Frances Hunter

blog of the author To the Ends of the Earth

 

Frances Hunter's Journal
February 2007

Book Signing!
Saturday, March 24, 2007
10am-1pm

We'll be signing books at the "Meet the Authors" day at the historic Luling Area Oil Museum, located at 421 East Davis Street in Luling, Texas. This event is sponsored by the Oil Museum and the Friends of the J.B. Nickells Library of Luling. Come on out and see us and enjoy one of the great small towns of Central Texas!

Check our MySpace page too!

February 27, 2007: By His Own Hand?

By His Own Hand? is a new anthology about the mysterious death of Meriwether Lewis, edited by John D.W. Guice. It's a valuable addition to the Lewis and Clark literature and may be of great interest to some of our readers who want to follow up To the Ends of the Earth with something of a more scholarly bent.

The centerpieces of this slim volume are two extended essays, one by James Holmberg of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, the other by Guice, professor of history emeritus at the University of Southern Mississippi.

In "The Case for Suicide," Jim Holmberg does an excellent job of setting out the evidence that Meriwether Lewis committed suicide along the Natchez Trace in the early morning hours of October 11, 1809. The strength of Holmberg's essay is the overwhelming documentary evidence that the people closest to Lewis, including William Clark and Thomas Jefferson, believed he was in a suicidal frame of mind. Holmberg also points out that the supposed tradition of murder did not begin until the 1840s, many decades after Lewis died, when the residents of the area formed Lewis County and began to embrace the legacy of their most famous, if deceased, resident. William Clark's son, Meriwether Lewis Clark, may have also played a role in attempting to rescue his namesake from the stigma of suicide.

By contrast, those who believe Lewis was murdered have never been able to muster much evidence against any of the many suspects and rely heavily on the dubious supposition that Lewis simply wasn't the type to commit suicide. There are big holes in all the murder theories. As fiction writers, we were able to fill in the gaps in Ends, but no documentary evidence exists that can do so in real life.

Yet Guice's essay, "Why Not Murder?" is more valuable than the confused tales of murder in the night might suggest. Guice points out that, starting with Thomas Jefferson, there has been a long history of retrofitting Lewis's life and actions to point to a suicidal nature. Scholars often point to Lewis's 31st birthday journal entry. Written literally as the members of the Corps of Discovery were poised to become the first Americans to cross the Continental Divide, Lewis seems to lament the fact that he's never accomplished a doggone thing in his life. But is this really evidence that Lewis was self-destructive or a raging depressive? And how about the missing journals, or Lewis's failures in politics after the Expedition? Might there be explanations other than mental illness?

Guice does a good job of showing that when interpreted through the assumption of suicide, Lewis's foibles seem much more ominous than they would otherwise. He also points out that the suicide tradition is based largely on hearsay, and calls for an exhumation of Lewis's body to search for forensic evidence that might settle the question once and for all. He notes that over 200 Lewis relatives signed a petition asking the National Park Service for permission to examine the remains, but the NPS denied the request.

I also appreciated Guice's defense of Vardis Fisher, whose Suicide or Murder? (1962) doesn't always get the respect it deserves. Fisher did yeoman's work in compiling the stories about Lewis's death, and his work remains the most complete on the subject.

There are some good primary source documents included in By His Own Hand?, and an excellent round-up of the arguments by Jay Buckley of Brigham Young University. This anthology is highly readable and well-edited and will be enjoyed with anyone with an interest in Lewis's sad fate.

February 21, 2007: To the Ends of the Earth is a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Finalist

Foreword Magazine is a trade journal devoted to covering books from the independent press. So we're delighted to announce that To the Ends of the Earth: The Last Journey of Lewis & Clark, has been named a finalist in the Foreword Book of the Year contest for historical fiction!

The Book of the Year Awards were established by Foreword to bring increased attention from librarians and booksellers to the literary achievements of independent publishers. Books are judged on editorial excellence, professional production, originality of the narrative, author credentials relative to the book and the value the book adds to its genre.

We're thrilled to be finalists! The winners will be announced in June at BookExpo America.

Night Soldiers and Code to Zero

I recently read two historical thrillers and learned from them some lessons I want to apply in my own writing.

The first was Code to Zero, by Ken Follett. The year is 1958. A man named Luke wakes up disheveled, disoriented, and seemingly homeless. He's lost his memory and suspects that people are following him.

As it develops, Luke turns out to be Dr. Claude Lucas, a rocket scientist who is involved in the upcoming launch of an American rocket that is the latest in our attempts to compete with the Russians in the space race. Someone doesn't want the launch to succeed, and Luke must recover his own identity in time to save the rocket launch and America's future in space.

Like most Ken Follett books, Code to Zero is very cinematic. The plotting is tight, and everything that happens moves us towards the ultimate goal of the rocket launch at Cape Canaveral. There's lots of action, and several appealing subplots, including a romance. Yet I was frustrated and disappointed in the end.

For a book set in such a recent historical period, Code to Zero is surprisingly sloppy in its details. A character lives in Houston and teaches at Baylor University, a mere 184 miles away. Long commute. A character laments that "life sucks," at least thirty years before the phrase gained common parlance. On a related note, a respectable woman talks openly about practicing oral sex. I recall the subject being a mortifying taboo for most women well into the 1980s.

Most irritatingly, Follett completely bungles the portrayal of the era's race relations. Marigold, Luke's sassy black secretary, wouldn't have lasted two minutes before being run out of 1950s Huntsville, Alabama, much less employed in a responsible position on a military base for two decades. President Truman did not even order the desegregation of the civil service until 1948.

Follett should have known better than to make these errors, and far from being minor, they symbolize what's wrong with Code to Zero. It's a slick and empty exercise, passably entertaining but unconvincing either as a period piece or as human drama.

The second book, Alan Furst's Night Soldiers, takes us first to 1934 Bulgaria, where 19-year-old Khristo Stoianev witnesses his younger brother being beaten to death by local fascists simply for being a smart-aleck. As a result, Khristo allows himself to be recruited to go to Moscow and train with the NKVD, the Soviet spy service.

Though intelligent and thoughtful, Khristo has almost no real power over his own life. Instead, he is buffeted through the conflicts of his time, serving the Soviet cause in the Spanish Civil War, struggling to find love and dignity in pre-war Paris, and surrendering to the inevitability of fighting the Germans as part of the French Resistance. Finally taking a gamble on the meaning of friendship and his past, he journeys through the heart of eastern Europe to help an old friend and perhaps regain his own humanity.

Night Soldiers is episodic in plot, with each episode in Khristo's life only loosely linked to that which came before. Through no fault of his own, Khristo seldom drives the events of the story, and is instead often the victim of the unseen forces of history. The book's central weakness is that the many people who touch Khristo's life are not nearly as well defined as they should be, robbing the story of some of the emotional impact that it could have had.

Yet Night Soldiers is by far the superior book to Code to Zero. I'm not familiar enough with the period to know whether Furst made any historical boo-boos, but I doubt it. I felt deeply immersed in the real history and geography in each of the many different settings of the novel; I feel that if I traveled the Danube on a tugboat, I would see the shining mountains, river flotsam, and fishing villages at each turn of the river just as Khristo sees them on his final epic journey.

More importantly, Night Soldiers is deeply satisfying as a human drama. The exciting thriller aspects are certainly present, but they're secondary to the re-creation of one man's life emeshed in the great historical forces of the 20th century. Khristo seems real, one small human who finally stops trying to tell the good guys from the bad guys and simply puts it all on the line to be a decent human being.

So what did I learn as a writer from Night Soldiers and Code to Zero? That historical details matter. That a tight plot means nothing if the stakes don't seem real, and that a story from the heart can be enlightening and magical even with a few flaws. That the fate of important rocketships is less interesting than one little Bulgarian's soul.

February 14, 2007: Great Quote

There's been a great discussion this week on the Historical Novels Society Yahoo! group about the value of historical research and creating believable historical fiction. Excellent quote from Mark Twain here:

"Herodotus says, 'Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.'"

Rocketman

An insightful article, Astronauts Gone Wild, by Rand Simburg over on Tech Central Station, talks about the Lisa Nowak debacle and its parallels to the Meriwether Lewis tragedy.

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

River Travel

One of the most striking differences between the past of 1809 and today is the importance of river travel and its difficulty. The steamboat era was yet to arrive, and people traveled the rivers in a variety of boats: canoes, pirogues, bateaux, skiffs, keelboats, barges, and giant flatboats, which went by such names as arks, Kentucky boats, New Orleans boats, and broadhorns.

The only means of propulsion were muscle and the current. The flatboats varied from 20-60 feet in length and 10-20 feet in width. Some had pens on board for cattle, horses, and pigs, but their main purpose was commerce. Cash products included items such as tobacco, flour, whiskey (Monongahela rye was a favorite), skins (otter, beaver, fox, and wildcat), butter, linseed, unbleached linen, carriages, candles, tallow, and iron.

The boatmen were tough characters. For fun, they danced to the fiddle and fought with fists and pistols. Bone-breaking and eye-gouging were common outcomes of these fights. Popular lore had it that the flatboatmen were half horse and half alligator. Their epitome was Mike Fink, king of the keelboatmen, who became a figure almost Paul Bunyan-like in the retelling.

Speaking of Mark Twain, he later wrote some of the best accounts of the boatmen in his classic Life on the Mississippi.

February 9, 2007: Naming Places

In their exploration and mapping of the West, Lewis and Clark named hundreds of places. Some names, predictably, paid homage to the politicians back home, such as the naming of the Three Forks of the Missouri: Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin. Other names paid tribute to the members of the Corps of Discovery: York's Island, Meriwether's Bay, Clark's River, Shannon's Creek, Seaman's Creek, Drewyer's Mountain.

The more interesting names are those that tell you what the experiences of the Corps were at the place. A Smithsonian writer noted that during their exploration, Lewis and Clark created place names that ranged from "the bitterly matter-of-fact to the sentimental. In the Bitterroot Mountains, they named a stream Hungery Creek because, said Clark, 'at that place we had nothing to eate.' Because a river reminded Lewis of a woman he thought of as 'that lovely fair one,' he named it Marias River." One of my favorites is Biscuit Creek, named after breakfast. A more grim food-inspired name was Colt Killed Creek, another legacy of the ordeal in the Bitteroots.

Hilariously, Clark named today's Clastkanie Valley "Fanny's Bottom," after his beloved younger sister Frances. In Clark's journal, the name is recorded as "Fanny's Valley," one imagines at Lewis's urgent intervention.

It turns out that Lewis and Clark's naming conventions were firmly in the tradition of the American backcountry. I read a detailed account in David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed about how American backcountry settlers mostly steered clear of high-toned names such as were common in tidewater Virginia, or inspirational names such as those often found in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania. The backcountry settlers liked to name their places after people (Harper's Ferry, Logan's Fort). It wasn't unusual to name a place after food and drink, giving rise to places called Corncake or Whiskey Springs. Lewis's Camp Disappointment had its ancestors in backcountry places like Lousy Creek, Big Trouble, Scream Ridge, and Devil's Tater Patch.

At least L&C spared future schoolteachers when they named their camp among the Nez Perce Camp Choppunish, after their name for those Indians. Like a group of early backcountry settlers, they could have named it for their digestive woes and saddled future generations with Camp Shitbritches.

All in all, the backcountry place names and Lewis & Clark's are remarkable in their similarities, embodying a spirit of fun and improvisation. These kinds of names were uncommon in other parts of the country and in Europe, and resulted in considerable amount of fun being poked at Lewis & Clark when they were published. A British critic even published a bit of doggerel about them:

Ye plains where sweet Big-muddy rolls along,
And Tea-Pot, one day to be famed in song,
Whose swans on Biscuit and on Grindstone glide
And willows wave upon Good Woman's side!
How shall your happy streams in after time
Tune the soft lay and fill the sonorous rhyme!
Blest bards, who in your amorous verse will call
On murmuring Pork and gentle Cannon-Ball;
Split-Rock, and Stick-Lodge, and Two-Thousand-Mile,
White-lime and Cupboard, and Bad-humour'd Isle!
Flow, Little Shallow, flow! And be thy stream
Their great example, as it will their theme!
Isis with Rum and Onion must not vie,
Cam shall resign the palm to Blowing-Fly,
And Thames and Tagus yield to great Big-Little-Dry.

William Foley's interesting account of how the Lewis & Clark Expedition was viewed in Britain

 

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