A quick history of the Erie Canal by Kaye Spencer #westernfictioneers #ErieCanal #AmericanHistory

With the opening of the Erie Canal on October 26, 1825, the Great Lakes was connected with Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson River. This was an engineering marvel, a masterpiece often called the Eighth Wonder of the World.

The Erie Canal represented a transportation door opening for American westward expansion.  Hardy adventurers with hope in their hearts for a new and better life beyond the horizon sold their farms, packed up their belongings, and boarded the barges and boats. Some would make it to the west. Many wouldn't make it, because of illness, lack of funds to continue, or simply from the hardships encountered along the way.

The website, Erie Canal (http://www.eriecanal.org/) offers this basic information:

'Proposed in 1808, ground was broken for the Erie Canal at Rome, New York on July 4th, 1817. The Erie Canal links the waters of Lake Erie in the west to the Hudson River in the east.

The idea of the canal was to open the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains to settlers while also creating a better (safe and efficient) mode of transportation to deliver produce to markets. Two years into construction brought the first commercial traffic on the part that was completed between the towns of Rome and Utica. Doubters now saw the visions of the developers first hand and excitement increased.'

Erie Canal Map

By Rosemary Wardley (Unpublished. Provided by author for upload) [CC BY-SA 4.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Quick Stats:


Original Erie Canal (construction: 1817 to 1825)

• 18 aqueducts
• 83 locks
• 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide
• Boats carrying 30 tons of freight could float the canal
• 10-foot-wide towpath along the bank provided room for horses and mules (and their drivers) to pull the boats and along.
• Drivers were known as 'hoggees'.

Enlarged Eric Canal (construction: 1836 to 1862)

• To keep up with increasing demands of traffic, the canal was enlarged to 70 feet wide and 7 feet deep with a 240-ton boat-weight
• 72 locks

Barge Canal (construction: 1903 to 1918)

• 1903 brought another enlargement with the development of the Champlain Canal, the Oswego Canal, and the Cayuga and Seneca Canal
• 12 to 14 feet deep – 120 to 200 feet wide – 338 miles long
• 36 locks
• Accommodated a barge weight of up to 3,000 tons.

Little of the original Erie Canal exists as its identity has been lost in the reconstructions.

An aqueduct over the Mohawk River at Rexford, N.Y., in the early years of the Erie Canal. It was one of 32 navigable aqueducts on the Erie Canal. Photo courtesy of Creative Commons/Clifton Park Collection [https://religionnews.com/2017/06/30/the-erie-canal-and-the-birth-of-american-religion/]

Erie Canal in Pittsford, New York

By kathryn from Boston (Erie Canal in Pittsford) [CC BY 2.0 

(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

You can read more about the Erie Canal at the Erie Canal Museum website HERE.

I was in elementary school in the 1960s, and I remember singing this folk song about the Erie Canal. The song is "Erie Canal Song: Low Bridge, Everybody Down". It was written by Thomas Allen in 1905.

The Erie Canal plays a part in the beginning of Louis L'Amour's book How the West was Won (c. 1963 Bantam Books).

Part 1 The Rivers: "The shining land lay open—ready for conquest, and the ways into it were the rivers. Slow and mighty, turbulent and frothing, the rivers were the roads the first settlers took, building rafts, and flatboats, floating down water that was green, brown, black, flecked with foam, but that led ever onward into the heart of that dangerous but unawakened land where riches waited for the bold and the strong."

Taken from Chapter Two:

Eve Prescott stood alone, a few feet back from her family, watching the boats that thronged the Hudson River and the Erie Canal. The shore was piled high with bales, barrels, and crates, merchandise and household goods, all awaiting shipment to the West. Nothing on the farm where she had lived until then, or in the tiny village nearby, had prepared her for this...

On the river there was the shrill piping of whistles, the clang of bells, and the sound of steam exhausts... She only knew vaguely where the Ohio River lay, or the lands to which they were going, those uncertain lands, theirs for the taking, which no one had seen... The Ohio country was the wild west, the wilderness. And that was where they were going... the Promised Land.

From the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo, a ditch four hundred and twenty-five miles long had been dug. The digging had been done by several thousand wild, bog-trotting Irishmen fresh from the old country, and they had been eight years in the digging... A canal boat had a crew of three to four persons. A boy or man, working for seven to ten dollars a month, drove the team along the towpath to haul the boat. 

The steersman might earn as much as thirty dollars a month, which was good pay for the time. The captain often did his own steering; otherwise, he sat on deck smoking his pipe and shouting insults at the other boats. Sometimes the cook was the captain's wife; more often she was one of the thousands of women who followed the canal, taking up with this boater or that, as jealous of her independence as any man on the ditch. Of all shapes and sizes, and of every color, the boats moved up or down the canal, fighting or racing for cargo...

The westward movement of which they were a part was more than a hundred years old... There were always men who went west...by the Wilderness Road, the by the Natchez Trace...the Overland Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Hastings Cut-off, the Applegate Road... But now there was a difference in their coming, for they brought their women along. They came to stay...

Now they went by the Erie Canal...

* * * * *

If you've not read How the West was Won AND watched the 1962 movie of the same name, you should remedy those most egregious oversights as soon as you can. You can thank me later. *wink*

Until next time,

Kaye Spencer

Writing through history one romance upon a time

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GUNSLINGER 6: Author GORDON L. ROTTMAN

by Tom Rizzo

Gordon L. Rottman’s latest novel—MARTA’S RIDE—represents an excellent blend of action, adventure, and romance against a backdrop of the Texas-Mexico border in the late 1860s. 

Marta’s Ride—the third in Gordon’s outstanding Ride series—features a mute 16-year old Mexican girl as the protagonist who finds herself alone after Indians massacre her family.

During her quest for survival, she meets Bud Eugen, an unemployed cowboy. Although suspicious and afraid, Marta and this young cowhand form what might be considered a cautious relationship. 

As in the previous two novels, The Hardest Ride and Ride Harder, the characters in Marta face life and death choices amid a harrowing adventure pitting them against brutal weather, ambushes, attacks, and shootouts with evil bloodthirsty banditos.

Gordon gives his resourceful mute teenage heroine a powerful voice in a vivid and memorable tale of kidnapping, murder, friendship, and re-awakening. 

The fourth book in the series, Marta's Daughter, is slated for publication later this year. 

                       GUNSLINGER 6

  

1. A lot of people say heroes/heroines are in short supply these days. Tell us about your protagonist Marta. And, was there a real-life inspiration behind her?  

That's a difficult question. There was no one single person that inspired Marta Amora Hinojosa. She is much like my wife, but she's not as prone to violence...thankfully. Many of her characteristics are derived from my daughters and nieces. All are strong outgoing women and girls. I've spent thirty-five years on the family ranch in Mexico and have watched all these girls working and playing there, it’s a different world.

I've never bought into the concept that most women of the Old West, and especially on the Texas-Mexican Frontier, were mostly passive and subservient. There were, of course, subservient women, but there were just as many if not stronger women. If not, they would never have established a civilized society in that wild land. Marta wanted what most women wanted, security, and safe place to live. She was willing to fight for that and make sacrifices to achieve it.

2. What was the biggest challenge you faced about writing the viewpoint of a character from the opposite sex?   

That's another tough one. It wasn't easy. I did not want this to be just something about how a guy thought a woman would think and react. Of course, Marta's previous life in a family of migrant workers had a big impact on how she responded. It had been a hard and challenging life living rough on the road. She's been physically and verbally abused, looked down upon, assumed to be a prostitute and thief, starved, suffered the weather, had no permanent home and had seldom spent a night under a roof. She did have a loving and hardworking family, and that brought her through many trials: How would she think, how would she deal with situations, most of which we have never experienced.

A major factor in regards to Marta is that she's mute, not because of the trauma of a murdered family, but an accident when she was nine. Being mute Marta has to find ways to express herself and being an "outspoken," and passionate girl makes that a special challenge. 

Because she is forced to find ways to express herself and make her wants and needs to be known, she has become more forceful and outgoing than a "typical" 16-year old Mexican girl. Bud Eugen is quite perplexed by the feisty girl, not only because of her strong personality, but he's had basically no experience with girls.

One example, begging. Marta finds begging one of the most abhorrent tasks she occasionally has to undertake. I talked to some beggars in Mexico and once I got them to open up I was stunned that they actually had strategies and very precise do's and don'ts.

When Marta sets out to beg in a town less than hospitable to Mexicans we learn how she picks the business she would sit at with the pros and cons between businesses and even churches. Where she sat was important, how she protected herself, and what she would do when invariably chased off were on her mind. We learn what threats she was on the lookout for ranging from self-righteous white women, gangs of young boys, and stray dogs. And what would she do when a certain young out of work cowpoke who she never expected to see again showed up? Relatives enlighten me on that reunion.

While a sensitive subject, it is no secret that Marta and the other kidnapped girls were raped and abused in many ways. That, of course, is a difficult subject and writing about it is an uncomfortable challenge. I read numerous articles about depicting this in narrative writing. Most complain that authors present it no better than a porn scene and to varying degrees of explicit description. I don't describe it, you know it happens, and you see the anguish and devastation the girls have to endure afterward, and they each are affected by it and deal with it in different manners just as real people.

3. Some might consider "Marta’s Ride" a retelling of "The Hardest Ride." What’s your take on this?

Marta's Ride is in a way a retelling of The Hardest Ride but from Marta's point of view. It has given her a "voice" of sorts to tell her story--she's the narrator. It does have to cover some of the ground crossed early in The Hardest Ride, but that part's shortened and of course seen from Marta's much different perspective. Too, there are numerous events that Bud never saw and that Marta had to deal with herself. For her, it is the first time she actually lived in an Angelo environment, and there is much that is new to her, some good, some bad.

Once she and the other girls are kidnapped and taken to Mexico, it is a completely different story. There are subplots, characters, terrifying events, and places visited that are not even alluded to in The Hardest Ride. At one point she's kidnapped from her kidnappers. One event sets the stage for a future title that will come to its conclusion three years later. Marta's Ride also gives us "the rest of the story" of what happened once they returned to what Marta now thinks of as home. It provides more on this than even found in the second book, Ride Harder.

4. Tell us something we don’t know about Marta and Bud. What makes them tick? Tell us one thing about them that we don’t learn from the book, perhaps a secret in their past.

Through all three novels, we hear mention of Bud's hateful and abusive mother whom he's not seen in nine years. While he's not making any effort to find her, deep inside he would at least like to know what became of her no matter how dysfunctional she was and how dangerous life with her had been.

Bud has a soft spot in his heart, which he reluctantly admits to. If he didn't, he would have turned his back on a mute, abandoned Mexican girl. Marta has a hidden desire. She wishes to see the ocean, simply because she does not believe such a thing exists. And, eventually, Marta also wishes for a family, her own children, which she never mentions to Bud and something a simple cowpoke like him never dreamed of.

5. Your series is quite popular. Reviews are outstanding. From your perspective, how do you judge the quality of your work? 

I was quite surprised at how popular the books, or rather Bud and Marta, became. I had read barely any Westerns, and the few that I had were mainly Cormac McCarthy. I do like traditional Western movies. I was putting together a story idea for a present-day story set on the Texas-Mexico border. It changed a great deal, and three factors changed it to a traditional Western: 1) Traditional gave me more flexibility in all what occurs without so many present-day real-world constraints, 2) I liked the idea of researching the period, which is not all that different than the present way of life in Morelos, Coahuila, and 3) I liked the challenge of writing a Western something totally new.

6. What was the first story you ever published and what was it like and what do you think of it now?

I'd never done any short stories until I had one punished in Sundown Press's "Sundown Western Tales." I started writing articles for military journals and magazines in 1975. That got me recognized as an "authority." My first military history non-fiction book was in 1984. I've since published about 130 military history books, mostly very dry technical subjects. 

I learned how to do historical research though, which is beneficial in researching Westerns. In the early 1990s, I co-authored three Tom Clancy-style WWIII techno-thrillers, which let me put to use my training as a Soviet military specialist and later as a Special Forces and SEAL war-games writer for 11 years. (I was in the Army for 26 years, and that's a great experience for writers.) 

The Hardest Ride was my first real fiction effort. I made a lot of mistakes including too slow of a start, a bit too much backstory, and included a lot of detail. Of course, that detail was beneficial too. Many reviewers like this subtle insertion of the details of what they ate, what they wore, and how they lived in the 1880s.

I've tried to learn and improve with each subsequent book of the Ride-series. I hope and think the next novel, Marta's Daughter, released by this summer, shows major improvement, although one of my nieces said she was emotionally and morally exhausted proofreading it. 

As a bit of a preview, Marta's Daughter takes place during the Mexican Revolution. Bud is 47 and Marta 41 and makes cameos. Their 17-year old daughter, Arsenia Renee Eugen, is sucked into the storm.

_______

Gordon’s first book of the series—The Hardest Ride—achieved bestseller status at USA TODAY and Amazon. The novel won the Western Fictioneers' Peacemaker Award for Best Western Novel 2014 and also ranked as a Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award Finalist for Best First Western Novel 2014. Western Writers of America also honored The Hardest Ride, naming it a finalist for a Spur Award for Best Traditional Western Novel for 2013.    

614-607-0949

Tom@TomRizzo.com

www.TomRizzo.com

Last Stand At Bitter Creek

Finalist for the 2013 Western Fictioneers' 

Peacemaker Award for Best First Novel  

_______

#CHRISTMAS TIDINGS - Meg Mims

Christmas Tidings

Merry Christmas from the Western Fictioneers! Have you been following the Wolf Creek series? It's an exciting string of books by Ford Fargo, who is a "conglomerate" of WF members writing varied protagonists who populate the fictional 1871 Kansas town of Wolf Creek - "a wild, wide open town where no one asks about your past, because almost everyone has a secret." So soon after the "War of Rebellion", many residents have moved west and now scrape out a living in the prairie-tough town... but not everyone survives the dusty streets, back alleys and sometimes dangerous saloons.

Book 1: Bloody Trail, starts off with a literal bang - when a a small army of former Confederate guerrillas rob the bank, leaving many innocents dead after their hasty departure. Sheriff G.W. Satterlee and his posse must overtake the outlaws before they reach Indian Territory—but the chase is complicated by the secret pasts of several members… The series continued the adventures from Book 2: Kiowa Vengeance, Book 3: Murder in Dogleg City and all the way through Book 8: Night of the Assassins. You can bet the latter has some sinister action! It's such a great series, and best to read them in order - except for the Christmas anthologies. Those will give a reader a taste of just how interesting these characters are, and what kinds of trouble they face.

Some of the authors participating in the Wolf Creek series include Troy D. Smith, Bill Crider, Phil Dunlap, Jory Sherman, James J. Griffin, L. J. Martin, Cheryl Pierson, Charlie Steel, Robert J. Randisi, James Reasoner, Clay More, Chuck Tyrell, L. J. Washburn, Big Jim Williams, Matthew Pizzolato, Jacquie Rogers, and many others. 

I introduced a new character in last year's Christmas anthology - Book 9: A Wolf Creek Christmas. Phoebe Wright, who is always right, is a widow who arrives in town to make sure her niece, Lucy, is safe. No letters have arrived from either Lucy or Phoebe's sister Ann Haselton, the town's teacher.

Unfortunately Phoebe soon learns that Ann died months ago during the guerrilla bank raid while protecting a child - and that Lucy has vanished. Phoebe knows her niece had very little money, so the search is on... She soon runs into other problems including the greedy saloon owner Ira Breedlove - whose place breeds only the love of money, and who doesn't appreciate Phoebe's righteous and judgmental attitude.

Phoebe definitely has her hands full in "A Savior Is Born" (written by Meg Mims).

But Book 9 also includes many other interesting stories featuring Roman Hatchett, a world-weary trapper (written by Jory Sherman), Gib Norwood, a dairy farmer (by Jacquie Rogers), Indian scout Charley Blackfeather and deputy marshal Quint Croy (by Troy D. Smith), and livery owner Ben Tolliver (by James J. Griffin) -- everyone seems to get a holiday surprise. The anthologies, as stated before, give readers new to the series a taste of great characters.

And the fun doesn't end there. Another Christmas anthology is Book 10: O Deadly Night, which explores more holiday happenings. Hutch Higgins needs a doctor (written by Big Jim Williams), new arrival Kelly O’Brian finds an unholy welcome (by Charlie Steel); town doctor Logan Munro just wants to celebrate Hogmanay (by Clay More), Billy Below and his favorite soiled dove team up for the holiday (by Chuck Tyrell), while Derrick McCain's sister slowly recovers from trauma (by Cheryl Pierson), and Marshal Sam Gardner stays busy (by Troy D. Smith) during the not-so-peaceful post-Christmas season in Wolf Creek.

While the series has slowed down a bit, with two books out since last year, it still continues the adventures of the town's embattled law officers dealing with a devilish rancher in Book 11: Stand Proud and Book 12: The Dead of Winter. And more books should be coming in 2015, according to Troy D. Smith, the series' editor - a tough job, given the interweaving of so many characters and so many viewpoints in a complex plot and setting. It's masterful, to say the least.

Once again, Merry Christmas, happy reading of the wild and woolly west, and a prosperous New Year in 2015 from the Western Fictioneers!

Mystery author Meg Mims lives in Southeastern Michigan with her husband and a 'Make My Day' Malti-poo dog. Meg loves writing novels, short novellas and short stories, both contemporary and historical. Her Spur and Laramie Award winning books - Double Crossing and Double or Nothing - are now among the Prairie Rose Publications book list. Meg is also one-half of the D.E. Ireland team writing the Eliza Doolittle & Henry Higgins Mystery series for St. Martin's Minotaur. Wouldn't It Be Deadly, Book 1, is out now! Book 2, Move Your Blooming Corpse, will be out in 2015. You can find Meg (and D.E. Ireland) on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. If you're in the mood for short, sweet Christmas novellas with rescue dogs and cats, check out the following:

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