Five Reasons to Read - And Write - the Oregon Trail with guest blogger Kathleen D. Bailey

 

 by Kathleen D. Bailey, author of Redemption's Hope

Twenty years ago, I had a glimmer of an idea for a novel. An impoverished young widow takes a place as cook on a wagon train, only to discover that the scout for that train is the man who betrayed her three years before. He’s under contract and she has nowhere else to go, so they find themselves slogging across the plains together. Old issues come out, new ones form in the pressure cooker that is 100 wagons filled with 200 to 300 scared, tired people. By the time they reach Oregon Country, both have changed immeasurably.

That gleam in this author’s eye became my first published book, “Westward Hope,” in 2019. I’ve since followed it with “Settlers’ Hope,” 2020, and “Redemption’s Hope,” out July 22 of this year. “Settlers’ Hope” takes place in an Oregon Country hamlet, with survivors of the trail, and “Redemption’s Hope” follows the trail in reverse, as Jenny Thatcher looks for the Native man she thinks she can love. But the Trail marks everything they do, from Oona Moriarty’s quest to find her brother (“Settlers’ Hope”) to Jenny’s retracing the route she took in 1846.

The Oregon Trail. The Great Migration. Opening the West. The Wagon Train era. Its names are legend; its legends are legend. Who hasn’t heard stories of the Americans who shook off their newly-minted country, less than a century after the Revolution, to see what lay beyond those hills?

The Oregon Trail is a gold strike (another beloved Western trope) for the reader.

1. It has tremendous range, from the transcendent novels of Jane Kirkpatrick to a simple novella. Choose your own adventure, there’s plenty of Trail literature, from an afternoon’s read in the hammock to something you can write a thesis about.

2. It can take you to another place, right in your own country. The Plains, desert and Western mountains are an exotic setting to anyone who’s never been there. Chimney Rock, Castle Rock, Independence Rock. Buffalo hunts. Amber fields of grain and snow-capped mountains. Bonus: the characters you’re reading about haven’t seen it either.

3. Oregon Trail books are a history lesson. You learn what they ate, how they ate it, what they packed and what they did when supplies ran low. You learn about the Louisiana Purchase and “Manifest Destiny,” all wrapped around a good story.

4. About that story…Anything can happen when you throw a group of strangers together under almost impossible conditions. You learn about the resilience of the human spirit, and also just how nasty we can be.

5. In the hands of a Christian author, Trail stories are a venue for strengthening your faith. (See #5, below).  

As satisfying as the Trail is for readers, it’s just as big a boon for writers. 

1. The Oregon Trail and its time period (1840s till after The War) is pretty forgiving from a research standpoint. You don’t need to know a lot of battles, dates and who massacred whom. (I’m doing a Lexington-and-Concord story right now, and believe me, there’s no comparison.) You do have to be careful if you throw in real historical characters, making them as accurate as possible, and you do need to have a rough framework of what’s going on Back East. But the real drama in your story will be between the men and women who board those wagons in St. Joseph, Missouri.

2. And drama there will be. Everyone on the Trail had a story. They were running from something or someone (Michael Moriarty in “Westward Hope”), they were running TO something or someone (Oona Moriarty in “Settlers’ Hope”), they were at rock bottom and had nothing better to do (Caroline Pierce O’Leary in “Westward Hope”), or they were good stable people who happened to have wanderlust (Ben Harkness in “Westward Hope”). Face a couple of them off against each other and watch what happens.

3. The Trail itself becomes a character, as the emigrants battle, well, everything. They fight river currents, arid deserts, plagues on their cattle and plagues on themselves. As they reach the higher plains, they throw out almost everything they brought, to make it easier on their suffering horses or oxen, and they learn what really matters. Or they don’t. (Ina Prince in “Westward Hope.”) People die on the Trail and are buried in places their loved ones know they’ll never visit again. Families become fluid, with parents taking in orphaned children and elders dying in the dirt.

4. By its very nature, the wagon train lends itself to high drama. It’s like a small town on wheels, and it has the best and worst of small towns. There’s gossip, backbiting, challenges to the wagon master’s authority. There are petty cruelties. A person’s past catches up with them on the trail, no matter how hard they try to outrun it. But there’s also transcendent kindness, as the emigrants help one another with everything from a loose wheel to childbirth. They are in this together. They don’t have anyone else. 

5. And it remains one of the best venues for exploring our Christian faith in fiction. Like Abraham, these pioneers went out to a land they knew not, or didn’t know enough. Like the Israelites, they turned their backs on their former lives in the hopes of something better. The Trail reduced every man, woman and child to their essence, and when they came to the other coast, most were forever changed. In the hands of an inspirational fiction author, at least part of the change will be spiritual. 

When I was doing library talks on “Westward Hope,” I occasionally encountered people who were skeptical about an inspirational novel. They would ask me, “Just how much religion is there in your book?” It’s a simple question to answer, I’m an inspy author, my faith permeates the books – I hope. My standard answer to “how much religion” is, “I wouldn’t want to take on the Oregon Trail without a belief in something bigger than myself.” There are no atheists in foxholes, or so the saying goes, and I doubt there were many on the Trail.

So check out the Great Migration, and I may be joining you. I thought I was done with the Trail, but new situations and characters are kicking around in my head, and I just might let them out!

~*~*~*~*~*~

Two distinct sets of villains. Two orphaned children. A man without a country and a woman with too much past...All in a rambunctious young country where anything goes, especially in the West. Seriously. What can go wrong?

“Redemption’s Hope” is the third and last installment of Kathleen D. Bailey’s “Western Dreams” series, following “Westward Hope” and “Settlers’ Hope.” The novel takes Jenny Thatcher, a secondary character in the first two books on the ride of her life, from the Oregon Country to New Mexico to San Antonio to New Orleans and back, as she looks for her dream and finds herself in the bargain.

White Bear, the Cheyenne brave, has a foot in two worlds but feels at home in neither. He longs to reconnect with the spirited white woman who had sought refuge with his family three years before. Is his true home with “Blue Eyes,” the woman he knew for only three days? 

Only if he finds her.

Kathleen Bailey is a journalist and novelist with 40 years’ experience in the nonfiction, newspaper and inspirational fields. Born in 1951, she was a child in the 50s, a teen in the 60s, a young adult in the 70s and a young mom in the 80s. It’s been a turbulent, colorful time to grow up, and she’s enjoyed every minute of it and written about most of it. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband David. They have two grown daughters.

Connect with Kathy at Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn 

 

What do you love about reading (or writing) about the Oregon Trail?

One commenter will win an ebook of Redemption's Hope and one commenter will win a New England gift pack (US only for gift pack) 

9 Tips for Writing an Epic Novel by Guest Kathleen D. Bailey

  By Guest Kathleen D. Bailey

 

            Two distinct sets of villains. Two orphaned children. A man without a country and a woman with too much past. And a rambunctious young country where anything went, especially in the West. What could possibly go wrong?

            When I began drafting “Redemption’s Hope,” the third book in my “Western Dreams” series, I knew it had to be different from the first two. “Westward Hope” and “Settler’s Hope” were traditional romances, with a “him” and a “her” battling forces that would keep them apart. While the first book takes place on the Oregon Trail, the external conflict comes from how the hero and heroine respond to the challenges of the trail and how their relationship plays out against it. It’s still the Oregon Trail, but it’s all about them. The second book, “Settler’s Hope,” takes place in one small Oregon Country settlement, a raw hamlet the Irish-immigrant heroine isn’t all sure she wants to make her home. Still the Oregon Country, but all about her.

 

            But I knew a one-horse town or even a wagon train tour wouldn’t offer enough scope for my third book, the story of Jenny Thatcher. Gun-toting, swaggering, pants-wearing, horse-stealing but now God-serving Jenny. A girl who was larger than life even in someone else’s book. And her love interest White Bear, a Native man who didn’t feel at home in either world, his or hers, and was larger than life in his own way.

            They had been apart for three years, so the story had to involve a search for each other.  And cruel forces to keep them apart. 

Jenny and White Bear needed a bigger stage for their story to play out from. I found it in the epic format. 

Jenny and White Bear would roam what was then the known world, from Taos to San Antonio to New Orleans to St. Joseph, and through places that didn’t yet have names. They would come together briefly for three glorious days in New Orleans, then be separated by the powers of evil. (See above, two sets of villains!) They would spend the remainder of the book trying to get back together, until a final showdown on the snow-covered plain where it all started three years before. And they would do it with a slew of secondary and minor characters, some real historical figures, some that should have been. 

            Here’s how I made it work.

1.     While I often write my books piecemeal, doing scenes as they occur to me and patching the whole thing together like a quilt, I knew that wouldn’t work for “Redemption’s Hope.” Too many moving pieces, too much risk of losing one or several threads. So I wrote this one in linear fashion. I made notes for things I might want to include in subsequent chapters, but the general progression was chapter by chapter.

 

2.    Details do matter, and in the big book it’s more than just mistaking hazel eyes for blue. With two separate sets of villains, I had to distinguish them not only from each other, but from the other set of bad guys.  I stressed their physical appearance, and also gave one of Jenny’s pursuers an extra interest in abusing her sexually. It never happens, I wouldn’t do that to Jenny, but it gave her pursuers another level of complexity, and gave her one more thing to fear.

3.    I also had to pay attention to timelines, both real and fictional. I printed out a couple of lists of events in my period, 1849 and 1850, and sprinkled them liberally through the novel.

 

4.    I really wanted a couple of real historical characters, and I settled on Christopher “Kit” Carson and Mrs. Susannah Dickinson, the wife of Alamo hero Almaron Dickinson. I researched both heavily until I knew what they might have said to Jenny. But every word and interaction has to move the story forward, even in an epic. I had to not only have them do cameos, but to interact with Jenny in a meaningful way. Carson helps her escape from two killers who’ve tracked her to Taos. Mrs. Dickinson’s influence isn’t so dramatic, but in chatting with Jenny, she influences Jenny to wonder if she would be as brave as Mrs. Dickinson, and stay with White Bear through something like the Alamo. Modern writers don’t have the luxury of a Charles Dickens, or even the 20th-century’s James Michener. Everything has to count in some way.

5.    I also wanted to show the entire scope of the West at the time, so I threw in some fictional characters such as Jenny’s friend Noonday Smith, the would-be gold miner. The same rule went for these as it did for the real characters: they needed to interact with Jenny and her situation, and not just be window dressing. I’ve been fascinated for years – and appalled – by the Creole custom of powerful men taking on “quadroons,” pretty mixed-race women, as mistresses. The process was institutionalized, sanitized and sanctioned in 19^th-century New Orleans. I wanted to have Jenny meet a quadroon, and found it in Dominique. But Dominique had to be more than an interesting sidetrack. I found her purpose in having Jenny reflect on her own past as a saloon girl, and fear exposing that part of her life again. She wants Dominique to find God, so she tells her own story as she explains the plan of salvation. It gives insight into Dominique—and Jenny.

6.    At some point I also had to decide what to leave out, and that’s hard with something as vast as the West. The American West was not only physically big, but had a range of characters and potential experiences. As my word count crept up and my characters careened toward their final battle, I knew I couldn’t fit in a cattle drive or a barroom brawl. But that’s all right. There are other Western books to be written, and I can put my stamp on those two classics in another story.

7.    With two sets of villains and Jenny and White Bear spending so much time apart, it was also crucial that I establish Where Everyone Was At A Certain Time. I printed a special copy of my chapter outline and color-coordinated Jenny’s enemies, White Bear’s enemies, Jenny and White Bear as to where they were in a given chapter.  A map of the United States also helped, with color-coordinated push pins guiding me through. Color-coordination is my fallback position for most organizing.

8.    For my epic, I also had to break with the conventions of the romance novel. White Bear and Jenny don’t meet or reunite in the first chapter, because the body of the story is about their search for each other. So I had to establish early on who White Bear was to Jenny, who Jenny was to White Bear, and that they had never forgotten each other. And I had to ramp up the anticipation of their reunion. Flashbacks are a powerful tool. Don’t overuse.

9.    Most of all, I needed to make their quest matter, especially for Jenny. Jenny, my former saloon girl, so tough on the outside, but hurting on the inside, so deeply even she doesn’t realize it. Jenny has accepted the Lord as her Savior, gone her way and sinned no more. But she still bears the load of guilt from all the years she didn’t serve Him. She buries her past in hard work at her horse farm and good times with her friends. But when she finally breaks away to look for White Bear, she also breaks away from the conventions that were holding her guilt at bay. As she roams the West she comes face to face with what she was, who she is now, and the full scope of the Father’s redeeming love. I had to make the journey matter for White Bear too, as he learns that Jenny is strong enough, and then some, to be married to a Native man. They needed to find not only each other, but themselves. 

This is what needs to happen in an epic. I could have just concentrated on the plot, the twists and turns, mixing suspense with a travelogue and tying it up with a big bow of narrow escapes for its paper-doll characters. Some writers have done that. Some readers don’t mind. But Jenny and White Bear deserved more: an internal journey to match their external one. I hope I gave it to them.

Now it’s your turn. What do you like/dislike about the epic form? Writers, how do you make it work, or why don’t you write them? Readers, do you enjoy reading epics?

 

Kathy is generously offering giveaways today to three commenters! Let us know in the comments if you’d like to be entered for either a paper copy of "Westward Hope," an e-copy of "Settler's Hope," or a New England gift pack.

 

Kathleen Bailey is a journalist and novelist with 40 years’ experience in the nonfiction, newspaper and inspirational fields. Born in 1951, she was a child in the 50s, a teen in the 60s, a young adult in the 70s and a young mom in the 80s. It’s been a turbulent, colorful time to grow up, and she’s enjoyed every minute of it and written about most of it.

            Bailey’s work includes both historical and contemporary fiction, with an underlying thread of men and women finding their way home, to Christ and each other. Her first Pelican book, ‘‘Westward Hope,” was published in September 2019. This was followed by a novella, “The Logger’s Christmas Bride,” in December 2019. Her second full-length novel, “Settler’s Hope,” was released July 17, 2020. She has a Christmas novella, “The Widow’s Christmas Miracle,” scheduled for this December as part of Pelican’s “Christmas Extravaganza,” and is completing “Redemption’s Hope,” the third and final book in the Western Dreams series.

She lives in New Hampshire with her husband David. They have two grown daughters.

            For more information, contact her at ampie86@comcast.net; @piechick1 on Twitter; Kathleen D. Bailey on Facebook and LinkedIn; or at www.kathleendbailey.weebly.com.

            

 

Don't Nickel-And-Dime This by guest blogger Kathleen D. Bailey

Happy Friday, Seekerville!

Carrie here - I have the utmost privilege of welcoming 'the author formerly known as kaybee' to the blog today. That's right, Seekerville's own Kathleen D. Bailey (a faithful commenter under the handle 'kaybee') has just released her first novel, and we are thrilled at the chance to help her celebrate!

Michael once betrayed Caroline in the worst possible way.
Can she trust him to get her across the Oregon Trail?
Can he trust himself to accept her forgiveness and God’s?

 

Goodreads | Amazon

Take it away, Kathleen!

~*~*~*~*~

For years, my father-in-law drove a vehicle which we famously referred to as the “Chinese Junk.” It was a 1960s station wagon that, with judicious replacing of parts, he had kept functional well into the 80s. He eventually got a better car for himself, but he kept the Chinese Junk as a spare and his children and extended family drove it when we were between vehicles or having our vehicles worked on. (We do not go to the kind of places that have loaner cars, sigh.) Toward the end of its life you had to connect two wires under the hood to start it, but there was no question in any of our minds that the Chinese Junk worked.

My father-in-law nickeled and dimed that car for years. The Junk gave up its particular ghost when the mechanics in the family couldn’t FIND parts, but even then it refused to die and it’s rusting somewhere in a secluded part of my brother-in-law’s property. Now that was a car. And also, probably by today’s standards, not legal.

You can nickel-and-dime a car, but only for so long. Trust me on this. Eventually even the Chinese Junk had to be retired, though family members still raid IT for parts.

But there are other areas of our lives where we can’t take the nickel-and-dime approach, and we shouldn’t.

Not Depressed Enough?

I stood up with eagerness as the medical researcher came back into the room, but her expression told me I had nothing to be eager about. “You didn’t qualify for the depression study,” she told me. “The doctor said we need someone who’s actively depressed.”

She said she’d try to get me a check for the time I spent on the screening, and as I walked out to the reception area she patted me on the back. “Look at it this way, at least you’re not depressed.”

Indeed.

For several years my husband and I have done medical research trials to help with an ever-expanding budget and ever-shrinking paychecks. I had had my eye on this one for catching up on our property taxes. But as I started my car, I knew that God would provide for the taxes in His own way and His own time.

It wasn’t always that way.

We have struggled financially for most of our marriage, from Dave’s college days to the Great Recession, which never receded fast enough for me. I clipped coupons, looked for deals on everything, and found secondary ways to make money. When I had full-time jobs, I always freelanced around the side; and when I lost one of those jobs due to budget cuts, I never collected a dime of unemployment. At one point during the laid-off years, I had six different income streams. At once.

But they never did what I hoped they would.

I would plan on a certain check to come to take care of a certain need, and when it came, another, more urgent need nudged it out of the way. So I’d roll the need over to the next freelance check, bonus or medical trial compensation. And the “need” would get eaten up by something else, a still more urgent one.

There was never enough to go around, and my plans for what there was always fell through.

This financial patchwork quilt, with plenty of holes, extended into our sixties. When friends paid off their children’s student loans and their houses, I continued to scramble for freelance jobs. Sometimes I got them, sometimes I didn’t.

Until the day I was grousing about yet another need going unmet because another need had superseded it. And the Lord spoke to me. Not a burning bush thing, I’ve unfortunately never had those, but it was clear enough: “Kathy, you are never going to nickel-and-dime your way out of your financial problems. If you could, you would have done it by now.”

Whoa.

Was that what I had been doing? I’d thought it was Good Financial Planning.

And maybe it had been, but God had a bigger plan. A spreadsheet I couldn’t argue with. I still plan, but I’m a lot more flexible in allowing Him to meet our needs. Because He will. In His time and His way.

I asked myself what else I’d been approaching this way, or seeing other people dealing with in the nickel-and-dime way.  

Mysterious ways

Could you nickel and dime a marriage? Could one go into that most intricate of human relationships with a checklist?

Only if one or more of the parties walked away with a broken heart.

If Dave or I had had a checklist, we wouldn’t be here today. Not together, anyway. There is no earthly reason why we should be married, or even a couple. But God wanted it that way, and the three of us are greater than the sum of our parts.

In writing (yes, I knew we’d eventually get here), I held to a punch-list format for years and years. If I did everything right, whatever “everything” was at the time, I would snag THAT editor, THAT agent, or THAT door would open and I’d walk in and not look back. I schmoozed and slaved. Boxes were checked. Formulas got followed, disciplines observed. But formulas and checklists don’t always follow the patterns of an industry in flux. Because there aren’t any patterns. Houses close or merge, agents burn out, trends flow away from my genre.

There is no formula for being published. There is only writing, hard work and God.

Being “anxious for nothing”

But God wasn’t done with me even then, as He pointed out that we can’t nickel-and-dime our salvation, either.

I thought I’d mastered that one. Raised in a liturgical church, I’d looked for salvation through sacramental observances and good works for most of my childhood and teen years, and thrown that off in the tumult of the 60s. When the Lord found me, a drugged, directionless little hippie girl, I learned that the road back wasn’t paved with good works, and I joyously accepted salvation by faith.

But there was still a lot to learn, and as with my finances, the idea of doing it myself wouldn’t go away. When there was a need I tried to fill it, even when He had other plans. I was Doing and not necessarily Being.

Until I couldn’t. Age caught up with me, along with a demanding job, and I couldn’t necessarily Do. Who would Do if I Didn’t?

I could never be good enough, smart enough, “Christian” enough for God. And He knows that. He knew it when I was born, He knew it on that fateful Friday 2,000 years ago. But that’s never been what He wanted.

We can’t nickel-and-dime the way to heaven. But when faced with the sacrifice of everything He was in spite of everything we are, really, who would want to? Wouldn’t you rather be loved with an Everlasting Love than check off, or be checked off a punch list?

He wants me, and you, to Be first.

And He’ll take it from there.

~*~*~*~*~

Kathleen Bailey, known locally as “Kaybee,” is a journalist and novelist with 40 years’ experience in the nonfiction, newspaper and inspirational fields. Born in 1951, she was a child in the 50s, a teen in the 60s, a young adult in the 70s and a young mom in the 80s. It’s been a turbulent, colorful time to grow up, and she’s enjoyed every minute of it and written about most of it.

She attended a mixture of public and parochial schools, graduating from the University of New Hampshire in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature. She married the Rev. David W. Bailey in 1977, and they lived in Colorado, Wisconsin and Michigan before returning to their home state of New Hampshire. They are the parents of two adult daughters.

She has worked as both a staff and freelance journalist. She semi-retired in 2017, in order to devote herself to a growing interest in Christian fiction. She has won or finaled in several contests, including the 2018 American Christian Fiction Writers Genesis contest.

She blogs on other writers’ sites and on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. She is involved in an active critiquing relationship with another author. A member of the American Christian Fiction Writers, she participates in continuing education, judges writing contests, and continues to enjoy the world of words.

Bailey “sailed off the island” Sept. 20 with the publication of her first novel, “Westward Hope,” by Pelican/White Rose Publishers. She is contracted for the second book in the series, “Settler’s Hope,” and also has a novella with minor characters from “Settler’s Hope” to be published in Pelican’s “Christmas Extravaganza.”

Bailey’s work includes both historical and contemporary fiction, with an underlying thread of men and women finding their way home, to Christ and each other.

For more information, contact her at ampie86@comcast.net; @piechick1 on Twitter; Kathleen D. Bailey on Facebook and LinkedIn; or at www.kathleendbailey.weebly.com.  

~*~*~*~*~

What about you?
What's something that maybe you've been trying to nickel-and-dime in your writing or in life?

 Comment for a chance to win an ebook of Westward Hope by Kathleen D. Bailey!