Changing Direction

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Carol Buchanan

Three Montana Vigilante Novels

Three Montana Vigilante Novels

Last week I mentioned on Facebook that I would be announcing a change in my writing direction today. I hope no one thought I might decide not to write any more stories of courageous people forced to make dangerous choices in order to survive in Montana.

The opposite is true. I’ve recognized:

  • Writing these stories is a calling.
  • The stories are building an audience.
  • I have made friends locally and throughout the Internet with people who like my books.
  • I don’t want to disappoint them.

Besides, although it’s hard work that involves sitting alone in rooms for hours on end, year after year, I love it.

I’m at the tipping point, though.

For two or three years I’ve been teaching self-publishing at our local community college and simultaneously writing a self-publishing newsletter and a blog for Montana Business (mtbusiness.com) called the Entrepreneurial Author. Though I’ll continue teaching, I shall no longer write either the newsletter nor the Entrepreneurial Author blog. I have to write more stories of Alder Gulch and the Vigilantes — and eventually other stories of Montana that I heard from my parents. I’m on a mission to make sure my ancestors’ pioneering hardships, courage, and perseverance are not forgotten.

When I made this decision, I sent Jeff Mangan, the wonderful webmaster of mtbusiness.com, three blog posts. Jeff says he has them in the queue. If you want to read past posts, enter my name in the search box at the top right of the home page.

I’ve enjoyed giving back to the writing community by sharing my experiences in self-publishing. But I just can’t do everything.

Stay tuned to this blog for more announcements as new stories and — yes — the fourth novel in the Vigilante series are published!

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Posted in Civil War, gold, Gold Under Ice, historical legal thriller, Law & Vigilance, Montana's Civil War, Montana's Vigilantes, Westerns | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Not My Story, But…

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Carol Buchanan

Some stories belong to other people from the git-go, and this one isn’t properly mine, but I’m affected by it. So I’ll let you in on it and give you the links so you can read it from the woman whose story it is.

My part is very small. I’ve been a privileged bystander in a drama the likes of which we seldom encounter in real life. My role reminds me of a speech from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, one of my favorite poems:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two…

Still, I have a front row seat to an exciting drama.

Here goes:

After 36 years of marriage, I have acquired in-laws I never knew about. After 36 years of wondering what my husband looked like as a little kid — baby pictures? — I have seen old photos with the world’s cutest little boy. Of course, I might be prejudiced, but I doubt it.

My newly discovered sister-in-law, Peg Baer Hasselt, searched for her older brother for 40 years. On Friday, April 13, he told me they had connected. It wasn’t a complete surprise, because I had fielded the call from the PI looking for him and told him about it. Nonetheless, it has rocked us — especially him. He had tried a few times to locate Peg, but women are very difficult to find. We change names, and Peg had been adopted so her maiden name was not the same as my husband’s. Or mine, since I’m borrowing his name while we’re married. (Women don’t have names in our culture, you realize. We borrow our father’s name, then our husband’s, unless we choose our own names as some of my friends have done.)

How did he get lost? After being honorably discharged in Europe from the U. S. Army in 1971, he didn’t go home. He tells me he couldn’t go home, and now that I know more I agree. If I had come from that dysfunctional a family I would not have gone home either. Enough said.

I like the idea of having more relatives, especially as nice a sister-in-law as Peg seems to be. I only know her from her blog and her kid pictures that I’ve seen now, but I’m happy our family circle has expanded.

Yes. It is good.

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Beer and Vigilantes

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Carol Buchanan

God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana

The front cover of God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, 2009 Spur Winner

The goldfields of Grasshopper Creek and Alder Gulch was incredibly hard labor. All up and down the 14 miles of Alder Gulch, thousands of men broke rock, smashed the pieces, and separated the gold. Their efforts paid off more or less well, but uniformly it made men thirsty.

They drank a monotonously narrow range of alcoholic beverages: Valley Tan, a “whiskey” compounded of white lightning, water, and tobacco for color; wine of various origins and uncertain content; and beer.

The beer came from breweries established by men who knew opportunity when they saw it. And two enterprising vendors were instrumental in the Vigilante activities that started up in December 1863.

A British saloon keeper named William Palmer inadvertently set the entire Vigilante episode in motion one December day when he drove his team down the Gulch to deliver beer to an outlying customer. The weather was more like October than December, so he took his shotgun with him, thinking to get in a little grouse hunting on his way back. He delivered the barrels of beer (history or my memory is a little cloudy on just how much beer he delivered) and on the return trip he shot a grouse.

The bird landed in some brush, and Palmer went after it. To his horror, he found it had fallen on a corpse. The body lay face up, its frozen hands clenched around some scraps of sagebrush, and its eyes and other soft parts pecked out and nibbled away. “The hand of Providence,” Palmer said later, “made that bloody bird drop right onto the poor bloke’s breast.”

He went to a nearby camp for help to load the body into the wagon, but the men refused. One said, “They kill men all the time in Virginia City. Why should we care about this fella?”

Incensed, Palmer managed to load the stiffened corpse into his wagon and drove up the Gulch. All along the way, he tried to find someone who might identify his cargo, and he also accepted sympathetic drinks to stiffen his resolve. Not until he reached Virginia City did he find someone who identified the body from a pocket knife he carried.

Hearing how Palmer had found the corpse, and angry at the callous refusal of the others to help him, a group of 25 men signed an oath of secrecy and mutual support. About 10:00 p.m. that night, they started out to ride down to the camp.

(God’s Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, tells how they arrested three of the men and brought them back for trial.)

One of the members of the Vigilante group was a German brewer named Charlie Beehrer. He was, by his own account, a tough man with a stern sense of right and wrong who was not one to let wrong-doers escape punishment. He was also a very strong man who sometimes delivered a keg of beer on his back to customers. By all accounts, Mr. Beehrer’s beer was excellent. He had brought over the recipe and the brewing techniques from Germany. Not surprising, hops was a profitable crop in the Alder Gulch area.

Both Palmer and Beehrer brewed their own beers to their own recipes and their own methods. I would like to know how the two beers tasted. English beer and German beer. I’ve drunk both, but never in a side-by-side comparison.

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Posted in God's Thunderbolt, historical legal thriller, Law & Vigilance, Montana's Vigilantes, Stories from Montana History | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Law and Vigilantes

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Carol Buchanan

Three Vigilante Books

Three Vigilante Books

The word “vigilante” arouses visions of mobs killing people because they muttered to themselves or were the wrong color. It conjures up images of witches screaming as they burn, or crosses aflame by night. It’s associated with the breakdown of law, the antithesis of civilization.

Badly written novels with lurid covers exploit this habitual response to the idea of vigilantism, and some historians and novelists can’t suspend their image of vigilantes to consider an alternative view.

The Vigilantes of Montana did not act in defiance of the law because there was no law. At the time, what was to become southwest Montana was part of Idaho, and in carving Idaho Territory from four others in 1863, Congress forgot to assure the transfer of law from one of them to Idaho. Of course, Congress was a little busy at the time, with a conflict known as the Civil War.

That’s right. No law. No code of law whatever. In fact, in 1867, 3 years after Montana was separated from Idaho, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled that a man convicted of a crime while there was no law did not commit that crime because there was no law against what he did. All felons convicted during the first year of Idaho Territory’s existence (March 3, 1863 – March 4 1864) were set free.

So that’s the first thing: no law.

Add to that an estimated 25,000 people (90% men) going after gold in one of the largest gold strikes on the North American continent. Between June 1863, when gold was discovered in Alder Creek, and the end of 1866, when it was all played out, an estimated $20,000,000 in gold was taken out of Alder Gulch.

Only a man’s individual conscience governed how he was willing to get his gold. Young men fell in with the wrong friends, and soon they were stealing gold, committing armed robbery, and murder.

That’s the fingernail version of the historical background.

Next week: Who were the people?

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Brushing the Soul

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Carol Buchanan

Portrait of Gus

Gus on a summer's day

I haven’t posted since January 11! That breaks the first rule of blogging: Thou shalt write regularly. To which I answer, Life happens. Sometimes it throws a curve ball, or a roadblock, or some other kind of obstacle in our paths. Or sometimes we have very large tasks that take time to plan and do.

In his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey called these large tasks “Big Rocks.” I’ve had a lot of Big Rocks to move since the middle of January, but they are mostly moved.

Moving my husband’s business occupied Feb. 25 through March 3. We sorted, sifted, tossed, donated, packed and moved to a lovely new location in our town that better fits his business. Then we had to unpack and set up the servers, the network, the PCs, the desks, the books, and settle it all.

Somewhere along in there I learned that my sister’s battle with cancer is in its final stages. There is nothing more to be done for her. The hardest part about that is knowing it didn’t have to happen. At the first sign of a problem, she went to her doctor. He blew her off. “You’re just getting old.”

She had to wait three months before he went on vacation and she could get another opinion from a different medical practitioner in that clinic. That was in February 2009. Three years, several types of chemo, and two major surgeries later, we are here. Nearing the end of the journey.

Do you know what anger feels like? I thought I did, but I’ve learned better. Thinking of the uselessness of this, the waste of her life, I am at times incendiary with rage. Beowulf’s dragon breathes its scorching fire; I see it now as I write. My fury could consume me and leave me a pile of ashes on the floor, an act of spontaneous combustion.

That’s where it stops. There will be no revenge, no retaliation. Eventually, I may be able to forgive the doctor because as a Christian I’m enjoined to do so. But feelings are not so governable, and I doubt I’ll ever think his attitude was right.

I pray about this. Of course I do.

I go out to Gus’s place. Shoveling out his shelter, carting the road apples to the manure pile, I work off the worst of the anger. I put on his halter and he cocks an ear at me to sense if I’m in a mood he might have to worry about. I loop the lead rope around a fence post because he hates to have his head confined by being tied, and I set to work.

One hand holds the rubber curry, the other holds the stiff brush. I begin with his face, lightly with the brush only, and work down his neck. Curry and brush, curry and brush, following the lie of his coat, I clean the gray mud off him.

He moves around and tries to walk away, testing me, but I bring him back. Four or five times. The gray cracks and blows away and the rich, red-brown winter coat emerges. He stands, head up, ears swiveling as he watches for predators.

I’m at his ribs now, brushing under his barrel, then in long sweeping strokes from neck across the shoulder down the flank. From withers to tail. By the time I’ve brushed both sides and his rump, the lowering sun sets the Swan Range on fire.

A stray beam makes his coat shine. I laugh out loud at the beauty and wonder of the moment. He stretches out his neck and yawns, licks his lips. We are happy together.

I slap at the inch-long dead hairs on my coat, and spit them out of my mouth. There will be more mud to brush off, more hairs that stick to my face and get in my mouth. There will be more road apples to shovel.

Somehow, though, brushing Gus, my soul feels burnished.

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