Coverage for a Forthcoming Book.

Come August, Five Star will release a new novel by yours truly: Father unto Many Sons. As you see above, the cover has been designed and is quite handsome.

The book is set around about 1840 and tells the story of a father who uproots his Tennessee family to escape the evils of slavery by settling in Mexico. His wife and two of his three sons aren’t too keen on the idea, resulting in a number of difficulties. The third and youngest son supports his father and follows his lead, adding to the troubles with the other brothers. All this is made even more difficult by trials and tribulations along the trail.

The book retells an older story, setting it in the American West’s challenging landscapes and violent, tumultuous times.

Western Writers Hall of Fame author Lucia St. Clair Robson read the book and said, "The riveting prologue of Father Unto Many Sons makes it well-nigh impossible to resist reading to the last page of the book. Author Rod Miller has combined vivid period detail with memorable characters to create a story that gives the sensation of visiting another time and place."

I can hardly wait for August and the release of Father unto Many Sons. How about you?

Were people in the Old West better than now?

Many people I know—writers and readers and viewers alike—are of the opinion that people living in the Old West were somehow “better” than those of us walking the earth today.

Back then, people didn’t use profanity. Honesty and square dealing ruled the day. Men placed women on a pedestal. Women were content in the kitchen and keeping house. Children were obedient, save occasional innocent hijinks. And while those were violent times, it was mostly good guys in white hats killing bad guys in black hats who needed killing. Truth, justice, and the American way ruled the day.

Studying history—rather than reading novels and watching movies and TV shows based on celebratory mythology—will soon disabuse you of any notion that human nature was any different then than now. Or at any other time in the history of people, for that matter. Certainly social conventions change, but that only affects times and places of misbehavior rather than behavior itself.

Back then, while men pretended to put “the fairer sex” on a pedestal, wives were little more than chattel, and could be beaten with little or no consequence. Ladies of the evening were routinely mistreated, with abusers considering violence included in the price. Alcoholism was rampant, drug abuse widespread. Child labor routine. Mistreatment of minorities acceptable, even encouraged. And so on.

The only real difference between then and now is that bad behavior often occurred behind closed doors in those days, and was little noted. Unseen, but there all the same. Now, it fills our TV screens and newspapers day and night.

Our blind spot concerning the evil in days gone by reminds me of the poem “Antigonish” by William Hughes Mearns. It begins this way:

Yesterday upon the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d go away.