USING FACTS AND FICTION TO CREATE A WESTERN NOVEL

My husband and I don’t subscribe to the Hallmark Channel and are just now watching (via Netflix) the great series based on Janet Oke’s writing, “When Calls The Heart”, set in a Canadian West coal town called Coal Valley. I wish I had seen this series before I wrote my own western romance of coal mining, O’NEILL’S TEXAS BRIDE, McClintocks book two. My book doesn’t include a Mountie, of course. Mine features a ranch hand hero, Finn O’Neill, who goes undercover in a lignite coal mine to earn money to buy his own ranch.

On second thought, perhaps I’m better off using research and my imagination to create my own version of a coal town operated by a less than ethical man. The town in my story is not nearly as neat and pretty as the one in Janet Oke’s stories. The miners get just as dirty, though. And the miner's homes were as basic as in the television series.

My idea of Lignite, only I added more grime
(photo purchased from iStock)

I confess that research into coal mining in 1885 Central Texas was difficult. I found plenty of information on early coal mining from BCE to today—but not much on the specific time period I needed. What I did discover was fascinating in some areas, not so much in others, and downright scary in places.

I found the perfect place for my story, the town of Coal, Texas southwest of San Antonio and near the town of Lytle. In my story, the town is called Lignite after the type of coal mined there. Also in my story, someone is causing deadly “accidents” at the mine and the owner wants to determine who is guilty. For this, he hires my hero, Finn O’Neill.

The beauty of changing the name of the town in fiction is that the town has whatever buildings I choose and/or need for the story. Instead of Lytle, in my book the next town is Spencer for the same reason. That’s one of the fun things about writing historical fiction. The author gets to build the setting and only has to be true to the period in customs and dress. I love making up my stories and their settings and I hope readers enjoy them.

The actual town of Coal was on the Missouri Pacific line in southeastern Medina County. Coal mines, worked by as many as 500 people at a time, precipitated the growth of mining camps in the 1880s. In 1881 the International-Great Northern Railroad built a rail line from Austin to Laredo that passed through Lytle southwest of San Antonio.

The community of Coal developed on this line a mile southwest of Lytle and just north of the mining camps. The high-grade lignite produced at the mines was sold to the railroads until the advent of oil-burning locomotives. In 1888 Coal Mine consisted of a store, a bandstand, a main plaza, a dance hall, a Catholic church, and at least two schools. Hmmm, in my story, Lignite has a store, both a Catholic and a Protestant church, a saloon, two dormitories called longhouses for single men, an infirmary with a nurse on duty, and one two-room school where heroine Stella Grace Clayton and her sister Nettie Sue Clayton teach. I included a lot of mystery in this book, but O’NEILL’S TEXAS BRIDE is a romance between Finn O’Neill and Stella Clayton.

Photo model for Stella Grace Clayton
(photo purchased from iStock)

Lignite, often referred to as brown coal, is a soft brown combustible sedimentary rock that is formed from naturally compressed peat. It is considered the lowest rank of coal due to its relatively low heat content. It is used almost exclusively as a fuel for steam-electric power generation. In China, lignite is also mined for its germanium content.

I learned a couple of interesting things in my research. (1) Dark black lignite, or jet, is where the term 'jet black' originates. (2) Now the term has more scientific and precise basis, but the actual term “horse power” began as the amount of effort it took one horse to lift one container of coal up from the mine shaft to the ground. (3) Another thing I learned is that I never, ever want to work in a coal mine. I get claustrophobic in elevators.  

O’NEILL’S TEXAS BRIDE, McClintocks book two, is available at these links:

Amazon    Apple/iTunes    Nook    Kobo    GooglePlay

Amazon bestselling and award winning author Caroline Clemmons writes western historical and contemporary romances. Her latest release is O’NEILL’S TEXAS BRIDE, McClintocks book two. Other series include the Kincaids and Stone Mountain Texas. You can keep up with Caroline’s releases by signing up for her newsletter. Her books are listed on her website at www.carolineclemmons.com and on her Amazon Author Page.   

A Woman's Work Is Never Done - Meg Mims

My mother always said this, while raising six kids in the 1950-1960s. She chose to leave a bank clerk job and be a housewife. My grandmother, raised on a farm, worked in an office as a typist before getting married and staying home to raise her family. That trend went back to the 1800s, when girls were raised to marry and have children. Many chose to work first at a job before settling down with a husband. Many didn't have a prospective suitor. Or didn't want one.

But there wasn't much to choose from in terms of paid employment at the upper level of salary choices. Men dominated the professions such as being a physician, a lawyer, owning a business, etc. Of course, there were exceptions - but for the most part, women worked as domestics (maids, laundresses, cooks) or in factories or at home, often paid by the piece, either stripping tobacco, picking nuts, producing silk flowers or sewing, making lace, etc. They sometimes worked in millinery and dressmaker shops, or ... as teachers. It seems fitting, being September, to talk about women working as teachers.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's sister, Catherine Beecher, born in 1800 in a prominent family of social reformers, was self-taught and believed that women were natural teachers. Catherine became one in 1821 and was a co-founder of the Hartford Female Seminary - where women were trained  to be mothers and teachers. She also believed that teaching was far more important than the work of a doctor or lawyer - something I agree with - although she never supported suffrage. Still, for the early 1800s, she spurred progress for women to further their education and then pass that knowledge to children.

It seems many people agreed with Beecher. "God seems to have made woman peculiarly suited to guide and develop the infant mind, and it seems... very poor policy to pay a man 20 or 22 dollars a month, for teaching children the ABCs, when a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price." -- Littleton School Committee, Littleton, Massachusetts, 1849

In urban schools, women taught and men were superintendents or principals. In western rural areas, men might have taken the lower pay of a teaching position if they had no other choice. School districts might have hired a man to teach the older children and a woman to handle the younger ones. If they could afford both, that is, depending on the school and settlement. And most schools were one-room, handling up to sixty children. Often there was little extra money for slates, books or even coal or wood for the stoves to heat the small schoolhouses in poorer settlements. 

Reading - utilizing the Bible, early primers or later MacGuffey's Reader - and grammar, arithmetic, geography and history were taught in schools, sometimes by teachers who had barely learned the same lessons. But while many consider the quality of lessons as basic or primitive, consider today's trend to skip spelling and grammar lessons (disappearing unfortunately). The extensive "figuring" lessons in measures and weights, basic accounting and other necessary math was vital to running a farm or a keeping a business afloat.

Women in the field appreciated the chance to live an independent life, and to earn wages - even if on a  temporary basis before marriage. By the turn of the century, 75% of teachers were women. My husband's aunt worked in a one-room schoolhouse with children ranging from kindergarten to eighth grade. She swept the steps and classroom every day, fetched coal for the heating stove, brought extra food for kids going without breakfast/lunch (during late Depression) and handled discipline - but the children loved her since she made it fun to learn.

 

 

Rural North Dakota - above

To the right, a class of thirty children, possibly the same age (easier than thirty all at different grade levels), and their female teacher - at the Watkins School, Nashville, Tennessee, late 1800s.

Today, women still dominate the teaching profession. They do have the advantage of earning pensions, benefits and fairly decent wages - although for the work involved, they are still not paid enough (in my opinion.) We all have memories of our favorite teachers. God bless them all.

Sources: http://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/beecher.html, http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/industry/4.htm

Meg Mims is an award-winning author with two western mysteries under her Eastern belt. She lives in Michigan, where the hills are like driveway slopes and trees block any type of prairie winds. LIKE her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter or check out her books on her website. Double Crossing won the 2012 Spur Award for Best First Novel and Double or Nothing is the exciting sequel.