The Gay Gentleman

The Gay Gentleman

My novel 'Plews' was released several weeks ago, and a few people have had time to read at least part way through the book. Talking to the people who have taken the time to read 'Plews', I often receive the feedback that I use words that the reader does not know or understand. Some of this can be explained by the fact that the mountain men used many words which were their own, often corruptions of French terms (Plews and Booshway to name two). Other words which occur frequently, are a kind of technical jargon for tools which we do not use any more (like frizzen and cordelle). The use of these words was necessary to refer to the things they used and maintain the atmosphere of early nineteenth century fur trappers.

The use of other words however, cannot be justified through context, but are simply words which have fallen out of the common vernacular. I take this feedback to heart, as I have no wish for the style of my writing to become too self-conscious or distracting.

That being said, allow me to offer some defense for using terms which are not in the parlance of our time. When I use a certain word, I am careful that it be the right word in that moment. It may not be a word which is used regularly in speech or prose, but if, for instance, I am describing an Irishman's cadence of speech, I will gladly use the word brogue, as opposed to accent, as it is more specific. Also, the elegance of phrase means a great deal to me, and if the word 'cyclopean' supports the poetry of a given sentence better than 'towering' I will not hesitate to use it if circumstance permits. I feel justified in doing so when I remember Mark Twain's quote “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning-bug”.

Another justification that I offer myself when I receive the above feedback, is that every word we lose from our everyday language diminishes our capacity to communicate. In this present world of hash-tags and one-hundred forty character communication, I fear that our ability to share complex thoughts is being diminished. George Orwell seemed to share this same fear when he wrote:

“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it... Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”

This brings me to the title of this post: The Gay Gentleman. I chose the title because it contains two words which no longer mean what they once did, and we have no real term to replace them. Gay used to refer to a mood of festive happiness, but it has lost that meaning all together. We had a perfectly serviceable word (a little clunky perhaps) in homosexual, so why did it need to be replaced? Where is the replacement for the former usage of gay? Even now, if I said that I was in a festive and happy mood, I can only imagine the looks I would receive, so not only has the word been lost, but the very concept cannot be easily described.

The word gentleman has received the same treatment over the last hundred years or so. It used to mean (according to C.S. Lewis) “one who had a coat of arms and some landed property”. Lewis goes on to say that the word gentleman (in his time) meant one who has generally good behavior. The current usage of the word, if it is used at all, seems to mean a man who does not make sexual advances during a date. We have no word to refer to someone who was born into a family of status and property. We have ceased to use the word, and even the concept of a difference in social or financial class seems alien to many of us even though the reality still exists. Is the modern term 'one percenter' really an acceptable replacement for 'gentleman'? I certainly hope not.

So, as I start my next novel, I will try to keep the language succinct and easy to read. I will try to avoid using ten-dollar words just to prove that I can, but if a certain character is what we would call 'shy' and 'quiet' you should brace yourself for the word taciturn, because it is probably coming up.

9-29-2014

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P.S. All quotes used without permission of any kind. Come and get me coppers!

Who in the world is Manuel Lisa?

Who in the world was Manuel Lisa?

If the mountain men did what they did solely for the money they are to be pitied. Most of the famous men of the fur trapping years were in debt or flat broke when they died. John Colter, who I have talked about often in this blog died of jaundice on his meager farm in 1813. Bill Williams was shot and killed by unknown assailants in the Rocky Mountains at the ripe old age of sixty-two when most of us would be contemplating retirement. Jed Smith was killed by Comanches on the plains of what is now Texas at the age of thirty. Jim Bridger, possibly the most famous of all the mountain men died on his son-in-law's farm in Missouri. Not one of these great men ever amassed a great deal of wealth, so if they went west looking for riches, they were disappointed.

Then, as now, the men who made the money were the traders, brokers, and organizers. Men like Manuel Lisa and John Astor gained a great deal of monetary wealth through their own brand of hard work. Each man has his own gifts, and the entrepreneurs during the fur trapping years were no exception. Some men were gifted with great ability as woodsmen, trappers and explorers, while others were gifted in market speculation and finance.

Should we therefore pity the men who spent their youth laboring under dangerous conditions and saw little monetary reward for their trouble? Should we vilify those who made a great deal of profit from the enterprise? Neither I think. By working together, the two groups were able to accomplish great things. The bosses (or Booshway) need the working man as much as the working man needs someone who knows how to make the labor pay.

Let us not forget however, the value of a life lived to the fullest. Men like Manuel Lisa and John Astor may have made great fortunes in their time, but how many young boys have taken up a pencil and played at being a financier? How many of us as grownups spend their idle moments dreaming of what it would be like to be a bureaucrat? Most of us (myself included) do not have to imagine what life would be like as an apparatchik or functionary, we know those realities all to well.

So do not mourn for the mighty mountain man who saw little if any financial gain for his trouble. For, in his life spent roaming the wilderness lining the pockets of others, he lived as a man should, and found riches all his own.

A.D.

9-22-2014

For the beaver

Last week on this blog, I posed the question: What would make a man like John Colter travel back into the wilderness after having just spent two long years there? This week I will take some time to look at the answer that he might have given.

Beaver.

The industrious amphibious rodent that drives Phil Robertson to apoplexy, was also the reason that John Colter, Jim Bridger, and Kit Carson, among many other less well-known names, made their way into the Rocky Mountains and spent years of their lives surrounded by danger and hardship. What could it be about this relatively inoffensive creature that drove men to spend their health and often their lives pursuing it?

The engineering works of the beaver alone are worth comment. The ponds that are created by their dams provide wetland habitat beneficial to many other species, including but not limited to waterfowl, deer, bear, and moose. It is no coincidence that I list many animals who are commonly hunted for sport, but the benefits of a beaver pond are not only limited to those seeking recognition from the Boone and Crockett club. I read that an observer once counted one hundred twenty four species of birds and thirty seven mammals making use of a beaver pond over the course of a year. Yet it was not fascination about the engineering skills of the beaver, or their support of the habitat that drove the mountain men to trap them in their millions.

The beaver as a food source is apparently nothing to write home about. In my studies, I have found numerous reports of mountain men broiling the fatty tails of the beaver, but no special mention of the men actually consuming the rest of the meat. I imagine that they did at times, because hunger was a regular feature of their lives, but the mountain men do not seem to have made beaver a regular part of their diet. This may pass without notice for we who are looking back across two hundred years. I doubt there is one of us today who would even consider beaver meat as a possible dinner option, but we must remember that these were the mountain men. They regularly ate some pretty awful sounding stuff.

Most of the books I have read about the fur trapping years mention the mountain men eating raw buffalo liver straight from the carcass of a freshly killed animal. Many of the books also claim that the trappers would squirt bile from the gall bladder onto the liver as a kind of sauce and sometimes use gunpowder as a seasoning. Now, if only one of the books had mentioned the practice I may have dismissed it as a tall story told to greenhorns, but it is so often repeated that I begin to believe they did just that. Not only in life or death, 'I must eat something or die' kind of situations, but as a matter of course, a delicacy if you will. If beaver meat tastes worse than raw buffalo liver coated with its own bile, than it must be bad indeed.

Maybe that is what potted meat is made of.

So if the mountain men did not chase the beaver out of scientific curiosity, or to sustain themselves, why go through all that trouble? The answer is simple of course:

Hats.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the height of fashion for men in both Europe and North America was to own a hat made of felt. The highest quality felt came from the beaver, and the highest quality beaver came from the Rockies. Top hats, cocked hats, tricorns, Paris beau, and many other silly looking hats that I don't know the names for, were all made from felt taken from beaver hides. Hides which were themselves taken from beavers who lived in what is now the western United States and Canada. The only thing that saved the beaver from being wiped out was the fad for silk hats that sprang up in around the 1830's.

So the reason that the reckless breed went west was simple really. Rich men buy hats made from beaver, therefore I (says the mountain man) will spend the next twenty or so years of my life chasing the toothy buggers along rivers infested with giant bears and belligerent Indians. If I am able to gather enough beaver pelts, then someday I may be able to afford a hat of my own.

I guess I haven't hit on the real reason the mountain men did what they did after all.

As a parting thought for this week, I wonder if anything I am wearing or using right now has some fascinating story behind it. Is some amazing creature being hunted to extinction by larger than life adventurers who will have stories written about their lives two hundred years from now? Something makes me doubt it, but the thought makes me want to be one of the adventurers and not just the guy wearing a silly hat.

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Interesting Times

Interesting Times

If anyone has ever lived in interesting times, it was surely the fur trappers of the early nineteenth century. When I began studying the lives of the mountain men a few years ago, I would often come across facts, small tidbits really, that would make me pause in wonder at the lives these men led.

John Colter for instance, was a private in the army who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition. For two years Colter lived and worked in the wild on this historic journey, enduring hardships and labor that we can scarcely imagine today. In 1806 the 'Corps of Discovery' as it was called, was nearing St. Louis at the tag end of their extraordinary journey, when they happened across the camp of two men who were headed upstream to trap beaver. The two trappers, named Hancock and Dixon, mentioned that they sorely needed a man who knew the Yellowstone country. John Colter volunteered to accompany the men back into the mountains as their guide.

If one is not paying attention, one might gloss over this small factoid as a minor occurrence at the end of a legendary journey, but think about it for a minute. Two years spent in wilderness the likes of which no longer exists and we won't see again. The expedition endured all the weather the northern plains and Rocky Mountains has to offer with nothing but the shelter that they could carry with them or construct from those things at hand. Everything they ate, they either gathered, hunted, or carried thousands of miles. The men were often surrounded by large, and sometimes dangerous, animals. They were out-manned, out-gunned, and out-supplied by native peoples whose land they had to cross, with or without their consent, in order to achieve their goal. For two long years, the men endured daily hardship, privation, danger and brutal toil.

After all that, John Colter went back.

When the odyssey was nearly over, with the goal nearly in sight, Colter elected to turn away from civilization and head back into the mountains. Waiting for him in St. Louis would have been nearly two years back pay, the fame of having been a member of the Corps of Discovery, and numerous opportunities for financial gain and a life of relative ease, yet he turned away from all of those things, and returned to the wilds.

To our modern values, this decision seems to be madness. Our society as a whole and most of us as individuals make our daily decisions based on what will make our lives easier. I could list a number of examples, but it seems redundant to do so (and it's easier not to). Just think of a time when you asked someone, or they asked you why a thing was done a certain way and the answer was 'it seemed easier'. The phrase 'it was easier' is axiomatic in our culture and passes as wisdom without question.

I point this out not to pass judgment on our culture or society, but to show that John Colter must have been operating with an entirely different set of values than many of us know, when he decided to head back into the Rockies with civilization so near at hand. The realization that these men maintained an entirely different mindset than my own has made me want to understand them better.

While writing my novel 'Plews', I tried to discover, and thus illustrate, what might have made a man make such a decision. The answers I arrived at, can be stated one of two ways: The first takes the form of my novel, and the second takes the form of the West itself.

Anyone who lives, or has traveled west of the Mississippi, must at least have an inkling of what Colter must have been thinking when he turned away from the settlements, and headed back to the Great American West. If we see those places and still do not understand, then we should be pitied.

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Hon-dah, Bienvenidos and Welcome!

Hon-dah, Bienvenidos and Welcome to my blog,

Since I began writing novels a few years ago, many have asked me why I write, and how I chose the subject matter. My motivation for writing is fairly simple: I love to read. When I was a boy of ten or twelve I was given a book with the legends of King Arthur written in a simplified manner for children. Since that day, more than twenty five years ago, I have been a voracious reader. As I grew older, I felt the desire to produce some work of my own as opposed to simply consuming the work of others.

The reasons for what I write are a little more complex. My favorite genre of literature is fantasy, and that has held true for most of my life. Why then, do I write westerns? When I made the decision to write a book of my own, I considered writing something in the fantasy or sci-fi vein, but something felt wrong about it. I had no context. I did not grow up in England like Tolkien, nor am I a scientist like Arthur C. Clark. I was reared on the dusty plains of New Mexico and the mountains of eastern Arizona. It was then that I began to consider the land where I grew up as a setting for my work. After all, we write what we know.

The more I thought about writing books set in the west, the more the idea made sense to me. Did characters like Lancelot, Conan, or Drizz't lead lives any more interesting than Jim Bridger, Doc Holiday or Cochise? I think not.

What about the common tropes of fantasy fiction? The swords, the dragons, and fantastic places. Is the Colt single action army revolver (more commonly known as the peacemaker) any less romantic than Excalibur or Andúril? Have we any need of a chimera when we see a pronghorn outpacing an automobile along the side of the highway, or a grizzly bear moving a log that weighs hundreds of pounds to find the grubs beneath? Is there any fantasy landscape that can match the stony escarpments of the mogollon rim for grandeur?

Again, I think not.

But these things are merely window dressing, sets if you will, for the drama that was played out in the west during the nineteenth century. It is the people which make a region interesting, and there are no more interesting people in the world than those of the American west. Those who lived (and now live) in the west are at the end of a long line of restless men and women. The sons of discontent if you will, who sought a new and better life beyond the frontiers of their respective civilizations. By no means am I speaking of only European immigrants. The descendants of the First Nations (or Native Americans) were at the end of a long line of forefathers who looked east from ancient Siberia and Mongolia and crossed the land bridge from Asia in a trek which would have been unimaginably difficult, to reach the arid lands of the west. Hispanic westerners are the sons of Spaniards who crossed the ocean, and then pressed north into hostile territory beyond the protection of their motherland in their pursuit of happiness. Asians crossed the broader sea to provide a better life for their families. Restless people from all over the world have come to the western United States seeking any number of things. Those of us who call the west home have one thing in common: we are descended from those who constantly sought the greener grass beyond the horizon.

It's kind of ironic that most of the grass they found was brown.

These are the lands and people that I intend to learn about and write about in this blog and my novels. If you are as fascinated by them as I am, join me on my journey. We may not learn anything worth tweeting about, but we may learn something worthwhile.

A.D.

2014

#plews

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