Palaver on research with white-eye Chap O'Keefe
WAR PATHS AND PEACE PIPES

Keith Chapman

"How many Black Horse Westerns deal with the Indian way of life and Indian wars — not as a part of the plot but as the whole story? Has anyone any idea?"

The question was put by English librarian John Herrington in feedback at the Yahoo BHW discussion group after he'd read I. J. Parnham's fascinating article on titles.

The Indian question in fiction is a tricky one — the very term "Indian" is rejected in some quarters. For many years, publishers have been wary of accepting fiction about Native Americans that isn't totally authenticated. This, some feel, results from over-reaction to what has been written, filmed and printed in the past, and from the obsession with political correctness.

Author Gillian F. Taylor told the Yahoo group about the cautious approach of the BHW publisher, Robert Hale Ltd, to Cullen's Quest. "The book was accepted, but [publisher and editor] John Hale said that in general, they don't go for stories about the Indian Wars. I guess I got away with it because the Comanches were being manipulated by the white folks."

But no hard-and-fast rule would seem to prevent issues of race and prejudice becoming part of an acceptable BHW plot. In the opening pages of her 1999 Curt Longbow story Warbuck, Irene Ord wrote:

There were going to be many dead men before they got the forts built right across the country to the Black Hills. He wished the men behind those desks in Washington would come themselves and see the mess they were making for the army by coming up with hare-brained schemes. They should listen to the Indians. There were better ways than war to enforce what they wanted.

Chief Red Cloud was bound to go to war, bringing in the Cheyenne and the other tribes who held the Black Hills sacred.

McCall shivered. He had a presentiment. He must choose whether he was a white man or a Cheyenne brave.

In an epilogue to the same book, the author gave some history, mentioning Custer's Last Stand, after which, she said, the Indians were harassed and pursued by General Miles till they had to negotiate surrender or let their families starve to death. The book's concluding words: "Reluctantly, the tribes moved into the reservations and became reliant on the food rations doled out by the Indian agencies. The proud Indians, natives of the country, were brought to their knees. The White Eyes, the strangers, would now shape their future."

For a fiction line of its kind, the Hale series has shown wide tolerance in all its requirements, which is one of its recommendations. Authors are not put in strait jackets. Every book appears to be considered on its own merits. It's hard to define an over-arching formula beyond a length of 45,000 words — but flexible by at least 5000 words either way — and the repeated call for traditional western action.

To date, I've written fifteen westerns for Hale and had fifteen accepted. The impression received is that Mr Hale is willing to consider books that break moulds, and he bears in mind his authors' individual strengths and weaknesses. Thus his reaction to the proposal for a recent submission was: "I might perhaps have had reservations about this story in other less capable hands, but I am sure that with the expert at work this will be entirely acceptable to us. Perhaps you could apply a little brake on sex and violence." And when he received the completed novel, which is set to appear sometime in 2007, his comment was that the work was "indeed acceptable to us".

Thus it was no surprise that in a recent debut BHW, Vulture Gold, the very authoritative, Arizona born and raised Charles Whipple, aka Chuck Tyrell, was able to feature as his town-marshal hero a half-Cherokee, Garet Havelock, and incorporate ostensibly derogatory racial mentions: "the miners laughed at the half-breed marshal who couldn't stand up to their mobs"; "he'd promised to get the gold back. Even half-breed Cherokees kept their promises"; "'There's no such thing as an honest Indian, especially half-breeds,' Donovan growled"; "No half-breed marshal could outsmart an Irishman."

Earlier in the year, Tyler Hatch (Keith Hetherington) made mixed parentage central to his plot in Longhorn Country. This BHW opened with an attack by whites on a Comanche camp in retaliation for a devastating raid and the seizure of white women five years previously. The story was of Blaine — "the injured party, the half-breed no one fully accepted". At the end, he is told, "You confused him, Blaine: he hated the half of you that was Yellow Wolf, the man who destroyed his Katy, but he cared about her blood that still flowed in your veins."

A few days after BHE #6 appeared, a feature at www.filmthreat.com discussed Disney's Song of the South. Buried in it was the following:

Among the thousands of westerns made by Hollywood since the early days of silent films, there were almost none about the genocidal policies of the United States government toward American Indians until Cheyenne Autumn came along in 1964. And this film, as did others in subsequent years, took the side of the Indians.

When Dances with Wolves hit screens in 1990, the reaction was one of astonishment, as if a great injustice had finally been corrected. Although a great western, and the first in almost twenty years to have substantial commercial and critical success, Dances with Wolves was hardly unique in its sympathy toward Native Americans. It's nearly impossible, in fact, not to have sympathy for them, in either a dramatic context or otherwise. This is why the issue of their abuse, neglect and genocide has been mostly avoided. The cynical view is that Hollywood is run by liberals who promote liberal positions in their stories. But the truth is simply more practical. Movies are a vicarious art form, and Americans like to imagine themselves as fair and honest. Film-makers are not going to portray the West honestly because the result would be too unpleasant.

Another '90s film which did show the gritty side of Indian war, but isn't mentioned by the commentator, was Walter Hill's Geronimo, memorably starring Jason Patric, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman and Wes Studi. Impressive photography and stunning surround-sound made for convincing battles, and in other scenes a haunting, moving quality was boosted by the score. (The music was credited to Ry Cooder, but perhaps the accolade should have gone to arranger-composer George S. Clinton, known to many at that date only for lending similar emotional depth to the late-night-television projects of the Zalman King company.) The Walter Hill movie had no female leads and the John Milius-Larry Gross script's power was said to lie in its intelligent comment on the treatment of the Apaches by the American Government. That accepted, some dramatic licence was taken — for example, with the time, place and circumstances of scout Al Sieber's death, which was actually in a rockslide while supervising an Apache road construction gang in 1907.

Nor was it correct for the "filmthreat" writer to suggest Hollywood avoids the unpleasant entirely. Back in 1970, for example, film-maker Ralph Nelson was widely criticized for the "gratuitous" violence in Soldier Blue, based on an excellent novel by T. V. Olsen. This film was banned in some places, for example, Australia, and shown elsewhere in censored versions. Reference online to the Chicago Sun-Times review by Roger Ebert — who frequently makes perceptive remarks about westerns — reminds us of the producers' defence of the time:

"Why, its ads asked, does Soldier Blue show, 'in the most graphic way possible, the rape and savage slaughter of American Indians by American soldiers?' Because it's true, the ads replied, and 'now more than ever is the time for truth.'"

The truth alluded to included the notorious Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 when the Third Colorado Volunteers under Colonel John Chivington attacked a sleeping Cheyenne reservation.

I'm sure many western writers, working alone without specialist knowledge, have tried to avoid the myriad pitfalls of the sensitive Indian question by ignoring the issue in their BHWs. The Irene Ord material gathered for the article in this BHE contains the following quotes from her: "Western fans know their stuff and are quick to point out any mistakes I make. I once put an Indian tribe in the wrong part of the country. . . On my most recent trip [to the US] I visited an Indian reservation which gave me valuable insight into the life of Indians. . . ."

Frankly, I believe over-research can lead to its own problems. In some ways, it might be just as well to put a tribe "in the wrong part of the country". That way, the knowledgeable can more readily accept the whole thing is a fiction anyway and not feel that somebody's ancestor has been maligned or misreported; in some way insulted, belittled.

Until very recently, I've taken the coward's/lazy man's path and avoided Indians in Chap O'Keefe books, but in a series of stories beginning next year, I introduce among the continuing characters a bunch of renegades led by one Angry-he-shakes-fist, a charismatic hothead who has jumped a reservation and is said to belong to an Apache sub-tribe. Now from other detail in the stories, the setting would appear to be someplace in southern Utah — hundreds of miles north of normal Apache roaming territory, I believe. But never mind, I reckon I'm safer from the critics with my Angry-fist because of this!

I take this tack not only with the Indian question. At some point in most of the O'Keefe books a crossover comes from reality to the safety of fictional neverland in the story's background. Thus in Ride the Wild Country, Joshua Dillard travels from San Francisco via Cheyenne and Greeley to Fort Harper, and it's around the last town that most of the villains have their abode. Since there's no Fort Harper — though there is a Fort Collins! — no one's going to tell me I've blackened their great-grandfather's reputation as the town's lawyer of the time; no historical society is going to inform everyone I've put a street or building in the wrong place and my story must therefore be worthless rubbish. In Frontier Brides, reissued in October in a Dales large-print edition with a stirring Longaron cover, Santa Fe and New York City hitch the happenings to reality; Rawhide Fork is untied imagination. Similarly, in The Lawman and the Songbird, published in November, the boom town of Cox City is a fiction loosely based on the most colourful of facts available to me about real Montana Gold Rush communities. Further nods to history are made in mentions of Governor Sidney Edgerton, Sheriff Henry Plummer, the town of Bannack and the politics of the period.

All research, that on Indians included, takes time and/or money. For most people, BHWs have to be write-offs financially. Lengthy, productive sorties into today's American West are out of the question. Irene Ord had the benefit of BBC money behind her when she first visited the US, and as a European resident she had the bonus of government PLR income to raise her earnings from BHWs.

That said, many diligent writers, like Gillian, Mike Linaker (aka Neil Hunter and Richard Wyler) and Mark Bannerman, take their research very, very seriously. The rest of us have no 100% sound excuse not to, but if you enjoy the yarns — please don't shoot the fiction writer who does less than he should in a world that's not ideal.

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