Pink and I are packing up today, hoping to hit the road in the morning, Saturday. I will be returning to the Canyon after Christmas, but Pink hasn't decided what she is going to do, stay at home or come back with me. When I get back, I will no longer be up here on the snowy prairie but down in the Canyon embraced in her arms.I still have court records to search in the two Prairie court houses in Grangeville and Nez Perce, but I have plenty of data to sort through for the month of December before I am ready to give organized search terms to the Court Recorders. They have to request the actual courtroom transcripts from an archive in Boise. I will send them the search parameters before I leave Arizona, so the records will be here when I get back. Court cases are tremendous sources for a historian. Because the transcripts are taken down word for word you can write in dialogue, moving from past tense to a present tense voice which enlivens any story. There is a great story about Peter Licker shooting Fabian Laizer over a dispute concerning Fabian's housekeeper in "A Brief History of the Flying B Ranch", an article I wrote back in 2000.
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| Moon rise over the Canyon |
Being back down in the Canyon will be warmer, sheltered and even mystical. I'm looking forward to a few months of intimacy with the subject of my prose. Wallace Stegner wrote, "No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments." Then he went on and added, "Fictions serve as well as facts."* I will make sure my readers know what are fictions, what are facts and most important what are myths, but to capture the spirit of a place, Stegner is right, the story of place is more than just facts.
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| Cali insisting I scratch behind her ears. |
* Wallace Stegner, The Sense of Place, Random House, 1992.
This is some good stuff, Bruce. I love the thought that historical writers have higher purpose in making places places.
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