Hazel Hart's Blog

It All Started with Pemmican

Pemmican is one of the foods my main character, Cordelia, carries with her when she runs away from home. My critique partner asked, “What is pemmican?” Since I had picked up the word from a children’s Indian guidebook I had when I was about ten years old, I had only a vague idea of it being somewhat like beef jerky.

My friend’s question sent me on an Internet search. I found an amazing site, http://www.foodtimeline.org/ . If you want to know what people ate, when they ate it, and how they prepared it, this is the site for you. Starting with water and ice as the first foods, to the beginning of agriculture in 10,000 B.C., to Kool Aid pickles in 2009, this site is a treasure trove of food information and links. There is even a link to the trending foods in 2011.

About pemmican: It turns out that it is somewhat like beef jerky. It originated with American Indians and was used by mountain men, but pioneers crossing the plains often rejected it as the food of wild men. See http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodmeats.html#pemmican for more.

If you have a favorite food research site, please post it.

 

Dueling Sources

What does a writer do when sources disagree?

When I decided to set Cordelia’s Journey in Kansas Territory in 1855, I researched towns in existence during that time period. After reading about Pawnee, Kansas Territory, in Daniel Fitzgerald’s Ghost Towns of Kansas, Volume III, I decided Pawnee would be a perfect setting for a few early scenes in the novel. According to Fitzgerald, Andrew Reeder, first Territorial Governor of Kansas, informed the Pawnee town association in December 1854 or January 1855 that the legislature would meet in Pawnee if the town provided a suitable building. In April 1855, Reeder issued a proclamation that the legislature would convene in the town. Fitzgerald went on to report that a building boom followed, with hundreds of people arriving, new houses going up and new businesses opening. Because of all the activity going on, I described Pawnee as a bustling town, complete with a boarding house, restaurant, church, and livery stable.

I was pleased with my depiction of Pawnee until I started reading Bleeding Kansas by Alice Nichols, who proclaimed that at the time the Legislature met, the town consisted of “Two half-finished shacks and a windowless, doorless, two-story stone capitol building….” Although one of the members of the Legislature claimed there were accommodations such as boarding houses available, Nichols says that was not the case.

Dismayed by the discrepancy between the bustling boom town and the two-shack description, I looked for a third source and located The Old Pawnee Capitol, a thirty-eight page pamphlet published by the Kansas Historical Society. A quick review of the publication revealed that Fitzgerald had used large passages from this book in his description of Pawnee.

Almost satisfied with Pawnee as a bustling town, at least for a couple of months, I searched the Kansas Historical Quarterly archives for more on Pawnee. In the Autumn 1969 issue, I found the article “Scenes in (and En Route to) Kansas Territory,” a compilation of five letters by William H. Hutter written in the autumn of 1854. In a letter dated November 18, 1854, Hutter wrote:

About a half mile below the Fort (Riley) is the site for the projected town of Pawnee. It is a fine location and struck the fancy of our entire party, as a very desirable place. Several of them secured claims in the vicinity. … The streets are to be 80 and 100 feet wide. The proprietors number some of the best and most enterprising men in the Territory and as an evidence of their energy, intend commencing the immediate erection of a large Hotel, which will be open for visitors early in the spring. The wages of mechanics are very high here. Stone Masons get $2.40 a day and board.

The above description of activity in November of 1854 leads me to believe Fitzgerald’s description of town in the midst of a building boom as it prepared to be the capital of Kansas Territory, a role that lasted for only four days.

Finally, a Kansaspedia article notes that when the members of the legislature arrived on July 2, 1855, the capitol building was not finished in spite of the “building boom” going on. With the majority of sources bearing out my first impression, I’m keeping my Pawnee scenes as I originally wrote them. Having sources at hand to show critics who may have a different vision of what the town was like gives me some comfort.

For my readers: What about you? How do you handle discrepancies in research? What are your most reliable sources? Please post a comment.

Women: People or Incubators?

When completed, my series of novels with the subtitle A Spirited Journey will trace a fictional family of American women striving for freedom and equality from 1855 to the present day. An important step toward freedom and equality was the 1965 Supreme Court decision striking down state laws that had made birth control for married women illegal.  That decision gave women the ability to control the number of children they had and when they had them. It gave women the physical freedom to obtain an uninterrupted education and pursue a career.

(Read more: A Brief History of Birth Control

Now the tide is turning and birth control is being challenged, even as personhood amendments are proposed in state legislatures. As legislatures seek to limit women's access to birth control and give more rights to the unborn, the world these laws are creating for women of the future contains chilling possibilities that make excellent fodder for science fiction writers.

In an article, "Pollution in Utero," published in the April 2, 2012 edition of Time magazine, Alice Park writes about a research study which shows the effects of pollutants,  "specifically polycylclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)," on babies who are still in the womb. These pollutants are in car exhaust and cigarette smoke and can cause anxiety and depression in children as they grow. Exposure to these pollutants can be measured in the baby's blood cord at delivery.

The studies were done in New York City where exposure to car exhaust is virtually unavoidable unless one lives in a plastic bubble for nine months, a fact that brings me to "What if?"—the starting point for much fiction.

What if the personhood amendment passes? What if additional laws are passed to protect the child in the womb? What if every child's blood is tested at birth to see if any pollutant—avoidable ones like drugs or unavoidable ones like the PAHs in car exhaust—is a result of the mother's environment? What if the existence of PAHs in the newborn's blood results in the mother being charged with child abuse and sent to prison? What if, in order to prevent the possibility of harm to the unborn, expectant mothers are forced into segregated living in some pregnancy compound until the child is born? What if she rebels and doesn't go and then miscarries? Will she be charged with murder? After all, the "person" she carried inside her died, and it was all her fault.

In the new world of personhood for the unborn, at what age does a female stop being a person and start being an incubator? Probably at puberty.

In half a dozen years or so, when I have brought my characters from the past of 1855 to the present of 2020 and write the above story based on "what ifs," will it be classified as science fiction or will it be an accurate reflection of American society?

Nails, Felling Axes, and Character Development

Creating an antagonist can cause problems. It is so easy to make the bad guy a stereotype, and it is sometimes difficult to admit that even bad guys have a redeeming characteristic or two. One of the characters I dislike in Cordelia's Journey is Cordelia's stepfather, Hiram Pierce. He is an overbearing, abusive jerk, but, of course, he doesn't think so. In fact, he is quite proud of himself, particularly in his abilities as a blacksmith. In one scene, I have him relating his achievements to his son Ambrose.

My problem: I had absolutely no knowledge of what an 1855 blacksmith had to brag about other than shoeing horses faster than the next blacksmith.

My solution: Internet research. Through search engines, I found information helpful in making Hiram more than a stereotype.

The first site is America Felling Ax which contains information on the making of the American felling ax. When I learned the importance of creating an ax with good balance, I knew making a better ax than other blacksmiths could be a source of pride and bragging rights for Hiram.

With felling axes as a focus for research, I found another source through Google, an online sample book chapter, American Axes: a survey of their development and makers, which underlined the importance of the blacksmith and the skill it took to make an axe, complete with illustrations of how axes were made.

Further research into items made by 1855 blacksmiths led me to the importance of nails as a source of income. An article, All About Nails, gives a brief history of nail making and tells how buildings were sometimes burned down for the nails that held them together. From another article, Blacksmithing History 2, I learned how the invention of the steam engine and the rise of factories that mass produced axes and nails cut into a blacksmith's income.

With this knowledge, I am now able to make Hiram Pierce more than a stereotype. Hiram sees how new inventions and factories are threatening his livelihood. The loss of a steady stream of income (nails sold for a dollar each), causes Hiram to move west where he can add land to his wealth. Of course, he continues to be a blacksmith, but he needs sons to help him work the land he has acquired. Each loss of a male child makes him more determined to have sons, even as he realizes the gender of a child or whether it lives or dies is completely out of his hands, as is the rise of factories that threaten his income. Hiram, who is all about control, feels he has lost control of his life.

The Great Book Hunt

Rummaging through old books in search of overlooked gems that will yield needed information for my writing is one of my favorite pastimes. Nothing else excites me like a pile of old books for cheap prices.

Over the past five decades, I have carried home enough books to fill the walls and floors of wherever I'm living. At times, an overflow of books has caused me to move to a bigger living space. I have favorite subject areas, and one of those is history.

Some time ago, I read that children's books were a great source of basic information on almost any topic, so I added them to my list of books to sort through at library sales and thrift store shelves. One of the gems I found that has been valuable as I write about Cordelia's life in 1855 is a book called How the Settlers Lived by George and Ellen Laycock.  This little 113-page book once graced the shelves of a junior high library and, sadly, has a broken spine. Even so, the information by the Laycocks and the full-page illustrations of pioneer life by Alexander Farquharson make the tattered book worth keeping. I have seen only a few others available from online used book dealers.

The Laycocks vividly detail the journey west by horseback, wagon, and boat. They chronicle the methods of clearing the land and building a home, of planting crops and hunting game, of making clothes and staying healthy, and of having a good time when all the work was done. This little book introduced me to methods of felling trees to clear the land, a detailed way of hanging a door without iron hinges, and how to cook over an open fire on the hearth. There are step-by-step instructions for hunting deer and trapping beaver. There is an entire chapter on making clothing, from preparing deer skins to spinning the hair of wild animals, such as buffalo and bear, into clothing, sometimes mixing the animal fibers with plants, such as milkweed heads and flax.

In a chapter on staying healthy, the Laycocks reveal that hygiene was minimal.  Bathing, when it was done, often occurred in a stream. In the home, one basin of water served everyone in the house as they took turns washing and drying their hands and faces. Insects were everywhere. A lack of cleanliness and understanding of the causes of disease resulted in many illnesses and deaths.

Yet, for all their hard work, the settlers had good times. Any get-together might lead to a party afterward. Work sharing gatherings, such as corn huskings, log rollings, and apple parings provided a reason for dancing, dinners, and contests involving shooting matches and other manly challenges.

For all the above reasons, How the Settlers Lived is one of my research gems. Do you have a favorite book for researching the past. If so, please leave a comment and let us know. We'll build a list.

 

Wash Day

Today, doing the laundry is usually accomplished in one of two ways: We own an automatic washer and dryer and do the laundry at home, or we pack up our clothes in baskets or bags and head to a laundromat. When I was a child living on a farm, we also packed our clothes in baskets and took them to a laundry in town. There we paid to use an electric Maytag wringer washer and three additional tubs of water for rinsing the washed clothes.

An early scene in my novel, Cordelia's Journey, has my main character, Cordelia, doing laundry. Even though I had a general idea of what was involved in washing clothes in 1855, I needed details. An Internet search brought up many sites. One of the most useful was Old & Interesting, and not just for laundry. The site's subtitle, "History of Domestic Paraphernalia," accurately describes the range of articles on cooking, cleaning, and household furnishings through the ages. Not only was I able to set Cordelia up with wooden tubs and a plunger but found descriptions of irons, butter churns, log cabin beds, and more. Since this site covers domestic life from medieval times through the early 1900s, I spent a guilty afternoon dipping into the past instead of writing about it. If you have a favorite site involving nineteenth century household furnishings, please leave a comment with a link.

First Steps

Welcome to A Spirited Journey.

I invite you to follow me through the research and development of the characters in my series of upcoming historical novels about the journeys of American women from subjugation to equality–from 1855 when women could not own property, vote, or even protect themselves from a violent husband to the current day when all three are rights under the law.

The first book in the series, Cordelia's Journey, will be published in July 2012. Briefly, in May 1855, thirteen-year-old CORDELIA PIERCE decides to run away from home when her stepfather shows signs of a sexual interest in her. She knows she must run even though she is worried about the fate of her three little sisters and her pregnant, bedridden mother, MINERVA PIERCE, if she isn't there to help care for them. Disguised as a boy, she travels from Hidden Springs, a small settlement in Kansas Territory, to Westport on the Missouri River, hoping to enlist the aid of her mother's sister, HANNAH TRUE, in rescuing Minerva from a husband obsessed with having sons. Out of ten pregnancies, Minerva has five living children, four daughters and a son. She has had four miscarriages. One additional son was born alive the previous winter, but died one week later. Her mother's weakened condition has Cordelia fearing for her mother's life.

I started Cordelia's Journey in November 2011 as part of the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) challenge and ended up with 20,000 words, far short of the 50,000 word goal. With every scene, items and events required research. From what my characters wore to how they washed it, from courting to crime, from laundry to politics, from the mundane to crucial issues of the time, I am pouring over the sources that will help me bring the past alive and walk in the shoes of my characters.

I invite you to join me as I gather the facts behind my fiction. I'll be reading books and visiting websites, museums, libraries, and ghost towns and sharing my historical research journey with you on this blog.