RIDING THE HIGH COUNTRY

by Julia Robb

 The first time I saw Colum McNeal, he was standing on a hill in the Davis Mountains, in far West Texas, about 120 miles from the Mexican border.

    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 19^th 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 19^th 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.