Frontier Politics – Part One

Political Map of the US, 1856
courtesy of Wikicommons

This may or may not surprise you, but a huge factor in the settling of the American West was all about politics. Yep. I’m not a big fan of politics myself, but you can’t deny that it sure does have shaping power. And as romantic as it is to think about the West being settled for dreams of building a better life or civilizing the wilderness or even getting rich quick, a lot of it had to do with one political party trying to out-maneuver the other.

And that’s not even taking into account the whole reason why the Oregon Trail was established in the first place. You see, in the 1830s, there were already a few trading towns in the Pacific Northwest. The purpose of these towns was to provide ports for traders to export their goods to the rest of the world. But whether those key ports would be controlled by Americans or the British in Canada was still up for grabs. Borders and boundaries were a little fuzzy that far west, and since the home office of both governments, so to speak, was so far away in the East, it was easy for both sides to proclaim their country’s borders to be wherever it was most convenient for their interests to say they were, even if they overlapped.

So who is going to win a political argument about borders in a far, far distant—and yet economically key—area? Why, the country who has the most settlers in place to lay claim to the land. One of the reasons so many Americans were encouraged to pick up everything and dash west, carving out the Oregon Trail as they went, was because the government needed as many card-carrying Americans in place on the ground as possible so that they could claim the ports. It was a unique version of “squatters rights” played out on an international political playing field.

So to make a very long and not particularly interesting story short, President James Polk brought the political and foreign policy aspect of the Oregon border dispute to a head by first threatening to go to war with Britain over it, then compromising and agreeing to mark the border at the 49th parallel in 1846. Just keep in mind that it could have gone very differently and Oregon could have ended up as part of Canada if settlers weren’t encouraged to take the Oregon Trail and make their fortunes in the new land of opportunity.

This wasn’t the only compromise with a political slant that shaped the West, though. In fact, one of the most potent forces in the rush to expand settled land in the West was a result of the good old Missouri Compromise.

James K. Polk – I had to do a project about him in 6th grade and I’ve never forgotten him since.
Courtesy of Wikkicommons

The Missouri Compromise was an act of epic political scale that is one of the first things we all learn about in high school as we study the lead-up to the Civil War. I know I never really paid much attention to it beyond what I needed to know in order to pass those history tests, but actually, it was amazingly important to the way the West was shaped in the mid-19th century. In a nutshell, the Missouri Compromise was a law passed in 1820 that prohibited any state north of Louisiana, with the exception of Missouri, to be a slave state. South of that line, you were good to own slaves. North of it? No slavery allowed.

That sounds simple enough, but in 1854, as the rumblings of war were really beginning to heat up under the surface of this country, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in an attempt to negate the dictates of the Missouri Compromise. Meaning that the new states of Kansas and Nebraska could determine for themselves whether they would be slave states or free states based on a vote of the men living in those states. In other words, the population of the states could self-determine which side of the issue they would come out on.

So what did people do? They rushed as many settlers out into Kansas and Nebraska as they possibly could. Both sides did it. The population of these states skyrocketed, not because they were seen as the land of opportunity or a means of getting rich quick, but because each side of a political debate back East needed as many voting men on the ground as possible to win their way.

Of course, as we all know, fighting broke out, “Bleeding Kansas” became a nightmare of a place to live, the Civil War burst out in 1860…and the population of the west rose as settlers who came for one reason stayed for another. The same is true of California and several of the other western states, by the way. Funny how populating territories can become a tool of politicians hoping to win an argument.

But in case you were worried that it was all cynical Sally, once the Civil War did break out, the population of the west began to expand again as war-weary, disillusioned segments of the populace looked for ways to escape the bitterness back east. But I’ll talk about that next time.

The Later Oregon Trail

Sep8

Image by Captain-tucker, via Wikicommons
Can you imagine traveling for a month in this?

So for a while now I’ve been meaning to share some of my research for my new series, Hot on the Trail. The books of Hot on the Trail take place on various Oregon Trail journeys (and several of them overlap from book to book!). But I wanted to throw a slightly different twist into the works. The heyday of the Oregon Trail was the 1850s, but my stories, beginning with Trail of Kisses, take place in the 1860s.

So what is it about the 1860s that made me want to set a series of novels there? Especially when that’s not the usual time period for the Oregon Trail.

Well, technically the early part of the 1860s was still the very tail end of the days of the Trail. The First Transcontinental Railroad wouldn’t be finished until 1869, although it was officially started in 1863. Prior to that there were some stretches of railroad that spanned some of the distances over the gigantic midsection of the continent that people wanted to cross, but not enough to make the entire journey.

There was an alternative way to get from east to west besides the Oregon Trail in the 1860s, however. Stagecoaches. Companies like Wells Fargo could get you and your goods across the vastness of the prairie, for the right price. The disadvantages of stagecoach travel, however, were that they didn’t have room for much more than your basic suitcases of supplies. They were also crowded and uncomfortable. If you think cramming more than a dozen people into a tiny old stagecoach for a couple of hours was bad, try shoving them all in for a couple of weeks. Stagecoach travel was much faster than wagon trains, but it was hellish in the best of times.

So if you were planning on starting over and wanted to take anything with you to the wide open west, in the 1860s, wagon trains were still the way to go. But another aspect of the history of the Oregon Trail that led me to choose the 1860s over a decade or two earlier is the fact that by this time, the trail itself was less of a bleak wilderness trek and more of a gritty jaunt from one outpost to the next to the next.

Entire businesses had grown up along the trail by the 1860s, from supply depots to military escort forces to entrepreneurial ferrying companies that would take wagons across rivers. Instead of feeling like you were taking your life in your hands by venturing out into the unknown, the later Oregon Trail was more like a long, slow walk through the past two decades of enterprise to add your own piece to the pie. And when it comes to writing books set in an era, it’s a lot of fun to be able to have your characters come across established, recurring, populated places. Especially if there are several books in a series.

Image by National Park Service, via Wikicommons

But the number one cool thing that prompted me to set the Hot on the Trail series in the 1860s was the Civil War. Everybody knows how much impact the Civil War had on the lives of everyday Americans. But what fewer people stop to consider was that there was an entire chunk of the population that wanted nothing to do with the war. And they had an alternative to staying back east and sticking it out. They could leave and head west. Many did, either because they were pacifists or because they were new immigrants who wanted no part of the conflict or because they had served their time and were tired of war. There’s a wealth of character motivation in the stories of these people.

One other aspect of the Civil War comes into play as well. Something that provides high drama. And we know that high drama is awesome for stories. I mentioned a few paragraphs above that by the 1860s, there were entire enterprises established along the trail, including military escort services. The military would accompany wagon trains along the most dangerous parts of the journey, when Indian attacks were more likely. But when war broke out back east, all of those troops were called to join the fighting. Military garrisons were either abandoned or restaffed by unseasoned, undisciplined militias. And that meant that Indian attacks saw a huge uptick.

On the one hand, this makes for great drama. On the other, much sadder hand, because the attacks by Native Americans defending their homelands from incursions of settlers they didn’t know and didn’t understand rose so high, when the war was over and soldiers were free to be sent out west again, it spelled the beginning of the end for the indigenous people of this country. Attacks during the early 1860s when there was no military meant war when the army came back, and none of those wars did anything good for the Indians.

So there you have it. I hope to take deeper looks into some of these things as the weeks go by and the Hot on the Trail books start coming out. I’ll also be posting excerpts and snippets here and there, so stay tuned!

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Sold My Soul to the Company Store

Aug12

Marquette Lumber company store, circa 1891
courtesy of Wikicommons

Yesterday I got to do a very fun character interview from Phineas Bell, protagonist of Somebody to Love’s point of view for the Kimi-chan Experience. I was surprised by the last question she asked Phin, which was about how a company town in the late 19th, early 20th century worked. I had actually done a lot of research into the whole company system and learned a lot of fascinating and terrible things. So why not share that with you here?

If you’re at all interested in the 21st century debate about minimum wage, if you paid even a little attention to the Occupy movement or the 1% versus 99% discussion, then you will likely flip your lid when you learn about what the company system was back in the day and how it affected the lives of working men and women just over a hundred years ago. Because in a time before labor laws, back when the Gilded Age was also known as the Robber Baron Age, the 1% could get away with a lot more than they get away with now. (And I know, they get away with a LOT now)

“Company towns” generally grew up around mines or other sorts of remote, labor-intensive operations. In the simplest terms, the mine employed the men, paid them, owned their houses, and owned the store where everyone bought everything. These were the days before everyone owned a car, and a trip to the next town over or anyplace where an average person could shop at the competition’s establishment was a major, expensive undertaking. In essence, you were stuck where you were.

The disadvantage of being committed to one place was that whatever the owner of the mine where you worked and the town that you lived in wanted to charge for rent or groceries or just about anything, they could charge. You had no choice but to pay their price or hit the road, homeless and unemployed. It’s easy to think from our 21st century perspective that hitting the road would be the obvious choice, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time before unemployment compensation or easy transportation, a job could literally be the difference between life and death.

courtesy of Wikicommons

Unfortunately, it was the most vulnerable strata of the population that was at the mercy of these company systems. We’re talking uneducated laborers without a lot of support. They had families that depended on them and very little recourse to lodge complaints when times were tough and bosses were unfair. It wasn’t until much later that the government began to step in and pass laws to fix the blatant abuses of company towns.

One of the most shocking problems that these company systems had was that when times got tough for the bosses, they would start paying their workers in scrip instead of cash. Scrip was more or less Monopoly money that could only be used at the company store. It was worthless, especially for anyone hoping to save enough to get out of the horrible situation they were in.

Now, it wasn’t all super horrible, and the company town system did begin to change near the turn of the century, particularly after the Pullman Strike of 1894. Pullman, Chicago was one of the earliest company towns, planned and paid for by the Pullman railroad car manufacturer. When the company hit hard times in 1894, it tightened its belt by reducing workers’ wages without reducing the rents on their company-owned housing. The workers went on strike, demanding fairer conditions. The government stepped in, and after an investigation found that the workers’ lives were better off under the company system than they would have been otherwise. However, public opinion condemned the “paternalistic” style of the company town as “un-American.” Compromises and new ways of creating a balance between industry and humanity were hammered out.

It didn’t all happen overnight, and the reason why I’m a little vague in that last sentence is because there wasn’t one big push or law or incident that changed things, but rather a slow, steady progression through the first two decades of the 20th century. Wage laws were passed, health care laws came into being, but most importantly, automobiles became much, much more affordable. Honestly, the company system declined when workers no longer needed to live in the company town immediately surrounding their mine, and instead had the mobility to live miles away in a friendlier environment.

Don’t you just love how the dots connect in History?

Would You Have Been a Colonist?

Jul22

Okay, in my newly released novel, Saving Grace, the characters were all on their way to Earth’s first extra-planetary colony when their ship explodes and they have to land (crash) on the nearest habitable planet (or moon in this case). They have to start over from scratch where they are. However, they were almost going to have to start over from scratch once they got to the planet Terra, as the colony there is only ten or so years old. So what does that make this? Yep, it makes Saving Grace a story about building a colony.

This is another one of those ways that this “Science Fiction” story of mine is actually a historical novel in disguise. I’ve always been fascinated with stories of the earliest colonists that came to America. What American kid doesn’t start learning about the Pilgrims every November by dressing up in black with big buckles and funny hats? It also doesn’t take us long to learn about the Oregon Trail and other intrepid pioneers heading West to set up a new life. Even European history is full of storied of colonists. Australia, Africa, India…every continent has stories of colonists to tell.

And of course the first thing we learn about colonists is how hard their lives were. Carving civilization out of the wilderness is a challenge, no matter what era you live in. The Pilgrims may have come to Massachusetts seeking religious freedom, but their first challenge was simply to survive the winter. They had a lot of material to work with—good land, tools, knowledge, and determination—but they had to apply all of that to a land and climate that was unlike the world they had left behind.

Pioneers heading West were faced with the same problems. Land was abundant, the soil was fertile, minerals waited in the hills, but the sheer vastness and wildness of the territory was overwhelming to the small bands of people who set out into it. Not to mention the fact that it was already inhabited.

Spoiler alert, the moon that Grace and her friends (and foes) land on has no other human inhabitants (well, that they know of, at least), but it has abundant wildlife, rich mineral resources, and fertile ground. The whole thing is just waiting for them to claim it. The biggest problem they encounter—and it’s a huge problem—is each other.

Grace and company aren’t the only colonists who had that problem. One area of history that I am dying to explore more of is that of the initial colonization of Australia by the British. What I know of it paints an odd and exciting picture of ships full of convicts turned loose on the virgin landscape, surviving, evolving, devolving, causing chaos, and somehow, amidst all of that, eking out a living and creating a vibrant culture that lasts today.

This is what really excited me about writing the Grace’s Moon series. Taking what I learned in my history classes and studies about how colonies form, who the brave souls are who tend to start them, and the reasons they were founded formed the bedrock of the world on which this series is built. What would these advanced, clever people do when they suddenly had all of their technology taken away from them? How would they deal with the problems and conflicts they brought with them from Earth? Is it even possible to form a Utopian society, even when the landscape around you is rich with promise?

I wonder if the waves of colonists we have seen on Earth asked these same questions. Certainly the Puritans came to New England seeking a Utopia, but further south, in, say, Virginia, it was more of a “get rich or die trying” sort of inspiration that drove people.

Incidentally, I have an ancestor, a carpenter named Jonathan Lax, who was a settler at the original Jamestown settlement in Virginia. I don’t know much about him, but I wonder what made him leave his home in the Lake District of England to risk his life in a land that was as far away to him as the fictitious moon Grace and her people land on is to us today. Would I have been that brave? Would I have been a colonist?

You know, I think I would have. In fact, given the right promise, I think I might volunteer for a colonial mission to another planet myself. How about you? Would you leave everything you know to start over in a virgin land?

Women in Politics, 1900

Jun20

Yes! I got my first 1-star review of Somebody to Love! And it was the best possible kind of 1-star review too!

How can a 1-star review be a good thing, you ask? Well, when the criticism is all about a point of historical accuracy, and when the reviewer is, frankly, wrong, it gives me a great opportunity to talk about my favorite subject: History. The accusation was that it is grossly historically inaccurate for Phineas Bell to muse that his 4-year old niece, Eloise, could be President of the United States someday. The reviewer scoffed at the idea, saying that in 1900, when universal suffrage for women was still 20 years off, it would have been ludicrous for a man to think that his niece could be president.

I couldn’t disagree more.

Neither could the actual facts of history.

No, women were not able to vote in federal elections until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. However, this didn’t mean that they didn’t have political ambition or dreams of future equality. Far from it. Very far from it if you consider that the first woman was elected to Congress in 1916. Yes, Jeanette Rankin was elected to the House of Representatives from the state of, you guessed it, Montana, not in 1960, but 1916. That’s four years before women gained the federal vote. A woman. Congress. Elected. If a woman could be elected to Congress in 1916, why not shoot for the big office and assume that someday she could be president?

Jeanette Rankin, first woman elected to Congress in 1916

History runs deeper than that, though. It would be false to assume that no one, female or male, had any sort of dreams or ambitions in the political arena whatsoever until—poof!—one day in 1920 everyone decided “Okay, let’s give women the vote”. In fact, the roots of the suffrage movement run deep, deep into the first half of the 19th century. Early women’s rights pioneers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony spent the greater part of the 19th century fighting for the rights of women. They had enough support to fill lecture halls and demonstrations and to make their voices heard at the highest level. They were fighting so that women could participate in government, so why not continue that dream to hope that someday a woman could be the head of that government?

The truth of women in politics stretches even further than that, though. True, women may not have won the vote federally until 1920, but as early at 1869 they were able to vote and participate in government in the western states and territories. Wyoming granted women the right to vote in 1869, and by the end of the century just about every other western state had given women the vote or held referendums to enfranchise them. Again, I propose that the hopes and dreams of the people who supported the movement could easily have extended far beyond just the vote.

Why? And why the West? What made them so advanced and enlightened? Well, one theory was that women were able to have more direct participation in western politics precisely because conditions were neither advanced nor enlightened. Life on the frontier was harsh. In some cases it was primitive and it was lonely. With so little people to tame the land and govern it, women became an essential part of political life. They were sometimes left in possession of land and businesses when their husbands died. Better yet, in some cases they were considered equal partners in enterprising endeavors because the men in their lives had no choice but to count on them. So many women rose to the occasion that their political rights were a natural matter of course.

So impressive was the political power of women in the west and the role that they were given in state and local government, that the suffrage movement back east looked to them as example of what women could do and be and achieve. The Progressive Movement, which is generally held to have started in the 1890s and transformed politics in the early 20th century with platforms supporting universal suffrage, modernization of technology, an end to child labor, and an increase in education, was closely connected with suffragists in the West.

If you take nothing else from this lightning-fast examination of women in politics in and prior to 1900, though, come away with this. Even though women did not gain the vote until 1920, it took decades of work and hopes and fighting and reaching for more to bring public opinion and government around to the point where the work of Stanton, Stone, and Anthony became a reality. So was it unrealistic of me to have a man speculate that his niece could become president in 1900? No! Not at all! And remember too, in 1900, England had a queen, and she wasn’t the first. Women could, and would, rule.