School days.

In recent weeks I’ve had the opportunity to spend time on university campuses at opposite ends of my home state of Utah.

At my alma mater, Utah State University in Logan, I met with a classroom full of journalism students. For more than an hour they peppered me with questions about journalism, advertising, magazine writing, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, Western history, how I go about writing, and all manner of things. Fortunately, after stringing words together over several decades for all manner of reasons I was able to offer some sort of response to most of their queries.

Days later, I spent an equally enjoyable hour with creative writing students at Utah Tech University in St. George. Again, the questions were insightful and the discussion engaging. Later, UT hosted a public event during which I read from several of my books—mostly fiction but also some nonfiction and poetry—answered a few questions, and spent time talking with and signing books for some of the readers kind enough to come out for the event.  A fine local bookseller, The Book Bungalow, handled sales and now has several of my titles on the shelves at their store in St. George.

All in all, the faculty and staff members involved in my visits had everything well in hand to make the experiences enjoyable. And, the students at both universities were impressive. They seemed bright, immersed, and involved—much different from my own time as a college student, if my hazy memories are to be trusted.

At the Utah Arts Festival.

Every summer (pandemics permitting) some 70,000 people make their way to downtown Salt Lake City for the Utah Arts Festival. On display is art of every kind, from sculpture and painting to music and dance to film and photography and more.

There’s literary art as well, and that’s where I come in. Or go on, if you’d rather.

On Friday, June 24, at 4:00 p.m. I’ll be reading selections from my writings about the 1863 Massacre at Bear River, the bloodiest encounter between the US Army and Indians in the history of the American West. It’s a tragedy largely forgotten and ignored in our collective memory, and that needs to change.

Selections from song lyrics, poetry, short stories, a novel, as well as a nonfiction book and magazine article are on the agenda.

If you’re anywhere near Salt Lake City from June 23 through June 26, be sure to visit the Utah Arts Festival. I’ll be there, and watching for you.

In the News.

 

Today’s story is ripped from the pages of the Eureka (Utah) Reporter, 18 May 1917. 

Henry Miller, the Elberta farmer who also owns a ranch near Jamison Hill on the old road, had a narrow escape from death yesterday when he was attacked by a cow which was no doubt suffering from rabies. Mr. Miller was at work near his home when the cow made a vicious charge upon him and then continued the attack after the farmer was knocked to the ground. Just at a time when Mr. Miller appeared to be in the greatest danger of receiving fatal injuries from the animal’s hoofs and horns the cow took a fit and this enabled him to crawl to a place of safety.

Propped up in bed at his ranch last evening Mr. Miller related his experience to Lewis Merriman, superintendent of the Yankee Cons mine, stating that the cow probably belongs to one of the Elberta ranchers. Mr. Miller’s injuries are painful but not serious and he will no doubt be out again within a few days.

 Henry is my great-grandfather. And to think my very existence on earth was endangered by a bad, mad cow.

 

And when I die.

We are all going to die. Our clock will stop and that will be the end of us on the earth. For most of us, our passing will be of little note, even at the time. And then, I heard or read somewhere, when the last person who knew us also dies, we will be altogether forgotten. Other than our posterity, who may know us only as a name on records, there will be no memory of our ever having been here.

But there is this.

For those of us who wiled away part of our lives putting words on paper, our names will live on in some fashion. On the shelves of libraries and archives there will stand books with my name on the spine. Some of the books some of us write will be saved for decades, even centuries. We will have created things that are as close to indelible as anything mankind creates. After all, we still read books written thousands of years ago, and know something of the people who wrote them.

This, of course, does not mean our books or our names will enjoy that same longevity. But, at the very least, I will have left something behind to note my passing. Somehow, that seems to matter, somewhat.

My Favorite Book, Part 11.

Since my long-ago college days I have had a more-than-passing interest in the history of American Indians. My shelves contain many books on the subject. But none has affected my research and writing more directly than The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre by Brigham D. Madsen.

The book covers the history of the Northern Shoshoni from early contact with whites around 1840, until the ratification of treaties with the United States government in 1864. Included in the story, of course, are some 40 pages treating the Bear River Massacre, during which US Army troops slaughtered somewhere between 250 and 350 Indians—the worst massacre of Indians by the army in the history of the West. Included in the book is Shoshoni historian Mae Parry’s account of the massacre.

That such a tragedy could be largely lost to history intrigued me. I set out to learn more about it, including the privilege of talking with the author, Brigham Madsen, on several occasions.

Reading The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre led to my writing Massacre at Bear River: First, Worst, Forgotten as well as a chapter on the subject in my book The Lost Frontier: Momentous Moments in the Old West You May Have Missed, a short story, a magazine article, several poems, and even the lyrics to a song, “And the River Ran Red.”

But it was not only the subject matter of the book that intrigued me. Besides being one of the West’s foremost historians and experts on American Indians, Madsen was a fine writer. This book, as well as the many others he wrote, is well worth reading.

My Favorite Book, Part 6

John McPhee is a name you will see here again. He is, without doubt, one of my favorite writers. Some of his books are collections of articles he wrote for The New Yorker, others address a single subject.

No matter the subject, if McPhee writes it I will read it.

Witness the fact that I have read his books (and many others) on raising oranges, building birch-bark canoes, Bill Bradley, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the Swiss Army, cargo ships, and the geology of North America—subjects I have no particular interest in but enjoyed immensely reading about.

Among my favorite McPhee books is Rising from the Plains, one of five volumes that make up his Pulitzer Prize-winning compilation, Annals of the Former World.

The book is about the geology of Wyoming, as seen through McPhee’s travels with geologist David Love. You’ll find that reading about rocks can be fascinating.  But Love is also a Wyoming boy who grew up on an isolated ranch when the West was still wild, and those stories are just as engaging as the tales about traces of the Triassic on the landscape.

This is about high-country geology and a Rocky Mountain regional geologist. I raise that semaphore here at the start so no one will feel misled by an opening passage in which a slim young woman who is not in any sense a geologist steps down from a train in Rawlins, Wyoming, in order to go north by stagecoach into country that was still very much the Old West.

So begins Rising from the Plains by John McPhee. How can you not read on?

Road trips.

If I were to wake up tomorrow and discover I had become wealthy overnight there’s not much I would change about my life.

Except one thing. I would travel. A lot.

There are many, many places around the American West I have yet to see but would like to. There are Civil War sites in the Southeast. Things in New England I’ve missed out on. I’d like to go back to England sometime, and Australia beckons, but other than that I would be content to stay within the States—mostly those Out West—save an occasional foray into Canada and Mexico in pursuit of history.

Most of my travel would be behind the wheel of a car. I like road trips. My wife tolerates them. She has what she calls “carcolepsy”—a condition that puts her to sleep when a car exceeds 40 miles an hour. She doesn’t think she misses much. Me, I like most everything I see through the windshield.

Way back when, there was a short-lived television show I liked called Then Came Bronson. It starred actor, songwriter, and singer Michael Parks as he rode around at random on a motorcycle. I still hear the theme song he wrote for the show in my head. The first two lines, in particular:

Going down that long lonesome highway

Bound for the mountains and the plains

History meets humility.

History is a messy subject. It’s never as simple as it ought to be. We tend to view history in black and white terms—good guys and bad guys, winners and losers, virtue and evil, right and wrong.

That’s particularly true when it comes to the history of something or someone near and dear to our hearts—our country, our people, our families. And it doesn’t stop there. This simplistic view of history devolves to the point that all semblance of actual knowledge gives way to belief, even wishful thinking.

And intellectual laziness. I read somewhere that instead of attempting to know what happened (which is no simple task), we cling to what we think happened, even what we wish had happened (which is much easier).

I once heard a radio interview with British actor Hugh Laurie. (House, Stuart Little, Jeeves and Wooster, Black Adder.) I remember only one thing he said, and it’s something I will never forget: “We must be humble in the face of facts.”

That bit of wisdom certainly applies to history. The facts of history—such as they are—are often uncomfortable. They sometimes contradict what we think (or wish or hope) happened. We squirm. We sweat. We tie ourselves in emotional knots. Our hearts and minds rebel.  But, eventually, we must come to terms with a revised reality.

Facts, in fact, can change our entire way of thinking—as they should, like it or not, if we follow Hugh Laurie’s advice.

What happened back when happened. We ought to know the facts of the matter as much as we can, with the knowledge that more facts may come to light and alter our understanding.

But that’s what humility is all about when it comes to history—basing the knowledge we have on facts rather than beliefs, and knowing that what we don’t know always outweighs what we do.

My Favorite Book, Part 3.

When my wife and I married lo these many years ago, included in the union was her full set of the Time-Life series The Old West.

Now, many historians pooh-pooh the books, and there are some inaccuracies and exclusions and such. But when it comes to an overview of pretty much every aspect of the history of the American West, with volumes covering most major topics, the series is hard to beat. Over the years (and even now) I have spent many an hour both browsing the books at random and researching a particular subject. While the series may not be a good place to end your research, they represent a fine place to start.

Included are works on cowboys, Indians, pioneers, ranchers, frontiersmen, Forty-Niners, Texans, trailblazers, gunfighters, Spaniards, and so on—more than twenty-five volumes in all, including a one-volume index that covers the whole set. 

The Old West isn’t the best thing my wife brought to our marriage, but it’s certainly one I’ve enjoyed—enough to be included among my favorite books.

Lies They Tell Writers, Part 28: Writing is a Lonely Life.

You’ll often hear it said that writing is lonely. It takes hours, days, weeks, months, years spent alone at the keyboard (or typewriter or notebook) to spin a story, write a novel, sort out history, create a poem, construct a magazine article, or whatever it is you write or intend to write.

Which is true, sort of.

But I would use a different word to describe writing time: solitary.

That’s because while I am usually alone when I write, I don’t find writing lonely. I spend that time conversing with characters, getting inside their heads, reading their thoughts, understanding what makes them tick, waiting to see what they’ll do next. That’s a lot of what makes writing fiction fun.

Even when writing nonfiction—a magazine article, or history—it usually comes down to living with people in your mind and attempting to understand why they do what they do or did what they did and how that fits into the big picture.

Poetry, too, requires immersing yourself in a world of words, of sounds, of rhythms, of ideas, of images. Which is anything but lonely. In fact, it can get right crowded and noisy in there.

Finally, if you want to know the truth, sometimes—oftentimes—the “loneliness” of spending time in those other worlds is more enjoyable than living in the real world.

Good Luck, Dale Walker.

There are many factors that play into achieving any sort of success as a writer. One of them is luck.

One of the luckiest things that ever happened to me when it comes to writing was meeting Dale Walker. Dale was one of those larger-than-life characters I first encountered at a Western Writers of America convention when the author paint on me wasn’t dry. He was a past president, past Roundup editor, past several other things in the group, and revered, it seemed, among the entire membership. He also edited the novels of many admirable writers and was a respected author of nonfiction himself. Being the socially awkward type I am, I admired him from a distance.

Then, still not long after I became a WWA member, the organization announced the creation of a fiftieth anniversary anthology with Dale as the editor. Not knowing any better, I submitted a story.

I saw Dale at the next WWA convention and screwed up the courage to introduce myself. He hinted that my story would be in the anthology. It would be, outside of some success with poetry, my first publication of any note.

It must have been at the next year’s convention or one soon after that I again screwed up my courage and handed Dale a proposal for a novel. He tracked me down the next day and said it was one of the best proposals he had ever seen—but, unfortunately, the publisher he represented wasn’t inviting any new authors into their Western line.

But he asked if I knew anything about a guy named John Muir. As it happened, I knew a bit more about the man than Dale did and related one of my favorite Muir stories about his riding out a Sierra windstorm perched in the top of a tree just for the fun of it. Dale said he was working on a project and may get back to me. Later that day, or perhaps the next, he took me aside again and asked if I would like to write a book about John Muir for a new nonfiction series—“American Heroes”—he was editing for Forge Books.

Just like that, I became a writer of books. All because I had the good luck to meet a man named Dale Walker.

My admiration for Dale only grew through working with him and getting to know him better and becoming friends over the years. I only wish I had gotten lucky earlier. Not because it may have helped me become something of a writer sooner, but because it would have been my good luck to know Dale longer and better, just because he was Dale.

Dale died December 8, 2015.

Lies They Tell Writers, Part 22: Vomit on the Page.

Our last effusion, outpouring, gush, upchuck of “Lies” talked about the physical process of writing.

Here we go again.

I cannot count the number of times I have heard writers and writing instructors advise other writers that when writing it is important, imperative even, to write write write write write write write.

Do it quickly. Don’t slow down (hence, the absence of commas above). Don’t stop. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, punctuation, word choice, or anything else. Just get it on the page (or screen) as fast as you can. You can always fix it another time.

A popular way of putting it is, “vomit on the page and come back later to clean it up.”

That doesn’t work for me.

It could be because I have written advertising copy for so many years. When you are confined to a fraction of a page or a half-minute of air time, you don’t have a lot of words to work with. Every one has to work hard on its own and play well with others. So, you carefully consider and contemplate every word, often before you write it.

Writing poetry is much the same, which is where I went next. Then short stories and magazine articles. By the time I got to novels and history books it was too late. I was already trained to examine each word, mull over every phrase, and think about every sentence. If something isn’t right, I am not capable of moving on. (Which is not to say everything I write is right; anyone who’s read my stuff knows better.) I can try, but it nags and niggles at me like a burr under a saddle blanket and I have to make it as right as I can before I can move on.

It’s more like playing with your food than vomiting on the page, I suppose.

The point is, writing is something you do by yourself. You have to do it your way. If that means barfing verbs and nouns and adjectives, fine. But if ruminating over every jot and tittle works for you, that’s fine too. 

Riding the Range with Rawhide Robinson.

Soon we’ll be setting out for the Llano Estacado and an adventure with Rawhide Robinson. As announced earlier, the novel in which he stars, Rawhide Robinson Rides the Range, is the winner of this year’s Spur Award for Best Western Juvenile Novel from Western Writers of America.

We’ll leave the Wasatch Front, cross paths with the trail Dominguez and Escalante blazed as well as the Old Spanish Trail, head east through the Colorado Rockies past Doc Holliday’s grave, travel south beyond Pikes Peak to connect with the Santa Fe Trail over Raton Pass, then southeast to the XIT Ranch and Dalhart, Texas, on to Amarillo and the Frying Pan Ranch, south past Charlie Goodnight’s Palo Duro Canyon, then on to Lubbock and the annual WWA convention.

It’s a Wild West journey Rawhide Robinson himself would be proud of. But I doubt we’ll experience the kind of extraordinary adventures he did. You are invited—encouraged, even—to ride along with Rawhide Robinson as you read about his escapades in the award-winning novel, suitable for grown-ups and young adults alike. You can get it through online booksellers and it’s available through your local bookstore.

Advance Coverage.

The artwork above is the cover design for The Lost Frontier: Momentous Moments in the Old West You May Have Missed. I think it’s quite handsome.

Behind the cover are nearly thirty nonfiction accounts from Western history about events and incidents on the frontier that haven’t received the notice they deserve from serious historians. They’re interesting, important, informative, and entertaining and I hope fans of the Old West learn something new.

The folks at TwoDot/Globe-Pequot, publisher of the book, are really on the ball, for while The Lost Frontier won’t hit the shelves until May, it has been listed with online booksellers for quite some time—so, if you’re a long-term planner, you can log on and pre-order a copy.

Hot off the press.

The second issue of the new online magazine, Saddlebag Dispatches, is now available. Boss editor Dusty Richards and his crew have assembled an impressive array of fiction, history, photography, and essays on the American West, so there will be something for every taste somewhere in the more-than-100 pages.

On page 82 is part two of my serialized long short story, “The Passing of Number 16,” in which the big bad Wolf threatens young bareback rider Tanner Lambert, and Deputy Hugh Morgan shreds another toothpick.

New to this issue is the first installment of a column Dusty asked me to write for the magazine, “Best of the West,” in which I sing the praises of the best writer among all the classic cowboy poets. That’s on page 102. You can get to Saddlebag Dispatches here: http://www.saddlebagdispatches.com/campfire.html. And be sure to invite all your friends to take a look as well.

Lies They Tell Writers, Part Two: Develop a Routine.

Set aside a time, a place, a situation for writing. Immerse yourself in the appropriate milieu for motivation. It might be a certain style of background music, or maybe it’s silence. Brightly lit, perhaps, or softly illuminated. Have your favorite thesaurus at hand, and align the proper number of freshly sharpened number two pencils. But whatever you do, however you do it, you must—must—create an environment that turns your attention inward and focuses your concentration on your art; an ambience that filters out distractions and informs your mind and body that it’s time to write.

That’s the kind of thing I've heard over and over again about how to write.

It might work for some. Maybe. But why limit your ability, your opportunities, to write to a certain confined situation? Why not write anywhere, anytime?

I have written while all by myself and when surrounded by family. In private and in public. At desks and at kitchen tables. Indoors and outside. In offices and airports and hotel rooms. On a computer. A notepad. A scrap of paper. With and without music and while sitting in front of the TV or listening to the radio. In bed, on the couch, on the porch, at the library, in restaurants, on the bus.

If I’ve spent any time there, chances are I’ve written something there.

Manufactured surroundings and invented schedules might sound like an effective way to free yourself to write. On the other hand, such machinations may prove so confining, so restrictive, they smother the muse. It might work for some. It may even work for you. But, despite what proponents of predictability preach, it ain’t necessarily so.

Instead, write. Just write. Wherever and whenever the opportunity arises.

The words don’t care.

Lies They Tell Writers, Part 1: Write What You Know.

You hear it all the time at writer’s workshops: write what you know.

I don’t believe a word of it. Writing about what you know about seems to me a recipe for repetition and stagnation.

 Instead, write what you want to know. The best writers are inherently curious, always seeking—through reading or travel or whatever—to learn something new. You could call it research. And those new things, whether sought out deliberately or stumbled upon by serendipity, often find their way into a story, a song, a poem, or a book—usually after considerably more research and curiosity.

Now, this is not to say you shouldn’t develop some mastery of the subject—know it, in other words—before you write about it. For one thing, readers who do know can spot a phony from afar. For another, writers owe readers a heaping helping of honesty, truth, and reality along with entertainment. And that’s true whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, poetry or plays, essays or songs, movies or magazine articles.

Texas poet Larry D. Thomas would never have imagined The Goatherd had he not been curious about what life might have been like for a man who tended goats in long-ago Texas. Michael Zimmer would not have written the outstanding novel Beneath a Hunter’s Moon had he not wondered about the somewhat obscure Métis and their ways. We would not have South Pass had Will Bagley not set out to discover the finer points of exploration and emigrant travel over the Continental Divide’s easiest crossing. And so on.

Don’t let your writing be limited by the limits of your knowledge by believing the lie that you should write what you know. Learn something new. Then, you’ll come to know what you write—and so will your readers.