What Led Me To This Book?
When I started writing what may turn into a multi-volume historical saga, I started with history closer to my home and heart — the flight of the Nez Perce from Oregon to Montana in 1877. It quickly became evident that I did not have the beginning of the story. In an attempt to find that beginning I tracked an historical figure — Colonel John Gibbon, who fought the Nez Perce at the Battle of the Big Hole — back to the Civil War. In researching Gibbon’s exploits in the Civil War, I was led to his involvement in the Utah War of 1857-1858, about which I’d never heard. That history captivated me and became the focus of my research, which led me to Colonel Philip St. George Cooke who led the Second Dragoons in the Utah War in a winter march across southern Wyoming to quell what was perceived as a Mormon rebellion in Utah. My focus shifted from the Civil War to the Utah War.
In writing about the Utah War it again became apparent that I did not have the beginning of the story. In researching the Utah War, I kept coming across references to the Mormon Battalion — about which I also knew nothing – that served from 1846 to 1847 in the Mexican-American War, commanded by Philip St. George Cooke, who had absorbed much of my attention in writing about the Utah War. I did not want to write about another hardship march so I avoided writing about it at length. I thought I could get by with flashbacks.
Once again I learned that, as is so often the case in life, shortcuts aren’t that short. I expanded my research of the Mormon Battalion and the more I learned about it the more I wanted to learn. I had again found history that captivated me. I expanded my writing about the Utah War to include the Mormon Battalion.
By-and-by I had a pretty big book. Several readers advised me that I had two books – one about the Utah War and one about the Mormon Battalion. I liked that idea so I broke the book in half. I expanded the first half which led to the manuscript I have now completed.
What I thought was a book about the Mormon Battalion turned into a coming-of-age story with a young recruit in the First Dragoons, who is not LDS, as its protagonist. Fiction writers will tell you that characters take on lives of their own, which weave into a book which in turn takes on a life of its own. In Beyond the Rio Gila, the protagonist started as a secondary character but evolved to command center stage, sort of like an understudy who grows into the lead role. My primary interest was to tell the history of the Mormon Battalion but the protagonist had ideas of his own. He broadened the story to include the First Dragoons and pulled its focus to the evolution of the boy to the man.
The historical backdrop remains the history of the Mormon Battalion, and its characters and events are central to this manuscript, but the story’s focus expanded to a larger story to encompass the First Dragoons as well as the Mormon Battalion.