THE REAL DEAL

     When I was growing up on the Southern Great Plains, in Hamlin, Texas, I had three places to find books.

     A school classroom contained three shelves, my father's church had a closet-sized room with five shelves (I couldn't reach high enough to see the titles without standing on a chair) and an elderly lady filled one room of her tiny, wood-framed house with donated volumes. Most of the library books dated from the jazz age.

    It didn't take me long to ransack the classroom collection and the town library leaned heavily on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau: Good writers, but I was too young to appreciate Emerson's advise for living or Thoreau's musings on nature.

     I did discover "Gone With The Wind," and read it ten times, splattering the pages with tears each time Rhett left Scarlett. 

     Rhett don't go, don't go!

     The church library, which smelled like paper mold and dust, produced "Cherry Ames, Student Nurse" and a dozen others in the Ames series, but most of the time I pulled a promising tome and found it was "Annals of the Northwest Texas Conference, Methodist Church, 1908."

     That was agony.

     When dad was transferred to a church in Midland, Texas, my book hunger was better fed. The Midland library was not bad, especially for a cow town plopped in the middle of nowhere.

     But finding good books has always been a struggle for me.

    Family sagas, pooh, romance, gag, fantasy, oh please (will someone produce a new plot rather than the same old formula).

    Give me big characters carrying big themes, written well; a rare combination.

    Historical fiction is my favorite, but guess what?

    A lot of historical novelists bend the truth.

    Imagine my delight when I discovered historical memoir, first-hand accounts of actual events. 

     First I read books like "Eyewitness To History," a compilation of short accounts, such as "Dinner With Attila the Hun," by Pricus and "The Murder of Thomas Becket," by Edward Grim.

     Grim actually saw knights, sent by England's Henry II, splatter Becket's brains on the Canterbury Cathedral floor.

     At some point, I got interested in the American Indian Wars and that opened up a treasure chest of reading.

     And it taught me something.

     No one race is all good, or all bad.

     On the American frontier, for every wrong one race committed, the other did the same thing.

    Reading about frontier history has often made me want to pull my hair out; so much hurt, so much misunderstanding, so much savagery.

    My favorite first-hand memoir is "On The Border With Crook," by Captain John Bourke, Third U.S. Cavalry, published 1891.

     Bourke kept journals when he was stationed in Arizona Territory and in the Dakotas, and his memoir is a detailed description of everything he saw.

    I loved his account of a man dying from wounds after an encounter with Apaches--"first exhilarated and then excited, petulant and despondent..he manifested a strange aversion to being put in the same vehicle with a dead man."
     I reproduced those stages of death in my novel, "Scalp Mountain."

     Then there's the man who crawled away from the scene of an Apache attack. The man wrote his name on a rock, with his own blood, immediately before he was devoured by a panther.

     Bourke became sympathetic to the Apache and didn't mind writing his opinions.

     As a result, he was never promoted beyond the rank of captain, which was a source of great bitterness to him.

    Well, to everyone who wrote a first-hand account and gave me something else to read, I send my thanks, and hope wherever you are, you are resting well.


    Julia can be reached at juliarobbmar@aol.com