The Shifting Winds

COUNTDOWN – 4 DAYS TO LAUNCH

Janet Fisher2 Comments

Joe Meek, Mountain Man Extraordinaire

Today on our countdown to launch I want to introduce one of the real historic characters who plays a significant role in my book, mountain man Joe Meek. In the story he’s a good friend of the fictional mountain man Jake Johnston. And when I say character, I do mean.

joe mural smallerPhoto courtesy of Oregon State Archives

The above photo is of a large mural in the Oregon State Capitol building. That’s Joe Meek in the red shirt, rifle in hand, yelling to catch the attention of men mingling around him. An uncertain voice vote has left the historic Champoeg meeting in confusion as to whether the Americans will set up a government and have the protection of law in this isolated land. In order to get a true count, Joe calls out with his immortal words, “Who’s fer a divide?” A hush settles over the crowd, and Joe calls out again. “All fer the report of the committee and an organization, follow me!”

Some thirty years after the days portrayed in The Shifting Winds Joe Meek sat down with author Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor and relayed to her the story of his life as a mountain man and as a settler in Oregon. Her book that came out of these discussions, The River of the West, was published in 1870. The man was an inveterate storyteller, and while some folks in his day suggested the stories may have occasionally stretched, he often enjoyed an appreciative audience. From Victor’s book I gleaned several of Joe’s stories about his exciting days in the Rockies. As indicated in the Afterword of The Shifting Winds, the stories “are as true as Joe chose to make them.”

Whatever the truth of his tales, he found purpose in Oregon. He would become sheriff, then territorial marshal, and he had connections in high places. There was more to Joe than first impressions might suggest.

In Chapter One, just after meeting Jake Johnston, protagonist Jennie Haviland meets Joe:

“Another man approached, dressed almost the same [as Johnston], his dirty buckskins showing more wear, the fringes more ragged, his dark straggly hair longer, and this one had a brushy tangle of beard covering his chin. He stepped up beside the other and stood before her with a broad smile, and she felt herself surrounded by the two of them.”

Jennie’s little brothers dutifully introduce themselves, but thirteen-year-old Eddie can no longer contain his excitement. He turns to Joe.

“‘Are you Joe Meek, the Joe Meek? The famous mountain man in the wax museum in St. Louis fighting the bear?’

“Mr. Meek grinned. ‘One and the same, but don’t ye let that statue fool ye none, boy. Old Joe didn’t lose nary a finger from that ol’ bar, do ye hear, now?’ The man held up both hands, fingers stretched to show he still had all ten.

“‘But did you really fight a bear?’ Eddie asked.

“Mr. Meek began to laugh and slapped the other man on the shoulder. ‘Do ye hear that, Old Jake?’ He was so caught up in laughter he didn’t attempt to speak further.

“Jake Johnston smiled at Eddie. ‘This man has fought more bears than any man I know.’

“Mr. Meek lifted a hand. ‘Why, bar fightin’—that’s what this old coon is famous fer.’”

And the stories go on.

NEXT: Fort Vancouver

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COUNTDOWN – 5 DAYS TO LAUNCH

Janet Fisher1 Comment

Mountain Men

With five days to go until the launch of The Shifting Winds, today’s post will focus on those intrepid mountain men who went out into the wilds of the Rocky Mountains to trap beaver for the American fur companies in St. Louis. From the early 1820s until 1840 these trappers worked the mountain streams and developed a lifestyle of their own. Company caravans took supplies to the Rockies for an annual summer rendezvous where they traded for beaver the mountain men had gleaned during the year. So the trappers never had to leave the mountains. Some didn’t go home to the States in all that time, maintaining a tenuous link with civilization as they had once known it.

George profile jpgPhotos courtesy of Douglas County Museum

George Abdill may not look like a mountain man in the pictures above and below, but the spirit of a mountain man lived in George’s heart.

Some years ago when I decided to write a book about the American frontier, with mountain men and pioneers and British fur traders, I went to see George Abdill, director of our local Douglas County Museum at the time. George was a man who held in his mind so much information, a person could ask him a question and he would answer with a chapter. When I told him about the setting and characters of my story, he smiled and sat back in his chair, his tone turning wistful. “If I could go back in time and choose what I would like to be, I would be a mountain man.”

George headshot jpgWow! What a great source for these stories!

He’s not wearing buckskins in the photos. He doesn’t have a powder horn and bullet pouch slung over his shoulder. And he’s not carrying a muzzleloader, but he knew how to shoot one and told me how to reload the single-shot weapon on the run while riding full tilt after buffalo. So, imagine him in buckskins, as he could have surely imagined himself.

The mountain men who trapped beaver in the Rocky Mountains generally wore buckskins because these trappers worked in rough country and the durable buckskin protected their own skin, also because they lived and worked with Native Americans who often wore deerskin clothing themselves. Fringes—or whangs—on the outer arm seams and leg seams offered more than style. The fringes helped the garment shed water by acting as wicks, an important feature for men who waded into streams to trap beaver and faced all kinds of weather.

Here’s how protagonist Jennie Haviland sees American mountain man Jake Johnston on first meeting:

“She managed to push back to arm’s length and quickly surveyed him from the smiling face down over the buckskin-covered length of him to the moccasins on his feet. He wore a buckskin shirt, much like their young Indian guide’s—fringed, embroidered, belted at the waist—but unlike the guide he wore long, trim-fitting buckskin breeches with fringes running down the outer seams. He was armed—a knife in a sheath on his belt, a pistol stuck into the belt, and powder horn and bullet pouch slung over his shoulder. With determination, she pushed back harder and he released his grip on her.

“He spoke with a drawl, still smiling. ‘Ma’am, may I have the utmost pleasure and privilege of welcoming you to the fair Willamette Valley? My name is Jacob Obadiah Johnston.’ He backed up a step, sweeping one hand before himself as he gave her a deep bow, the long fringes on his buckskin sleeve swishing with the motion. Standing straight again, he grinned wider. ‘My friends call me Jake. And you would be . . . ?’

“She could only stand and stare . . .”

The Shifting Winds is the fourth pioneer story I wrote, the fourth serious novel, and its pages are infused with the information and spirit provided by mountain man dreamer George Abdill. I wish he were still alive to thank for all the help he gave me.

NEXT: Joe Meek, Mountain Man Extraordinaire

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COUNTDOWN – 6 DAYS TO LAUNCH

Janet Fisher

Willamette Falls

As we continue the countdown to the launch of my new book, The Shifting Winds, today’s historical factoids focus on the developing settlement of Willamette Falls, soon to be named Oregon City, the first Euro-American settlement in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and the destination for many American settlers who would cross the Oregon Trail.

Society208-Clackamas County Historical Society Photo, All Rights Reserved

The above lithograph was created in the 1840s by lithographer J. H. Richardson who traveled to Oregon City during the settlement’s early days, one of several artists sent out to record images of the West during that period. The picture shows the bluff and the heavy forest above, which will become familiar to readers of The Shifting Winds.

A dramatic horseshoe-shaped falls gave the place its first name. Long before the white men came, the remarkable cascade drew Native American tribes like the Clowewallas, one of several Chinookan tribes who found excellent fishing at the site, and it became a place for the tribes to gather for trade. Some said the salmon were so thick a person could walk across the river on the salmons’ backs. Men built scaffolds right in the plunging water and climbed up to use spears and dip nets to catch fish struggling to leap the falls for the great return to their spawning grounds upriver.

When British fur traders entered the region they quickly recognized the potential power of the falls, and in 1829 Dr. John McLoughlin, HBC Chief Factor at nearby Fort Vancouver, laid out a two-square-mile claim at the site. By the time the characters of my story arrive, he’s in the process of building a sawmill on an island there.

The construction work brought HBC employees to the place which they called Willamette Falls. Then Americans began to arrive, and contentions stirred at this focal point, as well as across the Oregon territory. When the story opens in 1842, the Oregon country has been jointly occupied by the British and Americans for almost twenty years, because the two nations still can’t agree on a boundary. The British have been entrenched for years with their fur trading operations, and only a few Americans have trickled in—some missionaries, a few mountain men escaping a dying beaver trade in Rockies, and a scattering of emigrants who’ve come by land and sea.

Protagonist Jennie Haviland isn’t happy her father tore her away from her prestigious academy in Utica, New York, to come to this wilderness, but her one hope is that she’ll find a place she can call home in Willamette Falls. As she and her family follow their Indian guides through the dense woods to an overlook of the mighty cascade, she hopes to get her first view of this town. Awed by the spectacle of the falls, she can’t help admiring the beauty, but she doesn’t see a town, only some shacks on the island and a couple of log cabins with a few outbuildings on the flat bench of land below. Homes of isolated settlers? She turns to her father.

“‘But where is the town? Where’s Willamette Falls?’ She wanted to find the town of proper houses.

“The young guide mumbled to Pa again, and Pa nodded. ‘So that’s it,’ Pa said. ‘That’s our settlement.’

“Jennie scanned the tree-cloaked hills. ‘Where?’

“‘Those cabins are it.’ He pointed to the flat bench of land. . . .

“Jennie darted a quick look at the cabins on the flat, then jerked her head back to stare at Pa. ‘What do you mean?’”

NEXT: Mountain Men

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COUNTDOWN – 7 DAYS TO LAUNCH

Janet Fisher2 Comments

First Travelers on the Oregon Trail

The launch for my new historical novel, The Shifting Winds, is now seven days away, one week, and I plan to do a blog post each day from now until the day before the event. For each post I’d like to share some historical factoids that relate in some way to the book, from today’s brief overview of the first travelers on the Oregon Trail to bits of information on mountain men, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and other background elements that may work into a tapestry of color surrounding the story.

469.diorama oxen & wagonThe photo above was taken at the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center at Baker City, Oregon, a diorama showing a typical oxen-drawn wagon on the trail west.

Jennie Haviland, protagonist of The Shifting Winds, comes west across the Oregon Trail in 1842 with one of the earliest wagon trains of emigrants from the States. But fur traders first blazed that trail across the continent. As early as 1812 men employed by John Jacob Astor, founder of Fort Astoria, were probably the first white men to locate South Pass, a remarkably gentle passage across the otherwise rugged Rocky Mountains which made it possible for later emigrants to cross the Continental Divide with ease.

Missionaries began to make their way across the trail in the 1830’s, stopping along the way at the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, the raucous summer gatherings of American mountain men and traders. In the words of mountain man Joe Meek in our story, “My heavens! That was the time fer big doin’s, mind ye, when the company sent out supplies, and after bein’ temperate all year, we let loose a mite, we did. A man would spend mebbe a thousand dollars a day on—” Jennie’s pa interrupts before Joe can say more.

The first white women to cross the trail, missionaries Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding, traveled by wagon in 1836 with their husbands, Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding. After a few days at the rendezvous, which must have brought a little shock to their sensibilities, they took the wagons as far as Fort Hall in what is now eastern Idaho, the first to take wagons that far. Beyond that point they used pack animals.

481.Ft Hll exterior

The picture above shows the Fort Hall replica my daughter, granddaughter, and I visited when we backtracked the trail taken by our ancestors.

By 1840 as beaver played out in the Rockies, the American mountain men held their last rendezvous and some headed for Oregon. Joe Meek and his friend Robert Newell managed to get three wagons from Fort Hall to Walla Walla, the first to take wagons overland as far as the Columbia River.

As promoters sang the praises of Oregon, hoping to gain the land with settlement, more emigrants dared take the trek. A fair-sized party of seventy or so left the States in 1841, but about half the party went to California, all of them leaving their wagons at Fort Hall.

That brings us to 1842 when just over a hundred emigrants took the journey, the group my fictional Haviland family joined. This group also left the wagons at Fort Hall and went by foot and horseback to the Columbia River, where some proceeded either by boat or raft down the river, while others like the Havilands took horses over the Cascade Mountains.

The story of The Shifting Winds opens as the family approaches their destination, Willamette Falls, soon to be named Oregon City. Jennie expects to see a thriving town there, a semblance of civilization in this godforsaken wilderness, but she has a few surprises in store.

NEXT: Willamette Falls

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NEW BOOKS!!!

Janet Fisher4 Comments

912.new.booksBoxes of books came today! What a thrill to actually hold one of these real books in my hands and flip through the pages. My good old story I have loved for so long. Now in print so other people can read it and come to know some of my favorite characters. And the books are beautiful! I love what the publisher did with the cover.

My agent emailed me over the weekend to tell me she had gotten her copies, so I suspected mine might come today. I gave a talk at my Roseburg writers’ group this morning and had to leave home before the books came. But when I got back they were waiting on the porch for me. Ah! What a sight!

Checking an old blog post, I see that boxes of my first book came early the month before the release date too. And for those of you who have pre-ordered The Shifting Winds from one of the online outlets, you may actually get your book before March 1. I don’t know, but I think people started getting them earlier last time.

Oh, what fun! This is one of those moments for a writer. Sheer pleasure. I am so looking forward to sharing. 🙂

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Turning the Page

Janet Fisher2 Comments

Today marks a transition for me when I turn the page from writing to marketing. The photo below shows the rough draft of my latest writing venture, Book Five in my Golden Isles Series, Webs of Stone, and a draft of a poster for the launch of my upcoming release, The Shifting Winds. Release date is one month from today, March 1, so I must really get onto the marketing side of things.

906.turning.pageI finished the rough draft of Webs of Stone on January 19, then had to read it, once on the computer and once on paper, to get it ready for readers. I delivered it to my first reader yesterday, my daughter Carisa. So today I can focus on The Shifting Winds.

Of course it isn’t quite that tidy. I’ve had to do a few things for the upcoming release before today. I’ve scheduled some events and worked on my contact list. My daughter Christiane put together the poster for me and we worked on it a few days ago. But I feel the transition today, now that I can set the writing aside for a bit.

Friends often ask if I get confused going from one of my book projects to another, and I have to admit sometimes I feel conflicted. There’s such a long lag time between the writing of a book and the release of an actual book you can hold onto, you might write several in between. I have an added shift because I’m writing in two distinct time periods. It’s the same genre, historical fiction, in which I follow my theme, “following strong women through history,” but some of my books are set in nineteenth century America, and some are set in ancient Ireland and Crete roughly 3,000 years ago. Both are periods when women faced great challenges.

When I’m in the middle of writing one, as I just was, I’m really in that world. I have been immersed in the ancient world of Ireland and the surrounding scenes in Britain and Brittany and the Iberian peninsula, absorbed in the lives of my characters. I get a little otherworldly, a fine Irish concept with its myths of the Otherworld. For me it’s like getting caught up in reading a good book and not wanting to put it down. But when you write one it takes a lot longer.

So when I’m in that world it can be difficult to focus on another world, including the one around me. But now the new one feels done enough to let it rest while I turn to marketing of the one about to be released. And I move from the fourteenth century BC to the nineteenth century AD, with occasional glimpses of the twenty-first.

I love to write. I am more a writer than I am a marketer, but I do enjoy the readings and signings, the book talks, the book clubs–especially the book clubs where I can sit down with a group of readers and talk about the nuances of the book because they’ve already read it. I love hearing from readers. Their responses enhance my joy in the work and make it feel worthwhile.

Now I look forward to sharing this new book because it’s a favorite of mine. I’m so glad it’s going to be out there for others to read, and I hope readers enjoy the characters and the predicaments I had fun getting them into.

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Book to Launch

Janet Fisher

My debut historical novel, The Shifting Winds, is about to launch. As you may have seen in the sidebar, I have a couple of book signings scheduled already. The first launch party will be at the Elkton Community Education Center (ECEC) library in Elkton, Oregon, better known as the butterfly place, on Sunday afternoon, March 6, from 2 to 4 pm. Less than two months away now. This is the same place I launched A Place of Her Own two years ago, and everyone there helped me make that a wonderful sendoff for Martha’s story. I look forward to another great beginning this year.

ECEC

The photo above shows the ECEC library building. Elkton is about seven miles from my home on Martha’s Century Farm.

My next party will be later in the week at the Douglas County Museum in Roseburg, Oregon, Thursday evening, March 10, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm. At this event I will offer a tribute to the late George Abdill, former director of the county museum. George offered me considerable information and inspiration for The Shifting Winds, which portrays one of his favorite periods of history when fur traders and pioneers came up against each other on the American frontier of the mid-nineteenth century. And I did have a lot of fun putting this story together.

900.DCMuseum

The Douglas County Museum, shown above, is at the county fairgrounds just south of Roseburg’s downtown.

ShiftingWinds cover jpegI hope many of my local friends will be able to attend one of these opening parties. We’ll have refreshments, readings, signings, and plenty of conversation with book-loving people. In addition to The Shifting Winds, I plan to have copies of A Place of Her Own available.

In the coming days I’ll be adding more events around Oregon and beyond. Those will be listed on the right-hand sidebar as they’re arranged and also on the “Events” page, where you can see not only where we’re going but where we’ve been.

Cheers!!! 🙂

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Website Updated

Janet Fisher

With new books on the way, the time had come for a website update. And since I was visiting my webmaster, my daughter Christiane, that worked out well. First, we had to change the release date for The Shifting Winds from April to March, since it’s coming out a month earlier than planned. And we had to show it’s availability for pre-orders. With that done, we added an Excerpt so you can read a few paragraphs of the story. Then there were new books to talk about. Today we added a description.stonehenge 3_00001

The above photo I took some years ago shows Britain’s famous Stonehenge, which figures in the newest writing project, Book Five of the Golden Isles Series. The book is called Webs of Stone. You’ll find a description on the newly revised Books page. Up until now I’ve shown only five books for the series because I wasn’t sure if I had ideas enough for a book for this 16-year period in Ireland between the end of Book One and the beginning of the final book. That gap parallels events in the Mediterranean at that time, events shown in Book Four, but what was going on in Ireland then? [Note: The Books page has been updated yet again since the writing of this blog post, so the series in late 2022 has eleven titles.]

My muse was slow to visit, but when I took a Thanksgiving trip to Kansas City to visit Christiane and my granddaughter Calliope, inspiration struck. My muse talked to me. It happens in odd ways sometimes. I was searching for a hideout for my outlaw character somewhere north of Stonehenge (which I call the Great Stone Circle of Wessex in the book). And I wanted mountains. Where would I find mountains in England? Would I have to go as far as the Scottish Highlands? That’s a long way from Wessex when you’re walking or riding a pony. And I’d been in the Scottish Highlands. When you’re used to the Cascades and Rockies they seem like rolling hills. Maybe Wales? I’d seen some real mountains there. I clicked the “terrain” figure on Google maps and found the Lakes District in northern England. Then with a click on “street view” I found myself in rugged, craggy, stone-strewn mountains with steep dropoffs down to lovely lakes. Perfect! I could see myself there, my characters. And the story took off in my mind.

bohonagh with clouds_00001

The photo above shows another stone circle in near silhouette. This is the circle I chose for the home circle of the Golden Eagle Clan, the central clan for both Book One and Book Five. It’s the Bohonagh Circle near Rosscarbery in Ireland. For me it’s the Golden Eagle Circle. I was lucky enough to spend several days traipsing around these pillars and the vicinity back in 2004 when I traveled to Ireland with my good friend Tilly Engholm. She was my next-door neighbor in Portland then, an avid traveler, and we had a great time on this trip–although as I wandered from circle to circle, she began to weary of stones. Once she sighed and asked, “We’re going to go see more rocks, aren’t we, Janet?” And I had to admit we were. I do love the stone circles and the power I feel in them. Fortunately, Tilly was agreeable.

I wrote Book One, Whisper of Wings, that year. Since then, I’ve spent most of my time focused on Crete, where Books Two through Four are centered. It’s lovely to be experiencing Ireland again–and England, with a few scenes on the coast of Brittany and in what is now Portugal.

I’m excited that a new story is taking off and look forward to immersing myself in it. If you don’t hear from me as often in the next few weeks, that’s where I’ll be–Ireland and the High Lakes and the plains of Wessex and those other places–from roughly 1406 B.C. to 1390 B.C., exploring the mysterious circles and other rocks scattered over the British Isles and Western Europe like interlaced webs of stone.

Check out the revisions on my website. Cheers!

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The Shifting Winds Online

Janet Fisher1 Comment

ShiftingWinds cover jpegUpdate: The release date has changed, as some of you may have noticed. The book is now set to come out on March 1, 2016, one month earlier than planned. And the publisher has slightly tweaked the cover art, making the “F” in the author’s name more readable.

My upcoming book, historical novel The Shifting Winds, has appeared on the online sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble for pre-order.

You’ll also find it listed on Indie Bound. That’s a cool site where you can put in your zip code and find a list of nearby independent bookstores that will offer the book for sale. I always like to support the local stores whenever possible.

Powell’s in Portland has it listed but no photo yet. That’s almost local for us Oregonians.

And if we’re talking Portland, there’s my once-upon-a-time neighborhood store from when I lived in Portland, Annie Bloom’s Books in Multnomah Village, and they have it listed too. Yay!

Other sites include Books-A-Million and of course the publisher, Globe Pequot Press, TwoDot imprint, under the Rowman & Littlefield banner.

It’s always exciting to see the book go online. That’s when the dreams begin to whisper of a tangible, holdable bit of substance.

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