Sgt. Mom

Air Force veteran, historical novelist, and cat-person

Into the Wilderness – Part Three: By the Ice-Water Lake

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(Part 3 of 3 the story of the first emigrant party to bring their wagons over the Sierra Nevada, which became my first historical novel To Truckee’s Trail, which should be out in a second edition next month.)

Dawn, morning, day still moving through the desert, from their last camp at the Humboldt Sink. Riders led  their horses to spare them; the march only paused to water the oxen, and pass around some cold biscuits and dried meat by way of food for the people. At the hot spring in the middle of the desert, the animals drink, but not with any relish. They are fed with the green rushes brought from the last camping place. The emigrants rest in the shade of their wagons for a few hours in the hottest part of the day, resuming as the heat of the day fades. Sometime early the next morning, the weary, thirsty oxen begin perking  up, stepping a little faster. The wind coming down from the mountains is bringing the scent of fresh water. There is a very real danger to the wagons, if the teamsters cannot control them. Hastily, the men draw the wagons together and unhitch the teams: better for them to run loose to the water they can smell, than risk damaging the wagons in a maddened stampede. In a few hours, the men return with the teams, sated and sodden with all the water they can drink from the old Indian’s river.

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Into the Wilderness – Part Two: The Platte, Fort Hall & the Desert Sink

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(The continuation of the essay from 2005 which eventually became my first historical novel – To Truckee’s Trail.   The print version is going to a second edition, but it is currently available as an e-book. Along about 2006 I began to be overcome with a belief that we had to reclaim our American history, to remember who we were and where we came from, to know that the American experiment was a grand and optimistic one, and that our forebearers were for the largest part, decent, courageous and honorable people. So, I turned to writing rattling good adventure yarns in an attempt to educate readers painlessly. We can’t let scum like Howard Zinn and Michael Moore have it all to themselves, can we?)

Fifteen miles a day, more or less; the inexorable calculus of the overland trails. The wagon trains can only move out in late May, when the prairie grass is grown tall enough to feed the draft animals. And they must be over the last palisade of the high Sierra Nevada before the way is blocked by the winter snow. And they must do so before their food supplies run out. Any one of a hundred miscalculations, missteps or misfortunes can upset that careful arithmetic and bring disaster upon all. Is the water in that creek running fast and high? Can it be forded, or should the wagons carefully and laboriously be ferried over. An accident to a wagon, the loss of any of the supplies, an ox-team felled by disease or accident may be compounded later on. Balance taking a day to cross a high-water creek, against a day six months in the future and an early snow fall in the Sierras. Balance sparing a day camping by a pleasant spring of clear water, and the men going to hunt for meat which  when dried over the fire and stored away,  may mean the difference between a nourishing meal by an ice-water lake half a continent away, and starvation in that place instead.

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3,650 Days

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Three thousand, six hundred fifty days, more or less,depending on leap years since the end of the 20th century. Oh, I know, calendar-wise, only a year or two off. But we don’t count strictly by the calendar. Afterwards, we count by events. Myself, I have the feeling that the 19th century didn’t truly end for good and all until 1914. That’s when the 20th century began, in the muddy trenches of WW1. All the previous comfortable understandings and optimistic assumptions of the earlier world were shattered right along with three monarchial dynasties, over the course of four years. When it was over, the world of the time before seemed impossibly far removed, to those who could remember it a number which, as the decades passed, became steadily fewer, until that old world was entirely the stuff of books, paintings and relics, rather than true human recollections. We eventually adjusted and accepted the new reality of things. The old way, and the shattering events in which it passed became a date on a monument, a paragraph in a history text, a book on the shelf.

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Fire Country

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The winds kicked up over last weekend, here in Texas – and it  was wonderful, after what seems like an eternity of soggy, brutal and unrelenting heat.   It has rained here in San Antonio precisely twice in the last three or four months, and the second rain was nothing but a thin mist that moistened the ground and dried up almost at once.   The temperatures have been in the 100s, all summer long, and now most of Texas is dried to a crisp. Seasonal watercourses are bone-dry. Even in the spring, when my daughter and I took the dog and walked along the Salado Creek Greenway, there were only occasional stagnant pools of water in the creek bed.

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Into the West – The Start of Truckee’s Trail

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At the start of the summer movie season in 2005, I was lamenting on my  then-blog about the depths of my decided uninterest in anything premiering over the following months. I used to love going to movies, had subscriptions to Premiere, and to Entertainment Weekly   . . .   and then, somehow I just lost interest. The blog-lament turned into an essay about a dream movie epic a frontier adventure that I would love to see made. The essay eventually became an epic itself, and a reader of the blog suggested that I work it into a movie treatment, as she had friends in “the business.” Nothing ever came of the movie treatment, until about a year later, when she showed it to a writer friend, who thought it was fantastic, but advised that I would have better luck doing it as a novel first . . .  and so did it become, within a very short time, with their encouragement. Now, as I am preparing a second edition of To Truckee’s Trail, through Watercress Press, I dug up the original series from the archives.

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