Lady Lavender: The post-publication glow

After many long months of angst and annoyance, I’m happy to report that my new book, Lady Lavender, is at last on the shelves! Angst and Annoyance because it’s been three years since my previous book (Templar Knight, Forbidden Bride) was published, and I have the sweat and frown-lines to document each and every month of the interim period.

But no matter, the novel is here and I am celebrating.

Lady Lavender is a western historical romance about an immigrant French woman on the frontier trying to grow lavender (yes, they grew it in Oregon) to support herself and her 4-year-old daughter. The problem is the Oregon Central Railroad and the dishy exec it sends to gobble up her land, and her lavender field, by laying shiny steel rails right down the middle of it.

Hence, a romance blooms. For me, the “romance” derives not only from Jeanne and Colonel Halliday and their struggles, but from the early 1900's, when my mother was a young woman raised on a ranch in Douglas County, Oregon. I’ve visited the old Banning homestead, seen the barn my grandfather built - still standing but listing badly after all these decades. I’ve researched the Deer Creek School where my mother and her brother and sister went to school, tramped over the hills and meadows where she rode her horse and picnicked, and reveled in the feel of the land, the smell of the trees, and the whispers of long-ago stories.

The tiny town of Dixonville, Oregon, is the setting for my very first book, Western Rose (and most of my 16 subsequent works). Now there’s only a moss-kissed split rail fence and a post office - general store, but then . . .

Then it was alive with stories handed down from my grandmother and grandfather, Leora and Claude Banning, which grew into wild tales and imaginings about dramatic confrontations, dangerous exploits, and enduring love stories. And ended up as the characters in my stories. Western Rose, for instance, was based on the rather oddball courtship of my grandparents, both of whom grew up on Douglas County ranches.

Now I have a Big Fat Confession to make: recently I re-read this first work, Western Rose, and found that I still like it! I also re-read a later work, The Ranger and the Redhead. Ditto. O frabjous day!

Maybe I’ll work up the courage to re-read Lady Lavender. In the meantime, I’ve fallen in love with yet another story from that era and my favorite Oregon setting, and . . .

The long arm of research

It’s surprising where research for an historical romance can lead! I’m now writing a western set in 19th century Oregon about a man who wants to try wheat farming (yes, there’s a love story, but research about wheat came first).

Wheat has been grown for at least 7000 years -- not for fun, but for survival. Wheat is ground into flour which makes bread which feeds people; were it not for wheat civilization might have petered out thousands of years ago.

Not only can wheat be eaten, it can be stored for food during winter and as seed for a new crop in the spring. Villages developed where land was available to grow wheat. Bronze tablets dating from the 9th century B.C. show the grinding of wheat and bread-making in Assyria. Ancient Egypt grew wheat, aided by its network of irrigation canals, which demanded organization and supervision.

Growing food led to trade, development of language, mathematics, and business and diplomatic relations with other villages and later nations. . Today, wheat is the world’s number one farm crop, from the poles to the equator, from sea level to the Himalayas. There are thousands of wheat strains; some suited to heat, some to cold, wet, drought, you name it.

So what’s that got to do with my romance set in Oregon? In the Old West, wheat was the most popular cereal grain grown by American farmers. In the early 19th century methods of growing and harvesting had progressed little since the days of the Assyrians and the Egyptians. Farmers, then, were used to hand labor. Mechanization was almost nonexistent

Wheat growers harvested their crops with a sickle or a scythe, cutting their way through the stalks while others followed to collect the bunches of grain and bind into sheaves. It was hot, sweaty, dusty, back-breaking work. Things improved when a cradle was added to the scythe, the curving fingers of which caught the grain as it was cut, leaving it bunched and easier to tie into bundles. Still, a strong and experienced man could cut only two acres of wheat a day.

Separating out the grain kernels was even more primitive: either a farmer beat the wheat with a flail or had his cattle tramp again and again over the wheat heads. When only 15, Cyrus McCormick invented a lightweight grain cradle, with which he could keep up with the older men in reaping, and that was the beginning of mechanized wheat production. Later, McCormick’s invention of the reaper changed harvesting forever.

The first reaper was a two-wheeled, horse-drawn arrangement; blades clipped the stalks close to the ground and a rotating wheel pushed it into the cutting blades and then back onto a platform as it was cut. But that was in Virginia. What about Oregon?

The mechanical reaper opened the floodgate and new machines poured into the farming areas. By the mid-1880s, a single Oregon farmer could handle vast acres of wheat.

Wheat flourished in the Willamette valley, despite the lack of a local market. It was expensive to ship down the river or overland, and by 1863 attention focused on the railroads, in particular a rail line connecting Portland to San Francisco. During the Gold Rush, when mining towns were provisioned by farmers in the Rogue River and Umpqua Valleys, long trains of pack mules carried loads of flour from the mills. Later gold strikes in Oregon quickly built small cities and by 1870, a wheat-consuming population created a healthy demand for flour and wheat-farming took off.

By 1867 Oregon flour was known as the highest priced and best flour on the New York market. That year, $149,065 worth of flour moved from Portland to California, where it sold for $5 a barrel. At the gold mines in California markets, it brought up to $25 per barrel. Exported wheat even reached the East Coast by a circuitous route: by ship from Astoria, Oregon, to Boston by way of the Hawaiian Islands.

The highlight of the wheat-farmer’s year was the harvest. When the stalks turn yellow and the kernels have fully dried out, wheat is ready to be harvested. Old-timers cut wheat using a scythe. The cut wheat was then “stooked,” or gathered by hand into sheaves. These were then brought in from the field to the threshing area, laid out on a canvas or tarpaulin, and beaten with a flail until the wheat separates from the straw. It’s still full of chaff, the fibrous outer shell of each kernel on the head, and for this the farmer needs a windy day and a lot of help. In ancient times, people tossed the wheat into the air, and - because wheat is heavier than chaff, it falls to the ground and the chaff is blown away.

Using the hand-flailing method, it takes 1 - 2 hours to gather a gallon (4 stooks) of finished wheat, which can yield anywhere from 8 to 60 bushels of wheat per acre, depending on weather, disease, rainfall, etc. etc.

After inventing the reaper in 1831, McCormick kept tinkering and improvements in farm machinery increased. These included a wire binder. Adding a binder to the reaper, pulled by four horses, a farmer could cut widths from 6 to 8 feet and dump the wheat onto a revolving canvas belt which carried it into a tying mechanism. When a certain amount of wheat was gathered, a needle was tripped which sent a long curved metal arm around the stalks and knotted it with twine.

One or two men called shockers speared the bundles with a pitchfork into shocks, five or six bundles standing upright by themselves. The bundle wagons then moved onto the field and two men pitched the bound grain onto the flat beds.

In the latter part of the 19th century, wheat farming became even more mechanized with the labor-saving threshing machine. Each year threshing crews moved from farm to farm, feeding wheat bundles into a threshing machine, usually set up in the farmyard. Here the grain was separated, the chaff flying out one end and the grain funneled out the side to sack-sewers, who bagged the separated grain and needle-stitched the gunnysacks closed at the top.

And at harvest time, when threshing crews appeared on farmsteads and the farm women cooked and served them three hearty meals each day, romance could bloom . . .

The Elusive Historical Figure

Writing a historical novel can sometimes be an excuse to spend more time exploring a minor historical figure and moment who’s been evading you. I’ve written six westerns and spent a fair bit of effort trying to understand the Apache Wars which ravaged the Desert Southwest during the later nineteenth century. Great Indian war chiefs emerged from those bloody conflicts and are still remembered today – Cochise, Geronimo, and more. I’ve centered entire books on my heroes and heroines’ relationships with those big names.

But my research kept highlighting one man: Victorio, the greatest Apache war chief of all – possibly the greatest Indian war chief. I needed to write about him. So when Portia, the heroine of my upcoming historical THE DEVIL SHE KNOWS, needed to be young and silly but gallant, too, in the face of danger – I grabbed an episode from Victorio’s career.

Victorio was the chieftain of the Ojo Caliente (Warm Springs) Apache, who fought beside Mangas Coloradas and Cochise. Betrayed onto a reservation, he escaped with his people after being sent to another one which held more malaria-carrying mosquitoes than arable land. For years, he raided Arizona and New Mexico from bases within Mexico. Geronimo was one of his cohorts.

The Texas Rangers mobilized to close off the border into Texas. Two regiments of cavalry – the legendary Buffalo soldiers, Negro soldiers from the 9th and 10th cavalry – rode their horses and mules into the ground chasing him through some of the roughest, most desolate terrain in the West. Their commander gave full credit to Apache scouts from tribes farther west in Arizona. The Mexican Army’s finest Indian fighter stayed in the field for months, harassing Victorio.

Victorio was ultimately driven out of the United States by stationing troops at every water hole. Even then, he fought a series of pitched battles, most of which he nearly won, before fleeing across the border to Mexico for the last time. He died there in a battle with Mexican troops, probably at his own hand.

It took the combined efforts of the Mexican army, the Texas Rangers, and 2,000 U.S. soldiers to defeat Victorio and his warriors, who never numbered two hundred men and usually far less.

The opening of THE DEVIL SHE KNOWS is set during one of Victorio’s raids into the United States, when the inhabitants were rightly terrified of traveling anywhere along his likely path.

Have you ever had a historical character pique your curiosity but been unable to fit him into a book? What did you do about him or her?