Always to be Calling it, Please, Research

Tom Lehrer fans will recognize this line from his immortal hit, "Plagiarize." When I set out to write BUCKER DUDLEY it was not my intention to rip off other people's work, but to write something fresh and original about a very old idea: the sailor girl who went to sea dressed as a boy.

And I wanted to write about the War of 1812.

I didn't know a whole lot about the War of 1812 before I started reading. Americans don't. It's a big deal in Canada, because they figure they won it, which they did, sort of, and yet not. The idea of a shooting war between Canadians and Americans intrigued and horrified me. My father was American, my mother Canadian. They grew up thirty miles from each other.

What most Americans know about the war is the part where the British burned Washington, and then were repelled from Baltimore, where our flag still flew from Fort McHenry in the dawn's early light, after which they sailed off to New Orleans and got soundly whupped by Andrew Jackson's troops.

There was a lot more to it than that. First off the Americans declared war on Great Britain, the most powerful naval force on earth, without having an effective army or navy. It was not a popular war. President Madison sent raw troops to Canada under incompetent officers in the mistaken belief that their invasion would be welcomed. The troops were terrified of Indians, who wouldn't fight by the rules. The New Englanders were so distressed by the whole mess that they started making plans to secede from the Union.

Showing the craziness through the eyes of an adolescent girl who found herself in the middle of it became the task of writing the novel. Bucko does fine. Good health, a cheerful outlook, and remarkable athletic ability see her through most of her trials. The first draft of BUCKER DUDLEY showcased many fascinating characters that I came upon in my reading, but the multiple point of view necessary to feature them pulled focus from Bucko's struggles.

John Norton, the half-Scot, half-Cherokee Mohawk war chief, was too good to cut out of the book in the second draft: handsome, fascinating, bloodthirsty, irresistible to women, ultimately a tragic figure. So he is Bucko's cousin, on the Scottish side, her last remaining relative. She must go into the woods to find him after her ship is destroyed.

In the coming weeks I'll blog about the characters I had to cut. I already told you about Duncan McColl, the soldier minister who was a force for peace on the Maine-New Brunswick border, and Alexander Contee Hanson, the newspaper publisher who detonated the Baltimore riots, and my beloved Captain Thomas Masterman Hardy (Nelson's Hardy), whose aristocratic young wife never appreciated him. There are many others of interest, both noble and debased. Check back here from time to time to find out all about them.

When the Great Depression Began and Ended in Lambertville

For those of you who may be curious about the beginning and end of the Great Depression, in case we have to go through another one, or in case we are actually in one, as some suggest, I have a benchmark for you.

Some say the Stock Market Crash on October 29, 1929, marked the beginning of that grim period in our nation's history. It's true that when the bottom fell out of the stock market things looked mighty dark. But, the low point? That came in 1930, on the day when the Lambertville Free Public Library got a monthly bill for $4.00 from the telephone company and the board voted to remove the telephone.

Now, this was in a time when there were no cell phones. If you needed to make a call you found a pay phone and put a nickel in (first having felt in the change slot to see whether the caller before you had neglected to take his change). Was the library phone used by patrons in 1930? Was it used by the librarian to call scofflaws who kept their books out too long? Whatever use it had been, the library board considered it superfluous.

That's right, folks, there was no telephone in the Lambertville Free Public Library for another thirteen years, when the board voted to restore phone service. So 1943, at least in Lambertville, marked the end of the Great Depression.

Makes you think. What if things got so bad the libraries had to shut down their internet connections?

A Prize for the Edge of Ruin

The Edge Of Ruin, the comic thriller I wrote under the name of Irene Fleming about the early film industry in Fort Lee, New Jersey, has won a prize, the annual fiction award of the NJSAA (New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance). I must confess that I'm thrilled.

These folks are historians, not mystery fans necessarily, so the thing they like about it is the history. I think I got it right, not only the events of 1909 but the feelings and attitudes of the people of that time. Research is so much easier now than it used to be. Newspapers have put their old stories online and indexed them. The Library of Congress offers old silent movies reconstructed from the paper copies that were submitted to them for copyright protection.

Apart from the internet there were movies and books. Kino offers silent movies. Netflix offers silent movies. As for books, my two main sources were Fort Lee, The Film Town, by Richard Koszarski, and Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lucas, as well as many biographies and autobiographies. To say nothing of the stories told me long ago by my grandmother, who was living and working in New York City in those days.

I was perfectly comfortable writing about that period. 1812 is more of a stretch. Although Bucker Dudley is set in the Regency period it is in no respect a Regency novel. Most of it takes place at sea, or on military bases, or in the North Woods among the Mohawk Indians. Bucker hardly ever wears a dress, much less a corset. But it's fun. The history is as solid as I can make it. I have something like eighteen linear feet of books on the many aspects of the ever-fascinating war of 1812, and yet I manage to move the action along without boring information dumps.

I'll save the information dumps for the blog. Next week I'll talk about General Wilkinson, that wretched scoundrel.

Hurricanes

There is at least one hurricane connection for the War of 1812. Early in the war, perhaps a month after the declaration, a tremendous hurricane struck New Orleans and decimated the American fleet. (That is, it beat the fleet up pretty badly. "Decimated" ordinarily means "destroyed a tenth part," and don't let anyone try and tell you otherwise. In this case "decimated" means beat the fleet up pretty badly, but I don't have time to find out how badly, because I'm sitting in a rental car under a tree in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, outside the library, which is closed on account of Hurricane Lee. Fortunately their internet connection is available.

So I'm going to leave this spot now, before the tree falls on my rental car. I'm going back to my mother-in-law's house and sit on the porch, watching the wet tree limbs whip back and forth, working on my novel. Later on I'll tell you more about the damage that the unnamed hurricane did in 1812, how it affected the war effort, how a naval officer whose ship was destroyed wrote to the war office in Washington begging not to be put under the command of General James Wilkinson. I'll tell you more about Wilkinson too. He was widely hated. I hate him myself.

Farewell until better weather.

Why We Fought the British in 1812: The Thing with the Indians

The Battle of Tippecanoe

They wanted the Northwest Territory.

They were encouraged in their desires by the British, who occupied trading posts and forts throughout the Western frontier of the United States long after the Treaty of Paris concluded the American Revolution. With British encouragement the Indians continued to believe it was possible for them to hold the Northwest Territory against the Americans and stop the encroachment of land-hungry American settlers on their hunting grounds.

Even after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 (on the site of present-day Toledo), when Mad Anthony Wayne drove their warriors before him and the British refused to open the doors of their fort to let them in, some of them thought, we can still unite the tribes and resist the Americans.

This was Shawnee leader Tecumseh's plan, when territorial governor William Henry Harrison refused to relinquish the three million acres along the Wabash River ceded in the Treaty of Fort Wayne in 1809. The "Delawares, Putawatimies, Miamies and Eel River Miamies" were the signatories to the treaty, and for the three million acres they were to receive the following: "to the Delawares a permanent annuity of five hundred dollars; to the Miamies a like annuity of five hundred dollars; to the Eel river tribe a like annuity of two hundred and fifty dollars; and to the Putawatimies a like annuity of five hundred dollars." Tecumseh's position was that the Indians were one, and the separate tribes had no authority to sell land that belonged to all the Indians.

In the real world such a position can be maintained only by force of arms. The British happily provided rifles. Tecumseh went on a tour of the southern tribes to gather support, leaving his brother, Tenskwatawah the Prophet, in charge of the Shawnee capital of Prophetstown, where the Tippecanoe flows into the Wabash River. Now Tenskwatawa was a man venerated by the Shawnee as a person of supernatural powers. He preached a return to the old Indian ways, and he told the warriors of the tribe that the American bullets could not wound them if their hearts were pure. Before you say, "foolish native superstition," you might reflect that this was also the belief of Duncan McColl, a devout Scot.

It was to Prophetstown that William Henry Harrison came with a thousand men to parley with the Indian leaders. "We will talk to you tomorrow," they said. The Americans made camp nearby and went to sleep.

At four in the morning the bravest of the Indians came creeping into the camp with orders to murder Harrison and his senior officers. They were followed by three waves of charging warriors, secure, at least at first, in their invincibility. But God was not on their side, after all. Harrison escaped death, his forces overcame those of the natives, and he was able to mount and lead a cavalry charge that drove the Indians into a swamp before he burned Prophetstown to the ground. Thirty-eight of the Indian dead were found in Harrison's camp. It was a terrible defeat for them; Indians never left their dead if they could help it. Most of the survivors lost all faith in Tenskwatawa.

This and many other ripping stories can be found in Col. John R. Elting's sardonic account, Amateurs, to Arms! A Military History of the War of 1812. He begins it, "The United States swaggered into the War of 1812 like a Kansas farm boy entering his first saloon. And, like that same innocent, wretchedly gagging down his first drink, the new nation was totally unprepared for the raw impact of all-out war." The book goes on in that vein. You want to read it.

Of Tecumseh, more later.

1812 Revisited – War with Britain!

In scarcely a year it will be the two hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the War of 1812, a war that was pretty much fought to a draw between the United States and Britain. What do you know about this conflict? Not much, I'm willing to bet. Even the hard core followers of the British Navy in the old days of sail, and there are plenty of those people, aren't aware of some of the battles that were fought on the Niagara frontier, or the role of the woodland Indians, or the fact that the New England states were so adamantly opposed to fighting the British that they were ready to secede from the union.

There is much interesting scandal to be known about the War of 1812. It ain't just dates and battles, folks. I came across stuff that you won't believe while I was researching background material for Bucker Dudley. There was treachery, cowardice, drooling incompetence, illicit sex, and raving madness. And that was just what went on in James Madison's Washington. I've decided to tear the veil from this little-appreciated conflict and tell you all. But it will take time. Watch this space for news of what happened two hundred years ago.