M. Mark Miller, Author

Category: Narrative History

  • On Writing: Using Scrivener To Manage Multiple Threads in Narrative History

    This morning when I did my regular pass though my Facebook Page, I paused at the “Scrivener Tip of the Day.”

    Scrivener is writing software that I use for nearly all my work these days. It’s far to complicated to describe in a few sentences, but you can read about here. For this discussion, just think of it as a combination word processor and file manager with a suite of tools to help organize complicated writing tasks.

    One of the appeals of Scrivener is that a novice can figure out the basics in a few minutes and go to work, leaving the advanced features for later.  That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve learned enough about the program to find it very useful, but I still have a lot to learn.  That’s why I always check out the Tip of the Day.

    Often the tip is something I already know; often it’s about a feature that I think I’d never use, and sometimes—like today—it provides a solution to a problem that’s been vexing me for weeks.

    Today’s tip is by British crime novelist David Hewson, who explains how he uses Scrivener to keep track of the things as he writes a novel based on a Danish murder mystery broadcast by the BBC 4 as a television series, “The Killing.”  I’m sure there are major differences between Hewson’s work on a novel based on a TV series and my narrative history on events that happened in Yellowstone Park more than 130 years ago. But his post describes a problem that parallels one that I’ve been working on: how to keep track of a story that has several distinct threads.

    Hewson’s story has three separate threads:

    • A crime story about the pursuit of a killer.
    • A family story about couple struggling to come to grips with a tragedy.
    • A political story about a man’s effort to become mayor of Copenhagen.

    My book, which I’m calling Encounters in Yellowstone, has even more threads:

    • The Nez Perce Indians’ story of fleeing their homeland in Washington and Idaho in hopes of making a new life in the buffalo country of the Montana plains.
    • The Army under General O.O. Howard who pursue the Nez Perce across three states.
    • The Radersburg Party of tourists who have one of their members shot and left for dead, two women taken captive, and several fleeing through the wilderness.
    • The Helena Party of tourists who have two of their members killed in blazing gun fights with the Indians.

    In addition, Encounters will have several compact stories that are contained in single chapters.  These include stories of other army units that hunted for and fought the Nez Perce, settlers who were attacked and robbed, and scouts who scoured the wilderness looking for the Indians.

    Hewson describes how he uses Scrivener’s tools for labeling files, sorting them, and creating collections to keep track of various threads.  (You can see his blog post for the details.)

    Once threads have been assembled in collections, they can be viewed separately to check  for such things as completeness, continuity and style.  Two collections can be viewed simultaneously to check for transitions.  If any problems are spotted, they can be edited on the spot.

    I’ve posted here before about the problems of keeping things straight while writing a narrative history with a several  threads involving a large number of people.

    I said in that post “My job is to analyze the accounts of these people—and of dozens of others—and sift out the truth. Then I’ll try to put the whole thing together in a coherent whole. To do that, I’ll need to look for places where the various viewpoints converge and diverge, overlap and separate, compliment and contradict.”

    Hewson has described how to use Scrivener to help solve those problems.  I’m grateful for his advice and look forward to giving it a try.

    ∞§∞

  • On Writing: Narrative History Requires More Than Getting the Facts Right

    I just finished an article for The Pioneer Museum Quarterly on Fred Bottler, a pioneer rancher in the Yellowstone River’s Paradise Valley north of Yellowstone National Park. Bottler built the first ranch in the valley halfway between Bozeman and Mammoth Hot Springs. That made it an ideal stopping point for early expeditions exploring the park so dozens of park journals and reminiscences mention Bottler’s ranch.

    Gustavus Doane

    Bottler knew the Yellowstone Park area well because he had prospected for gold in there 1860s. That made him an ideal guide, and he accompanied several people who visited the upper Yellowstone in the 1870s.

    My article provides Bottler’s biographical information and recounts stories about him. One of those stories, told by Bottler’s son, Floyd, concerns a pair of needle guns, which were an early type of repeating rifle.

    Floyd said his father won the guns in a card game with soldiers at Fort Ellis, an army post near Bozeman. Although Bottler knew the guns technically were government property, he thought they would be handy if Indians attacked his isolated ranch. He decided to keep them.

    An officer at Fort Ellis, Lieutenant Gustavus Doane (who had a remarkable moustache), heard that Bottler had the guns and decided to retrieve them. Floyd said that when Doane arrived at Bottler’s house, the rancher invited him in and seated him where he could see the guns hanging on a wall.

    Floyd said Doane would look at the guns, then look at Fred, and then back at the guns. Finally, Doane told Bottler that a man living on the edge of Indian country needed such guns and he could keep them—but only if he kept them out of sight when he visited the fort.

    Then, Floyd said, “Their eyes met again and held for a long moment. Then both men rose and the hands met in a strong clasp”

    I couldn’t resist quoting that directly in my article. But when I asked Ann Butterfield, the Pioneer Museum Associate Director, to read a draft of my article, she objected.  She said she liked what I had written, except for that “gazed into each other’s eyes” stuff. “Men just don’t act that way,” she added with a scoff.

    I immediately checked my source and confirmed that I had quoted Floyd accurately. I assured Ann of that, but she was’t really  mollified. That made me think.

    It’s my job to present old stories for today’s readers. I want people to read straight through my stuff and say: “That’s interesting.” I don’t want them stop and say: “This just doesn’t sound right”—even if it is right.

    I also like to quote exactly what people wrote because their word choices make personalities and emotions shine through. It’s always a balancing act to decide when modern sensibilities might collide with old fashioned ways of saying things.

    When I turned in final draft of my article, it didn’t contain the “gazed into each others eyes” quote. Writing narrative history is not just about getting the facts right; it’s also about getting the reader’s experience right. If it distracts, it’s got to go.

    The Pioneer Museum Quarterly will publish my article on Fred Bottler in a few weeks.  I’ll let you know when it’s available.  Then you can decide if I made the right choice.

    ∞§∞

    — Photo detail from the Yellowstone Digital Slide File.

    — You can read an excerpt from my article on Fred Bottler here.

    — To see related posts, click on “Narrative History” under the Categories Button on the right side of this page.

  • On Writing: Cubism, Narrative History and the Nez Perce

    While organizing research notes for my next book, Encounters in Yellowstone 1877, it occurred to me that my task is akin that of the Cubist painters.  A hundred years ago artists including Pablo Picasso, George Braque and Juan Gris invented Cubism. They looked at objects from multiple viewpoints, analyzed each viewpoint, and then reassembled them into a single composition. That’s like what I’m doing.

    "Three Musicians," Pablo Picasso

    I’ve collected numerous pieces about the events of the summer of 1877 when the Nez Perce Indians encountered several groups of tourists while fleeing from the Army through Yellowstone Park.  Those pieces contain distinct—even disparate—viewpoints. Here are some of them:

    • Yellow Wolf, a young Nez Perce brave who felt justified in seeking revenge on all whites following the Army’s pre-dawn attack on the sleeping Indian camp that left dozens of women and children dead.
    • Emma Cowan, a young wife fulfilling her dream of visiting “geyserland” who spoke sympathetically of the plight of the Nez Perce in her reminiscence even after Indians left her husband for dead after shooting him in the head and then took her captive.
    • Jack Bean, an old Indian fighter who had been with the troops that buried the mutilated bodies of Custer and his men after the Battle of the Little Big Horn and had no qualms about scalping Indians.
    • General Oliver Otis Howard, an evangelical Christian and Civil War hero, who led his exhausted troops across Yellowstone Park after several humiliating skirmishes with the Nez Perce.

    My job is to analyze the accounts of these people—and of dozens of others—and sift out the truth. Then I’ll try to put the whole thing together in a coherent whole. To do that, I’ll need to look for places where the various viewpoints converge and diverge, overlap and separate, compliment and contradict.

    Like a Cubist painting, the final narrative won’t always arrange things in the way that people are used to seeing them, but I hope it will be compelling and enlightening.  I’m enjoying the challenge.

    ∞§∞

     — Image, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

    — To see related posts, click on “Narrative History” under the Categories Button on  this page.

  • Narrative History or Historical Fiction 3: A Moonlit Night In Yellowstone Park, August 23, 1877.

    “Should I approach it as narrative history or as historical fiction?” That question haunted me this week as I continued research for my next book, Encounters in Yellowstone 1877. I’ve written about it before, here and here.

    Great Fountain Geyser

    To write the kind of story readers want, I need to include details that bring the story to life and give it credibility. That’s true no matter how I approach the book, but there’s more flexibility in fiction.

    A crucial scene in the book occurs on August 23, 1877, the night before Nez Perce Indians take Mrs. Emma Cowan captive along with her brother, Frank, and their 13-year-old sister, Ida. Earlier that afternoon, the tourists learned that the Nez Perce had fought a bloody battle with the Army two weeks before and were headed toward the park. In her reminiscence about the trip, Emma admited the news worried her.

    In his book about the trip, Frank said, “Mrs. Cowan was uneasy, and upon being asked what was wrong, replied ‘nothing.’” Frank said that later he saw Emma come to the door of the tent she shared with her husband and Ida and look out several times. Emma’s repeatedly peering out of the tent is a good example of the adage, “actions speak louder than words.”

    I was reminded of Jerrie Hurd’s admonition to write slow scenes fast and fast scenes slow. Jerrie says “when you get to the action, slow down, take your time, fill-in as much detail as possible allowing the reader to savor every moment of what’s happening.”

    There’s no doubt that Emma was worried, but what did she see? If I knew that, I could heighten the drama, but neither Emma nor Frank described the scene and there are no other accounts by members of their party.

    What to do? I saw three options: (1) write historical fiction and invent a plausible scene, (2) write up what I already knew as narrative history and hope that my readers will forgive the lack of detail, or (3) do more research to flesh things out. I chose option 3.

    I knew that the tourists were camped in the trees near the Fountain Geyser, which is at the edge of the Lower Geyser Basin in Yellowstone Park, so the first thing I did was a web search for images of the area. I found several photos like the one above that show several geysers spewing columns of water and steam in the middle of a chalky plain surrounded by pine forest. (I plan to visit the site this summer to get more detail.)

    Then I reviewed Emma and Frank’s accounts of the evening. After deciding to head home the next day, the group put on a sort of minstrel show to celebrate. They built a bonfire and spent the evening singing and dancing. Then the bachelors in the group curled up in their blankets under the trees while Emma, her husband and Ida retired to their tent.

    Next, I looked for journals of travelers who were nearby that night. One of them was Jack Bean of Bozeman, a scout the Army hired to find the Nez Perce. Bean was on a hillside about 30 miles from Emma’s camp watching the Nez Perce arrive at Henry’s Lake. Bean didn’t comment on the weather, but apparently had no difficulty seeing the Indians’ campfires four miles away across the lake.

    Another Scout, S.G. Fisher, who had been hired in Idaho, was 10 miles closer than Bean in Targhee Pass. Fisher had heard about a Nez Perce camp ahead of him and was planning to attack it with his force of 80 Bannack Indians. Fisher said he approached the camp cautiously because “the moon was shining brightly.” Fisher found the Nez Perce had moved on—and I found an important snippet of information—it was a moonlit night.

    With the new information from my research, I feel confident that I can write compelling description of Emma’s behavior—one that sticks close enough to the facts to qualify as narrative history. It probably will go something like this:

    Emma didn’t fall asleep quickly that night. Instead, she repeatedly came to the door of the tent she shared with her husband and sister and peered out. Perhaps she was just checking to make sure the bonfire her friends had built to celebrate their impending departure from Yellowstone hadn’t spread.

    Perhaps she was hoping to see Fountain Geyser play one more time. The bright moonlight reflected off the surrounding chalky ground would have made that a beautiful sight.

    Most likely, she was worried about encountering Nez Perce on the trip home. Emma couldn’t have known that Yellow Wolf and his band of Nez Perce scouts had seen the bonfire and were planning to attack the camp the next morning.

    I’m glad I kept researching. I’m sticking with narrative history.

    ∞§∞

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    — To see related posts, click on “Narrative History” under the Categories Button on the right side of this page.

    — Image detail from Coppermine Gallery Photo.

  • Narrative History or Historical Fiction? — Redux

    In September, I posted a rumination on this question: Should I approach my next book, Encounters in Yellowstone 1877, as narrative history or as historical fiction? Then I was researching the morning of August 25, 1877, when George Cowan regained consciousness in Yellowstone Park after Indians had shot him in the head and left him for dead. I thought I could write a more vivid account of George’s ordeal if I knew what the weather was like on that day. It occurred to me that if I were writing fiction, I could just invent the weather.

    Recently, the issue arose again when I was writing about the time George and his companions spent at Henry’s Lake on their way to the park. After several days of hard travel, they stopped to rest at the sportsmen’s paradise.

    One day, while everybody else went out on the lake in boats, George and his wife, Emma, decided to ride horses into the nearby mountains. They said they were going to hunt. Elk and deer were supposed to be abundant the area, but after a long day, George and Emma returned empty handed.

    I’d like to write that they went for some “just the two of us” time. After all, they were newlyweds who had been traveling for a week and sharing a tent with Emma’s 13-year-old sister, Ida. It’s not far-fetched to think the Cowans wanted to be alone.

    I’m not just wanting to write a raunchy sex scene to liven things up. (Not that I don’t like a raunchy sex scene as much as anybody.) If I could show George and Emma as lovers, that would strengthen an important narrative theme that pervades their story and gives it coherence.

    In a later scene, when George regains consciousness after the Indians shot him, his first concern is not that he is alone in the wilderness with bleeding gunshot wounds. Instead, he anguishes over Emma’s fate at the hands of the Indians.

    The theme of the Cowan’s devotion returns still later after Emma  gives George up for dead and returns home to mourn. When she finally learns that George has survived, she makes a heroic horse-and-wagon trip to be by his side—175 miles in 31 hours.

    If I were writing fiction, it would be easy to foreshadow the drama of such experiences. To make a  love story for George and Emma. I could write something like this:

    George winked at Emma when he heard Ida say that she wanted to join the boating expedition on the lake. “Emma and I are going to see if we can bag us an elk,” he announced.

    The newly weds rode their horses away from the lake. After an hour, they crested a hill and headed down toward a stream that flowed out of the mountains.

    “There’s a nice spot,” Emma said, pointing to a grove of aspens that was bordered by a meadow.

    George dismounted and helped Emma off her horse. “I’ll picket the horses,” he said.

    George tied the horses in a grassy spot on long ropes and loosened the cinches on their saddles so they could graze. When he looked back, he saw that Emma had spread a blanket in deep shade under the aspen canopy.

    “There is no chance that the bright sun would burn our bare skin there,” George thought.

    There isn’t a shred of evidence that anything like that happened, and I don’t expect to find any. In the Victorian Era, genteel people like the Cowans didn’t talk about their feelings, and certainly not about their sex lives. If I stay with narrative history, I can’t make things up. It doesn’t matter that fictional scenes are completely plausible and re-enforce the narrative. I can only write things I can document.

    But there might be a way to stay with narrative history and still hint at a love life for George and Emma.  Would it be okay to speculate about their activities and motives—as long as I’m careful to let readers know that I’m moving beyond the facts? Could I write something like this:

    George and Emma mounted their horses and rode off to the mountains, ‘To hunt elk and deer,’ they said. But maybe the newly-weds just wanted to be alone after sharing their tent with Ida for a week.

    What do you think?  Should I switch to fiction, or stick to verifiable facts, or add overt speculation?

    ∞§∞

    — To see related posts, click on “Narrative History” under the Categories Button on the right side of this page.

  • Narrative History or Historical Fiction?

    Most of the time I think I’ll write my next book, Encounters in Yellowstone 1877, as narrative history, but when I hit a dead end in my research, I’m tempted to switch to historical fiction. That happened yesterday when I was trying to find out what the weather was like in Yellowstone Park on August 25, 1877.

    One of the main characters in my book, George Cowan, woke up that morning after lying unconscious under a tree in his blood-soaked clothing. George was suffering from three gunshot wounds so severe that he could barely crawl, let alone walk. He hoped to drag himself on his elbows for five miles that day to a campsite where he might find food.

    I’d like to write something like this: “An ominous gray sky greeted George . . ..” Or maybe: “The bright morning sun cast deep shadows that must have looked like canyons to George . . ..”

    I don’t want to just say: “George awoke the next morning . . ..” But I may have to if I can’t find out what the weather was like. It might be easier to give up narrative history and convert to historical fiction. Then I wouldn’t have to ground every detail in the facts; I could just make stuff up.

    That may sound like a no-brainer: don’t bother with the hard research; go with historical fiction, but it’s not that easy. When you tell your readers you’re writing fiction, you promise to provide compelling stories, fully formed characters, and gripping details that will bring your story to life. That can be as hard—maybe even harder—than sticking to the facts.

    I’ve got myself persuaded. I’m sticking with narrative history—at least for now. I know it’s possible to write true stories that have all the compelling virtues of fiction. Laura Hillenbrand did it with Seabiscuit; Erik Larson with Devil in the White City; Timothy Egan, The Big Burn; David Laskin, The Children’s Blizzard—and there are many more examples.

    If they can do it, maybe I can do it.

    What do you think?

    ∞§∞

    — To see related posts, click on “Narrative History” under the Categories Button on the right side of this page.

    — Read more about History versus Fiction.

     

  • Researching Attitudes Toward Indians

    What would it feel like to wake up in a wilderness with a lead slug embedded in your skull and remember watching your wife being dragged away by hostile Indians? That happened to George Cowan when the Nez Perce fled through Yellowstone Park  a hundred and thirty-three years ago.

    I’m writing about George’s ordeal for my next book, Encounters in Yellowstone 1877, so I need to know how he felt. Actually, it’s not hard to empathize with George. We all know that his head hurt from the bullet lodged there. And of course, George felt anger  — maybe even rage — at his attackers, and fear — maybe even terror — at what they might do to his wife.

    George’s story is compelling because it’s easy to identify with him, but can we assume he reacted in the same way we would? Wouldn’t events like the Battle of the Little Big Horn that happen just a year before George’s ordeal have colored his reactions?

    Last week, I did some research to answer questions like those. I started by searching the index of Montana the Magazine of Western History. I scanned subject headings until I saw “Indians, attitudes toward.” Under that heading I found an article published in 1957 by Robert W. Mardock entitled “Strange Concepts of the American Indian Since the Civil War.” Mardock says in the 1870s Americans called Indians everything from “noble savages” to “red devils.”

    New England writers like Cooper and Longfellow promoted the “noble savage” view, but Mardock says things were different on the frontier. He quoted a Virginia City, Montana, newspaper: “It is high time that sickly sentimentalism about humane treatment and conciliatory measures should be consigned to novel writers, and if the Indians continue their barbarity, wipe them out.’”

    According to Mardock, “The apprehensions and viewpoints of our frontier areas were strongly reflected in the Eastern newspapers. Exaggerated dispatches from the West, incredibly wild and inaccurate when reporting Indian ‘massacres’ and depredations, were commonly printed without ever questioning their accuracy. The frontier ‘red devil’ concept dominated the national press with few exceptions.”

    George Cowan was an attorney so he probably read both territorial and national newspapers. Visions of “red devils” must have danced through his mind when he came to that morning.

    And what was George’s wife, Emma, thinking when the Indians hauled her away? I found a 1984 article by Glenda Riley entitled “Frontierswomen’s Changing View of Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West,” that provides some insight.

    Riley says, “Journalists and novelists fed the anti-Indian prejudices of their reading publics with fictionalized accounts of brutal and primitive savages who preyed especially on women. When women’s accounts were published they were usually ‘penny dreadfuls’ or narratives of captivity that further inflamed hatred of Indians.”

    In their accounts, George and Emma Cowan don’t dwell on their feelings toward Indians, but they were creatures of their times so the insights Mardock and Riley provide must apply to them. I’ll use those insights as I scrutinize the Cowans’ accounts and write about their adventures. Encounters in Yellowstone will be a better book because I took the time to dig into these things.  Of course, I will do more research.