The New Old West
A strength of historical fiction is the ability to help readers understand lives as they were lived in the past. Historical fiction gives readers the opportunity to view events through the eyes of characters as they are experiencing them or begin to comprehend the daily challenges of a specific time period as characters endure.
The American Western is a uniquely popular historical fiction genre. Set on the frontier of the Western United States in the 1800s, tales of the Old West or Wild West often are adventures populated by desperadoes, gunslingers, and scattered lawmen who traverse barren, often hostile terrain, engage in gun flights, and interact with settlers, farmers, cattlemen, and Native Americans over issues of personal honor, frontier justice, revenge and retribution.
But Westerns are wide-ranging. There are grand-scale epics (The Wild Bunch, 1969, Django Unchained, 2012, or The Harder They Fall, 2021), sci-fi offerings (Westworld, 2016), horror tales (Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, 1966), and the outright weird (the steampunk Jonah Hex series).
Some aficionados worry that the Western is going the way of the buffalo. Stuart Rosebrook at the end of 2021 bemoaned the decline in the number of published westerns. “The canary in the coal mine of Old West history publishing is the waning number of Old West titles published annually by university publishers. I wish I had better news to report on this matter, but the time has come when most major academic houses are publishing fewer than 10 new traditional 19th-century titles a year,” he wrote. Western Books, Western Books & Movies
And as for Westerns published by New York publishing houses? Rosebrook is “not sure if even Larry McMurtry or Elmore Leonard could get a contract from a major New York fiction house in 2022. It may be the end of the road for the literary Western novel in New York.”
But then there are the recent numbers: The television series Yellowstone, starring Kevin Costner on Paramount, had 12.1 million viewers for the opening night of its fifth season last November, making it “the most popular scripted series episode so far in the new television season,” said Nielsen. ‘Yellowstone’ tops 12M viewers, becomes most popular scripted series - pennlive.com
The man behind Yellowstone, Taylor Sheridan, has other Western series on the air, including 1883, starring Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, and 1923 with Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. At Disney+, hit Star Wars series The Mandalorian was inspired by Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns. Why Are Westerns Still Popular? - Netflix Tudum
The Longmire series on A&E and later Netflix regularly drew more viewers than television icons Breaking Bad and Mad Men. While the overall number of Longmire viewers dropped from 6 million an episode in 2014 to 3.7 million in 2015, series per-episode totals were far higher than those for Breaking (2 million) and Men (3 million). Longmire (TV series) - Wikipedia
In other media, Josh Terry reported last December that “Red Dead Redemption 2, an ambitious 2018 video game where you can be a cowboy in the Old West, sold more than 39 million copies and may have inspired Lil Nas X to write his record-breaking and genre-smashing single “Old Town Road.” This year, Beyoncé’s Ivy Park Rodeo fashion line proved that the cowboy aesthetic is timeless, supremely cool and able to adapt with the times.” Why Are Westerns Still Popular? - Netflix Tudum
Nuevo Mexico
Two book series are taking Western stories to their historical fiction roots in a particular period and place--New Mexico in the mid-1800s or Nuevo Mexico--and in the process bringing to light an environment and occurrences few, even those steeped in Western lore, may know much about.
https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/179563349094/map-of-mexico-1836
Loretta Miles Tollefson writes regularly about the New Mexico of the late 1800s and early 1900s, including book reviews, descriptions of historical events (such as Teddy Roosevelt’s visit to Albuquerque in 1903), and political factors that affected the region (the imposition of taxes in 1837 and a Supreme Court decision on land grants in 1887). For more about her, see: About Me – Fiction and Fact From Old New Mexico (lorettamilestollefson.com).
As she reports on her website, Miles Tollefson is focusing almost exclusively on historical fiction. After publishing two volumes of short stories and micro-fiction in 2018, she added the stand-alone The Pain and the Sorrow (2020), the fictionalized tale of the true story of a young woman who learns she has married serial killer Charles Kennedy set in the 1860s (The Pain and The Sorrow: A Novel of Old New Mexico - Kindle edition by Miles Tollefson, Loretta. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com) and three novels in the Locke Family series.
The Locke Family Saga of novels begins with Not Just Any Man, published in 2018, with sequels Not My Father’s House following in 2019 and No Secret Too Small in 2020. The series follows Gerald and Suzanna as they make a home among the Sangre de Cristo mountains, raise children Alma and Andrew, deal with a personal past they’ve tried to keep hidden, and face an outbreak of rebellion against the New Mexican government in 1837 (Amazon.com: The Locke Family Saga: Three Novels of Old New Mexico eBook: Miles Tollefson, Loretta: Books).
The latest from Miles Tollefson--There Will Be Consequences-- further develops the story of that rebellion.
Released in January, 2022, the book was reviewed by this author for the Historical Novel Society: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/there-will-be-consequences-a-biographical-novel-of-old-new-mexico/
There Will Be Consequences chronicles disputes among the leaders of New Mexico-the local governor, president, alcalde, and rebels--and a year-long period of violence ending with the death of the governor and execution of the rebel who replaced him.
As noted in the History Novel Society review, Miles Tollefson “brings the rebellion to vibrant life” by letting the principal historical figures speak for themselves, presenting the story as it affects each of them in their own words and observations.” Amazon.com: There Will Be Consequences: A Biographical Novel of Old New Mexico: 9781952026058: Miles Tollefson, Loretta: Books).
Long-time Western writer Rod Miller recently added to his own Old New Mexico series. Miller writes extensively about the American West, writing articles for such publications as Saddlebag Dispatches, True West, Western Horseman, and American Cowboy. His historical books have won awards from Western Writers of America and Western Fictioneers. He is a four-time winner of the Spur Award, two-time winner of the Peacemaker Award, and winner of the Poetry Book of the Year from two organizations--Westerns International and the Academy of Western Artists. For more on Miller, see: About (writerrodmiller.com).
Miller’s New Mexican family series begins with Father Unto Many Sons in 2018 (paperback released in 2020) as the heads of two families head west: Lee Pate uproots his wife and sons from Tennessee because of his abhorrence of the institution and spread of slavery. In Arkansas, he meets the Lewis family, Mormons uprooted from Missouri by persecution they themselves endured because of their religious beliefs. Father Unto Many Sons: Miller, Rod: 9781432843441: Amazon.com: Books
The sequel, This Thy Brother released in 2022, reacquaints readers with the Pate and Lewis families as they adjust to the realities of the Santa Fe Trail and the desert Southwest. The book was reviewed by this author for the Historical Novel Society: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/this-thy-brother-five-star-western-series/
The family relationships highlighted in Miller’s first book resonate in the second. Despite single-minded pig-headedness, jealousy, and resentment, brothers are still brothers, family is still family. Unusual is the setting and its challenges: a rugged and yet-to-be secure trail for moving goods from Mexico to the U.S., nascent and chancy enterprises for buying and trading merchandise, frictions among Navajo, Ute, settlers and ranchers, and the Mexican Army. https://www.amazon.com/This-Brother-Five-Star-Western/dp/1432892762
Both Consequences and Brother depict New Mexico before the area became a U.S. territory (1850) and later a state (January, 1912), when Nuevo Mexico covered more than 200,000 square miles and included present-day New Mexico and part of Texas.
Conditions were poor for the residents of a little more than 25 Native pueblos and 100 settlements. Essential elements of prosperity--agriculture, commerce, and industry--were lacking because of the remote location and overall neglect by the central Mexican government. [Source: H. Bailey Carrol and J. Villansana Haggard, Three New Mexico Chronicles (Albuquerque, 1942) , described by Pedro Bautista Pino, the province of New Mexico's representative in the Spanish parliament, in 1812.
“Mexico was too embroiled in its own problems to attend to those of New Mexicans.” The staples of Mexico’s economy--silver mining and textile manufacturing--were collapsing. Investors were no longer staking the Mexican government but taking their fortunes back to Spain. Taxes were making trade more profitable for American traders than Mexican merchants. Santa Fe National Historic Trail: Special History Study (Chapter 2) (npshistory.com)
Meanwhile, skirmishes between settlers and neighboring tribes were increasing not only in number but in property damage, injuries, and deaths and further eroding exports as well as herds of sheep and stocks of cattle.
Yet “officials in Mexico City were unable to address the mounting discontent among the people in the northern provinces, and failed to dispel the conviction expressed by the editors of El Fanal, that "the government does not pay as much attention to the edges of the Republic as to its center." Santa Fe National Historic Trail: Special History Study (Chapter 2) (npshistory.com)
The opening of the Santa Fe Trail, covering 934 miles from Franklin, Missouri, to Santa Fe, established the first legal trade route between the U.S. and Mexico in 1821, and brought much needed tools so New Mexicans could more easily build, farm, and hunt. Shipments of a wide range of goods from fabrics to buttons, clothing and shoes, to and from southern Mexican soon increased. But with them came steady increases in import duties.
Santa Fe Trail. Travel the Trail: Map Timeline 1821 - 1845 - Santa Fe National Historic Trail (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)
Smoldering discontent and concerns about safety boiled over in 1837, soon after the new governor of Nuevo Mexico imposed a tax to support government operations and the region’s military garrison and rebels took up arms.
This is the part of the west visited by authors Miller and Miles Tollefson. Through the experiences of their characters, readers ride along with a pair of Pate brothers as they accompany freighters moving cattle and wagons of goods between Santa Fe and Independence, Missouri, and travel with a mountain man to the Place Deep in the Rock where Anasazi once lived and Navaho now hide in barrancas and fire arrows on Utes and the white men below. Readers visit Daniel Lews’ Santa Fe Warehouse that manages the string of mercantiles from Albuquerque to Abiquiu and the Pate’s cattle and sheep ranch on the Pajarito Plateau, and they view the rebellion of 1837 from the perspectives of government officials and aides, religious leaders, merchants and traders, army men, and rebel leaders.
Sources:
Santa Fe National Historic Trail: Special History Study (Chapter 2) (npshistory.com)
History of New Mexico - Wikipedia
Subdivisions of the First Mexican Empire, 1821. - Maps on the Web (zoom-maps.com)
Reno, Philip. "Rebellion in New Mexico - 1837." New Mexico Historical Review 40, 3 (1965). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr/vol40/iss3/2, UNM Digital Repository.
Why Westerns Will Always Win. Between ‘The Harder They Fall’ and ‘The Power of the Dog,’ the genre is evolving and better than ever. Josh Terry, Dec 27, 2021
Why Are Westerns Still Popular? - Netflix Tudum
Best of the West 2022: Western Books
by Stuart Rosebrook | Dec 10, 2021 | Western Books, Western Books & Movies
‘Yellowstone’ tops 12M viewers, becomes most popular scripted series - pennlive.com
Longmire (TV series) - Wikipedia
List of Western subgenres - Wikipedia