"John Fremont's 100 Days" by Gregory Wolk

The name John Fremont (1813-1890) evokes images of Manifest Destiny, exploration of the western United States, the first Republican candidate for President (18560, and the separation of California from Mexico. Less well-known is his very brief role in the American Civil War.  

For slightly more than three months in 1861, he was the commander of the U.S. Army’s Western Department, stretching from Illinois to the Rocky Mountains and headquartered in St. Louis. Those three months are now detailed in John Fremont’s 100 Days: Clashes and Convictions in Civil War Missouri by Gregory Wolk and published by the Missouri Historical Society.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Love Is All You Need: Motive Power of Western Civilization – Bradley Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

All the Time I Thought Was Mine – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

Nutcracker Dreams – Jordana Rosenman at Front Porch Republic.

The Missouri Civil War Museum

Recently, my wife and I visited the Missouri Civil War Museum. I’d heard about it from an online friend, but we’d never visited. It sits in the grounds of the Jefferson Barracks Park, with near Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery nearby, located in eastern St. Louis County adjacent to the Mississippi River. The museum has an admission fee, but it’s reasonable and well worth the cost. 

The museum was opened in 2002. It receives no funding from state or federal taxes; it’s a 501(c)3 educational organization. It was created with the specific purpose of saving the Jefferson Parks Recreation Building (built in 1905) and opening a museum dedicated solely to Missouri in the Civil War. 

To continue reading, please see my post at Dancing Priest.

Poets and Poems: John Dorsey and “Your Daughter’s Country”

I’m reading Your Daughter’s Country, the recent poetry collection by the Missouri-based poet John Dorsey, and I’m thinking to myself that I wouldn’t want to be the subject of one of his poems. He casts an affectionate eye on his friends, acquaintances, and relatives, but it is a ruthlessly honest eye, one that sees them as they are – the good in them, the bad, the indifferent. You don’t read a poem with the title of “Coco Malone is a Bad Bitch” and expect both scalpel-like description and affection, but that’s what you get.

I’m put in mind of my Uncle Revis. He was my father’s brother-in-law, the husband of a beloved aunt who made the best biscuits in north Louisiana. If the word “garrulous” hadn’t already existed, it would have been invented just for him. For years, I spent a summer week or two with my grandmother who lived across the street from my aunt and uncle, and we ate together, picked vegetables together (my job was digging for potatoes), and watched television together. Saturday nights meant The Lawrence Welk Show, and my Uncle Revis would sit quietly until the Lennon Sisters performed, when he would start shouting “They’re ignorant!” at the television. It was something you got used to.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Justin Hamm and “The Inheritance”

I’m reading the poems of The Inheritance by poet and photographer Justin Hamm, and I realize how easy it would be to say “rural poems” and “regional poet.” It would be easy, and it would also be wrong. 

I’m reading these poems, and I’m thinking about the blond-brick 1950s ranch home where I grew up in suburban New Orleans, and the house on Fairfield Avenue in Shreveport where my father grew up (on the wrong side of the great dividing line of Kings Highway), and the house on Dauphine Street in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans where my mother was born and lived until she was 27, a divorcee with a six-year-old child living with her mother.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“Bending Toward the Sun” by Mona Hodgson

It’s September 1865. The Civil War had ended but its effects linger. Some men have come home from the war; others have not. For Emilie Heinrich, the war presented no personal impact. She had been 14 when it started; her father had not enlisted. The two of them operate a general store in Saint Charles, Missouri, on the Missouri River not far from St. Louis. 

Quaid McFarland was one of the more fortunate soldiers. He had enlisted with the Union forces and he came home, much to his mother’s delight. He hasn’t seen Emilie since she was 14 and in pigtails, but when he does see her now, he unexpectedly discovers a love interest, and interest that Emilie reciprocates.

But there’s a problem. Emilie’s German father does not see Quaid as a suitable husband for his daughter. For one thing, he’s a teamster, driving a delivery wagon, definitely a class below where Emilie is. For another, he’s Irish.

Bending toward the Sun is the second of three “Quilted Heart” novellas by Mona Hodgson (the first being Dandelions on the Wind and the third is Ripples Along the Shore). It’s a historical romance, hinged upon a single question – will Emilie and Quaid overcome her father’s objections to their relationship? 

Hodgson has published some 42 books, including historical novels and children’s books. Her series books include Sinclair Sisters of Cripple Creek, Bedtime in the Southwest, Real Girls of the Bible, and the Princess Twins books. What initially attracted me to Bending Toward the Sun was its post-Civil War timing and the physical setting of Saint Charles, which is about 10 miles from where I live.

Bending Toward the Sun is a romantic story of overcoming class and ethnic prejudice, steeped in solid period research. 

Poets and Poems: Dave Malone’s “View from the North Ten”

The Missouri Ozarks is a distinct region within the state of Missouri, yet geographically indistinguishable from the Arkansas Ozarks. It presents distinctly different faces, depending upon what one is looking for: the entertainment complex of Branson (and upscale resort at Big Cedar); the natural beauty of the hills, small mountains, rivers and streams; St. Louisans’ favorite weekend resorts at Lake of the Ozarks; the rural, backwoods movie setting of “Winter Bone;” the Ozarks of the Baldknobbers legend and Harold Bell Wright’s “Shepherd of the Hills.”

Behind the legends, entertainment extravaganzas, resorts is the region that tens of thousands call home, where they live, work, get married, raise families and die, much like any other part of the United States. This is the territory of farms and small towns (Springfield, Mo., population of 162,000, would likely be the unofficial capital). Away from the glitz of the Branson Strip, it’s an area of rugged, stark beauty; I even have two photographs from the region on the walls of my office at work.

This Missouri Ozarks is the home of poet Dave Malone.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Reading a Novel that Stars Your Hometown

Yesterday, I reviewed Litany of Secrets by Luke Davis – the first in what I hope is a long line of mystery stories featuring Cameron Ballack, a disabled police detective. What I didn’t mention in the review, likely because it would have detracted from what I was describing, is how familiar I am with the geography of the novel.

The story is set in the town of Defiance, Missouri, which is about a 40-minute drive from where I live in St. Louis. Defiance is the area Daniel Boone settled in a couple of centuries ago, and it sits near the Missouri River, right on Highway 94, a windy road through the state’s wine country. Every time we go to Augusta (a few miles to the west) to visit the winery there, we drive right through Defiance.

The Katy Trail runs right through Defiance as well, and I’ve biked the trail a number of times. In fact, it was on the Katy Trail where I had my crash in 2009 (four broken ribs and a partially collapsed lung), and right on the wooden bridge crossing the Femme Osage Creek, which is the locale of one of the scenes in the book.

The headquarters the police work out of in the story is “east of the high school and a minor league baseball stadium” in O’Fallon, Missouri. The baseball stadium in question is the T.R. Hughes Stadium, and my oldest son worked there for the minor baseball team after graduating from college. One of the character’s parents lives in Chesterfield, a St. Louis suburb, and the character herself graduated from Parkway West High School.

The references to highways in the book – Highway 94 in St. Charles, Interstates 70, 64 and 270 – are all real roads. Interstate 70 connects St. Louis and Kansas City; Interstate 64 is the main highway through the St. Louis region; and 270 is the “belt” around St. Louis County.

One scene has the detectives talking to a professor at Fitz’s restaurant in University City, the area we call the Loop. Fitz’s is a real place, and something of a St. Louis icon (think burgers, fries, root beer, and malts). And I got hungry reading the references to Ted Drewes Frozen Custard stand in the city of St. Louis.

Litany of Secrets is filled with St. Louis references, but that won’t stop non-St. Louisans from enjoying it. It’s a great story. A bonus for me was to read about places I’m so familiar with.

David Gerard’s “God’s Acres”

The older I become, the more I see my own story in the story of others. I didn’t grow up on a farm; I wasn’t one of six or seven children; my family wasn’t Roman Catholic. But I was a child during the same years as author David Gerard, the years of Sputnik and NASA, of Kennedy and Nixon, of the Cold War and the first Barbie dolls and the peak of rock and roll before it became rock.

That is perhaps why Gerard’s novel God’s Acres resonates so deeply. It’s familiar territory – the late 1950s. Edward Szczykiewicz, known as Bud, is a second grader at a Catholic school in St. Joseph, Missouri, and he tells the story of his family, and specifically his mother, Martha, in 1959 and 1960, the time when Martha beings to disintegrate mentally.

Martha is a worker, an almost tireless worker. She’s convinced her hardware-store-owning husband to move to a rather ramshackle farm, and she applies her energy to planting and cleaning and cooking and children and being a Catholic in the pre-Vatican II church. She holds her world together with work, but she is wearing her family and herself out.

Martha’s husband takes refuge at the hardware store. The oldest, Bobby, joins the Army. Clara becomes pregnant and is sent off temporarily to a convent. Terry falls in love with a Protestant boy. Bud gets expelled from the Catholic school. Martha becomes pregnant herself with her seventh child. Nothing is happening the way Martha believes it should happen, and she begins to unravel.

Because the story is told from the perspective of a child, the reader experiences all of the joys and terrors of childhood, some of which is laugh-out-loud funny. Gerard effectively uses humor to keep the story from tipping into a depressing account of a dysfunctional family. Instead, it becomes something more universal – the story of family dealing with personal, community and national change.

Gerard introduces each chapter with a brief story of Martha’s condition in the present – she’s developed Alzheimer’s disease, and she’s dying. He also intersperses summary statements of news events at the time throughout the text, which has the effect of centering the story in time and simultaneously adding the cushion of distance between the story and the reader. A third element of the story is the use of lines and references to Shakespeare’s King Lear, although the madness in Bud’s story belongs to the family queen, not the king.

God’s Acres is an engaging story that becomes a riveting story, pulling the reader into a family’s drama, dysfunction, and joy and laughter alongside sadness and death.

God’s acres was published by PenUltimate Press in 2010, and received the Oklahoma Book Award in 2011.It is one of PenUltimate’s Missouri Lives Series.