There’s a local author (Gary Wietgrefe) who has a booth at the farmer’s market. It occurred to me that he might know of a local copy editor. Sure, I can find one on fiver, but I’m happy to support someone local.
I went on Saturday, primarily to talk with him. He writes historical fiction. He has written a book about his great-grandfather’s 1905 cattle drive from Iowa to Dakota (a single territory, then): Lessons of an Immigrant Father.
How convenient when I want to write a chapter about a cattle drive, about which I know nothing. I bought the book, although I did not find a copy editor.
The past is not just a foreign country. It’s an alien planet. Top position on the “what?!?” list has got to go to the fact that not only did three people (with one riding horse and a wagon) drive 50 cattle 500 miles but two of them were his sons, ages 12 and 14 (one of whom was the author’s grandfather).
It is a good book. I learned two new words, which is incredibly rare.
- Slough, which rhymes with “grew”, not cough, plough, or though. It’s basically a swampy backwater, occasionally a tributary, to a larger river, occasionally a lake.
- Raddle. He used this instead of “rattle”, once. To be fair, it was in-dialect dialog so he could have been using it as the accent. I looked it up to be sure it was a mistake. It turns out that “raddle” is a word, but it’s something completely different and he did use it correctly the second time. It’s either painting livestock or weaving branches together, depending on context. Read the book to find out which.
A bone to pick with that dialect: The plural “you” is “youse” not “use”. I had to read that sentence out loud before I could make sense of it.
It reminded me of a real-life …
How do I find that series? It’s a young man who hitch-hikes across the country. He does everything and meets everyone. No one thing is impossible, but the entirety of it is ridiculous. I read it years ago. I’ve got 1000s of books in Goodreads, but I have no idea what to search for. There it is! In the middle of page 50. I started at the end (page 96) and worked backwards. I only got distracted twice. I don’t know where Goodreads is getting those dates, but there is no way I read those books in that order. Anyway…
It reminded me of a real-life Richard Jackson Saga, although better written.
The cattle drive is not technically detailed. It is contextually detailed. The towns they went through and the reactions had good period details. The learning experiences of the young men are from their perspective (mostly) so you get to see them growing from boys to men, surprisingly quickly.
There is enough detail for me to write mine. I’m not planning on going into detail, either. I’m not writing a book about how to drive cattle. I’m writing a book in which a cattle drive is an unwelcome necessity. I can be vague.
Key take-aways:
- It’s slow – as in “moving a battalion of pikemen” slow. 10 miles is an acceptable day; 15 is nearly a dream.
- Cattle tend to want to wander off. Calves are the worst. Bulls are OK as long as there are no not-part-of-the-drive cows in the immediate vicinity.
- Water is key in the Dakotas. It’s not such a big deal in Iowa and Minnesota because it’s everywhere. In South Dakota, not so much. Stopping where water is available makes the “it’s slow” problem worse, but if you press on, you end up with dead cows.
- The cowboy/cow ratio is far smaller than I expected. The three of them do fine with 50 cows. The dialect guy recounts under 20 cowboys driving 10,000 cattle. I expected it to be more manpower intensive. I’m not sure how many cows are involved in mine. I’d be surprised at more than 1,000 – but I haven’t looked at South Dakota cattle numbers, yet.
I’m not a big historical fiction fan. One of the reasons is that I find it difficult to discern the boundary between history and fiction. This author is pretty clear about it.
Sad irony: The protagonist’s parents immigrated to America to get out of the continual wars roiling the Germanies. Two of their grandsons (the 12 year old in the book and a younger brother) end up with the US Army in Germany during WWI.
Highly recommended.
