I recently completed my first novel in the Western genre.
I have read this novel at least ten times by now, and just finished reading the author’s proof that I received in the mail. I feel somewhat guilty about really enjoying this book—surely I’m biased and am missing something.
One thing I consciously chose to avoid in this novel—the first in a series of three that is going to explore the terrible things that happened in the Pleasant Valley range war of 1880’s Arizona Territory—is graphic violence of the sort that our culture enjoys in the abstract sense provided by books and movies. Perhaps this is because modern America is unfamiliar with real violence. In my novel, when the first few murders of the range war occur, they happen off stage—still incredibly impactful to the community, but not graphically represented for the reader. I’m doing this on purpose, but I will need to adjust this stylistically as the range war erupts and chaos starts to take over. I’m pondering how to do this in a consistent way.
My main character is a pretty unusual one. She becomes our guide to the humanity and the inhumanity behind the cause of this range war. She is a widow who had plans to go to Arizona before her husband passed away suddenly. Very unusual case. I have considered if she’s too unusual, but then I remember my grandma and my great-grandma and their hard, adventurous people, and I think maybe she’s not completely unreal.
One thing in the first book I intentionally showed was how the ranch community welcomed her and admired what she brought to the community. She’s tough and unbending—even while silently grieving a recently dead husband. She has great powers of observation. She counts things and remembers them. She works on the small plot that she bought with the first proceeds from her freighting business—driving small numbers of cattle and hauling goods between the isolated valley and the two closest towns—each of which is over eighty miles away.
I made a point to reflect a culture we no longer remember where men showed respect to women, particularly women they admired. I also am trying to show a historically representative ranching culture where Anglos expanding to the west interact with families who had moved north from Mexico generations earlier. In my book, just like in the world of my grandparents, these two different cultures have the general tendency to appreciate each other and each other’s traditions.
I read an interview with Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove”) recently where he felt over-focused on the “badness” of the American West. He stated his goal was to “demythologize” the West, mostly because he believed that “The history of our country is a violent history, a racist history, and a misogynistic history. It wouldn’t be correct, politically or otherwise, to paint it as civilized.”
Though I love his characters and books while disagreeing with the decisions he made in them, I wonder if it’s the place of any author to “demythologize” history. Especially if we are doing this from within the comfortable boundaries of our own mythologies. My objective is to present the history accurately and with as little of my twenty-first century bias as I can manage.
I think about the mythology of the 1880’s in the West. The mythology of my Great Great Grandfather, who sold a horse to Jesse James after fighting in a Civil War on the opposite side of Jesse. Who built a small farm despite pressure from outlaws, dangerous wildlife, and disease and loss. I suspect we have exaggerated the more brutal aspects of his mythology for our own entertainment, but they were certainly a part of it.
In interviews, McMurtry admitted that though he had intended “Lonesome Dove” to “demythologize” the West, he quickly recognized that he had only accomplished the opposite. “Lonesome Dove,” which had been intended to be a long critique of western mythology, had become the chief source of western mythology. So when I write this book about the Old West, I try to do something different: navigate the place between the wilder parts of their era without forgetting the basic humanity they held, which in many ways was stronger than our own.
This “navigation” will be a good challenge as I move into the rest of the story, though. Stay tuned for Book Two in “The Rim Country,” where things begin to drift out of control and new players emerge with their own objectives and goals.
Find Book One of “The Rim Country” at the links below:
