

‘Day of the Outlaw,’

and ‘The Hateful Eight.’

Reviews of WINTER’S WAR:

‘A fine hardboiled revenge Western.’

‘Mayo's skewed vision of the world … shows us the mythic West with the sharp, clear eye of a realist looking through rippled glass.’

‘An original voice.’

‘Gritty, and peppered with enough fierce and spunky characters to populate two novels.’

https://www.amazon.com/Winters-War-Matthew-P-Mayo-ebook/dp/B008KFX9UU/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr

AUTHOR FAVOURITES: WRONG TOWN by MATTHEW P. MAYO

Matthew P. Mayo – who won the Spur Award for TUCKER'S RECKONING - tells me a favourite of his own books is WRONG TOWN, first of the ROAMER books.

Circumstance (not helped by his homely face) has made Matthew’s hero ROAMER into what his name suggests – a lone drifter. Roamer’s day begins with him being attacked by a grizzly bear – and then gets worse! With the zippy beginning and black humour characteristic of Matthew, WRONG TOWN takes Roamer from wrestling a grizzly for breakfast into a Rocky Mountain town where he’s locked up for a murder he didn’t commit. And then a lynch mob comes after him…

We authors are always being told our books need ‘grabby’ beginnings. WRONG TOWN certainly has an opening line that’s hard to beat: ‘My eyes snapped open in the strange gray light of early morning as a grizzly grunted hot breath in my face.’

There are plenty of instances of lynching in the real Old West, where official law and order officers were rare. Sometimes they had racial (not to say racist) motivations. Between 1848 and 1860, white Americans lynched at least 163 Mexicans in California alone. On July 5, 1851, a mob in Downieville, California, lynched a Mexican woman named Josefa Segovia. She was accused of killing a white man who had attempted to assault her after breaking into her home. On October 24, 1871, a mob rampaged through Old Chinatown in Los Angeles, killing at least 18 Chinese-Americans, after a white businessman had inadvertently been killed, caught in the crossfire of a Tong battle within the Chinese community.

Sometimes lynching’s were carried out when groups of individuals banded together to deal with outlawry in areas where there was no official law. Or, as in early 1860s in Montana, where the ‘official law’ turned out to law-breakers themselves. HENRY PLUMMER, Sheriff of Bannack, was suspected of being part of a gang of road agents plundering the area. He was dragged off to a hanging tree by The Vigilance Committee of Alder Gulch in 1864.

Henry Plummer

In 1884 cattlemen in Montana organised against rustlers operating in the Musselshell River region. Led by prominent rancher, GRANVILLE STUART, this group of vigilantes, known as "Stuart's Stranglers", were responsible for the deaths of at least 20 thieves in July 1884, by hanging, shootings or fire.

Granville Stuart

Many outlaws fell foul of ‘lynch law,’ particularly the gang led by the RENO BROTHERS. They robbed and killed across the Midwest in the years immediately after the American Civil War, and carried out the first train robbery in U.S. history at Seymour, Indiana on October 6^th 1866. Later three of the gang were captured and taken by train to gaol. On July 10, 1868, three miles outside Seymour, the prisoners were taken off the train, and hanged from a nearby tree by a group of masked men calling itself the Scarlet Mask Society or the Jackson County Vigilance Committee. Three other gang members were captured shortly after. In a grisly repeat, they too fell into the hands of vigilantes and were hanged from the same tree. The site became known as ‘Hangman’s Crossing, Indiana.’

Frank Reno

Finally FRANK RENO and three more gang members were captured and held in the New Albany, Indiana gaol. On the night of December 11, about 65 hooded men forced their way into the gaol and dragged the prisoners from their cells and lynched them – making a total of 10 Reno gang members lynched in the course of 1868.

Grizzly bears deserve a blog all to themselves. Movies about grizzly attacks include THE REVENANT and MAN IN THE WILDERNESS, both about HUGH GLASS, a ‘mountain man’ mauled by a grizzly in 1823.

Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘The Revenant’

Lynch law features in many a western including books/movies like THE OX BOW INCIDENT

and WARLOCK.

Reviews:

‘Mayo is a breezy yarn-spinner… steeped in authenticity and boiled in action’

‘Terrific’

‘An original piece of work’

‘In the great tradition of noirish Westerns’

https://www.amazon.com/Wrong-Town-Roamer-Book-1-ebook/dp/B007L74538/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1486939723&sr=1-1