RIDING THE HIGH COUNTRY
by Julia Robb
I was sitting in my living
room, here in Marshall, drinking coffee.
You
might call it a waking dream.
At
first, I didn’t know his name-that came later-but I saw his red hair burning in
the sun and had to know why he swept the valley below with restless green eyes.
That’s how
all my novels begin, with a vision of somebody I have never seen, doing
something I don’t understand.
Then the
questions begin and the questions create the story.
It was a
lot easier to understand where Colum was, physically, than what he was doing because
I know that part of Texas.
The Davis Mountains are
not really mountains, but a series of green hills.
The highest
peaks rise 8,300-odd feet, squatty in comparison to the Rockies.
It’s strange
country. Lush grama grass fattens cattle, but it grows around piles of rocks
and surrounds desert plants like prickleypear and ocotillo.
Pinyon
and ponderosa pine cover the upper slopes.
I had a
good time writing Colum’s story—eventually titled “Scalp Mountain” (now on sale
as an ebook, at Amazon).
Readers ask
me why I wrote this historical novel and I tell them about seeing Colum.
My
answer is a little misleading.
I wrote
“Scalp Mountain” because the frontier and its moral complications grip me like
a head-on train wreck.
There’s
more.
I’m not
comfortable with our noisy, entertainment-centered, celebrity-driven, American culture.
Writing
is a form of withdrawal.
But,
really, the 19th Century was a lot tougher than the 21st.
Dead
children were a life-long emotional burden for families, especially mothers.
One out
of five children died before they were five years old; almost all families lost
at least one baby, or child, and some
lost every child they had.
Abraham
Lincoln and his wife Mary lost two children before the president was shot-Eddie,
3, and Willie, 13.
Mary’s
grief further unbalanced her already precarious emotions. Mr. Lincoln closed
himself in Willie’s room once a week and stayed for hours.
Tad died
at 18, several years after the president was assassinated.
It
wasn’t just children.
Average
life expectancy in the 19th Century was about 48-years-old (and a
lot less for young women, who often died in childbirth).
Disease
took its toll, but men and women were also maimed in accidents; everything from
runaway buggies to mules expressing their displeasure with a kick to the
nearest head.
Cutting wood was a daily chore and if an ax
slipped and cut a leg or foot, the victim often died from blood poisoning.
Labor saving devises (like washing machines
and running water) did not exist.
Women’s washdays
included three tubs of water they had to haul from the well or the creek, they
had to boil the clothes, slap them around the soapy tub with sticks and hang
them on a line.
It took
all day.
Physical
labor; aching backs.
Toothache tortured almost everybody. Cavities relentlessly
decayed most peoples’ teeth and pain meds (even aspirin) were a distant dream.
Although
some assume the frontier was romantic, the opposite is true.
Tens of
thousands of Americans, red and white, died in the Indian Wars, which raged for
400 years, from Jamestown through Wounded Knee.
Farms,
ranches, mail carriers, stagecoaches, soldiers, surveyors, even whole
settlements, were attacked, tortured and butchered.
Women
and kids were kidnapped and never seen again.
U.S.
Cavalry surprised sleeping Indian villages, especially on the plains and
especially in winter. Then troopers destroyed the stored food, burned the
lodges and buffalo robes, shot the horses.
Tribal
people died of starvation. Babies froze to death in their mothers’ arms.
White women
captives were raped to death, or brutalized beyond what I want to describe in
this space.
Still,
the high country of my imagination lures me.
And I
don’t really have to live there, do I?
The past
is safe because it’s over.
God
bless all readers, whether they read my novel or somebody else’s book.
You give
writers an excuse to dream.
