Her prose is too visual to rest quietly on library shelves.
[Joe Walker, by Martha Ture. (Lulu Press 2007); paperback; 370 pages; $23.95 on Amazon.com.]
SUN CITY, Texas — Author’s Note: This note comes to you from the author of the review rather than the author of the book. It’s only fair to admit that I have begged Martha Ture — with whom I’ve collaborated on social science rather than literature — to recast this story as a screenplay. An ulterior motive in publishing this review on The Rag Blog is the chance of catching the eye of one of the filmmakers hiding behind every tree in Austin not already taken by a poet or a picker.
She captured my love of a common sight here in the Texas Hill Country — a hawk riding the thermals, something that in our time can be presented on film from the hawk’s point of view — on the first pages.
The hawk “veered aslant the wind to scout a new position, her tail glowed orange in the sun.” Joe Walker would have made eye contact with the proud bird had she not been showing him her parts that Indians understand to have ceremonial uses.
“I count eleven tail feathers,” thought Walker, “I can see each one…” The old mountain man was in a doctor’s office viewing the real world through a window.
The doctor expressed amazement at the 65-year-old Walker’s general physical condition before he dropped the hammer: two or three years of eyesight remained by relying on the spectacles just fitted.
The hawk was just looking for rodents,
doing what hawks do.
Martha Ture was as tired of living and breathing Joe Walker as she showed Walker tired of watching his vision deteriorate. The hawk was just looking for rodents, doing what hawks do, but the narrative those eyeglasses set up required a prodigious amount of research. Enough was enough, she thought, and, besides, she had never written a screenplay.
Years and another read later, I still can’t disabuse myself of the notion that she has written a screenplay — just not on purpose. Her prose is too visual to rest quietly on library shelves. It demands the sort of action a talented director creates from cold words in language that is anything but cold.
Several actors who used to play handsome young gunslingers but have aged well and perfected their craft would be cruising to Academy Award nominations as Joe Walker. There is plenty of talent in the current generation of handsome young gunslingers (or the University of Texas Radio-Television-Film Department) to fill out the rest of Walker’s expedition.
There is a major supporting role playing a real historical figure — the Apache leader Mangas Colorado — and it gives me pleasure to understand that there are experienced Indian actors to test for that role. I grew up with the expectation than an Indian character — even a real one — would be played by a white actor with high cheekbones in redface.
The characters are set loose on virgin land.
The characters — some real and some created by Ture — are set loose on virgin land she views from her substantial experience as a wildlife photographer, where the trick is not just to look at the animals, but to catch them looking back.
The part of the story that is harder to present with certainty in our time is the historical context. How would the territories that would become the states of New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona look in 1860 to the Indians and the explorers who would be the vanguard of the settlers?
The shots fired at Ft. Sumter the next year would mark the beginning of an interregnum on the western frontier. Most of the young nation’s attention would be fixed on what remains the bloodiest war in U.S. history.
“Go west, young man, go west.” This admonition was attributed to Horace Greeley, and the attribution remained even after he disclaimed it. Greeley purloined the sentiment from John Soule, adding, “and grow up with the country.” He was writing in 1865, cheering on the Homestead Movement some 20 years after the United States had begun to debate “Manifest Destiny” in connection with the Texas Annexation Treaty.
It was God’s will, Manifest Destiny held, that the young nation begun with settlements on the Atlantic coast would colonize westward until it reached the Pacific. The fine irony that those who had so recently thrown off their colonial yokes became colonizers themselves was plain only to the indigenous peoples who were the source of the “free land” given away by the federal government between 1850 and the final homestead patent awarded to Kenneth Deardorff for 80 acres of shoreline on Alaska’s Stony River in 1988.
Settler armies occupied themselves fighting each other.
The westward expansion encouraged by the Homestead Act contained one of the simmering disputes leading up to the Civil War, all facets of the slavery issue. Statehood debates always had to address the balance between free states and slave states. When compromise failed, the resulting hostilities complicated life on the western frontier, to the short term benefit of the indigenous peoples. Settler armies occupied themselves fighting each other rather than policing the frontier.
When more homesteaders headed west postbellum, they had trails to follow, trails that would become more distinct over the years. Even now, we can still see places where wagon wheels wore grooves into solid rock.
Where did the trails come from? They were aboriginal trade routes before they were marked and mapped by white explorers who went west following a lucrative fur trade, or hunting the gold the Spanish did not find, or looking for adventure. Some explorers wanted nothing more than a place to hide and a chance to re-invent themselves.
Returning alive required luck and skill. Those who made repeated explorations — or said they did — often became famous as the lines between autobiography and fiction became harder to see and easier to exploit.
Explorers who succeeded on their own terms but did not pursue fame passed from the national stage leaving only the certainty that stories worth telling were being neglected. After the eyewitnesses passed on, the stories could be cobbled together from the odd person on the odd expedition who kept a journal that became one of many that landed in research libraries.
Shoot-outs sometimes found their way
into government reports.
Added to these kinds of accounts authors consider solid gold, there are the historical happenings that allow placement on a timeline. The first (white) man to see some bit of natural wonder and live to tell it acquired naming rights on a date known (at least by year). Shoot-outs sometimes found their way into government reports and newspapers of the time, although those “official” accounts were often embellished.
Finally, and most important to literary value if not historical value, authors of any skill learn about the human life cycle and how motivation changes over time. Having discerned motivations, authors need the skill to avoid having the protagonist spew forth reasoning to every other character in a manner that bears little resemblance to how people talk.
It is from the skill of dropping subtle clues that Martha Ture makes us understand Joe Walker as if she had met him and leaves us thinking we have met him.
What skill set, Ture must have asked herself, enabled Walker to repeatedly enter a wilderness inhabited by danger on four legs and on two legs accompanied by greenhorns and not only return alive, but also without having lost a man? Had her goal been a 21st century dime novel, she could probably have gone no farther than marksmanship.
Ture gives us reason to think that Walker was a good shot with a long gun or a pistol — at least he was before age began to take his eyesight. Of course, there was much more to Walker.
Walker was not disposed to immediately
resort to main force.
When the Indians had something his party needed, Walker was not disposed to immediately resort to main force, and he was able to conduct negotiations across cultures in the sign language of the Plains. His ability to bring back entire companies of greenhorns with their hair was probably most enhanced by his skill of interviewing a man who had not been tested and coming quickly and (more important) reliably to the probable outcome.
Ture offers up the tale of Joe Walker’s last expedition, a search for gold in the wilderness between the state of California, recently the Mexican District of Alta California, and Santa Fe. There appears to be a high probability that the gold is there, but that probability is not matched by a reasonable chance of getting to it. The greatest hazards are the desert and the Apaches, but there are only marginally less fierce tribes contesting possession of their homelands and the U.S. Army bluecoats were sometimes too occupied with pacifying former Confederate soldiers to attempt pacification of Apaches..
“Captain” Walker (an honorific carried long past his military service) brought relatives to claim ranchland in California that offered refuge between the times when he continued scratching his itch to explore. We meet Walker when the impending loss of his eyesight is about to enforce his retirement. He is not yet resigned to the idea when an opportunity presents itself in the person of George Lount, a man who has been saving every dime he earned to the purpose of funding an expedition to hunt the gold that had so far proved elusive. There was nobody he’d rather hire as a guide than Captain Joe Walker.
Walker disclaimed any interest in staking a gold mining claim, and his life to that point proved him immune to the lure of what the Indians called “the yellow metal that makes white men crazy.” He did his level best to talk Lount out of the expedition, using his knowledge and experience and every argument at his disposal… except his failing eyesight.
“Fool,” Walker thought to himself. “Is he too stupid to believe it? Or does the big empty country call him like a woman? Probably some of both. I should tell him no. It’d be a sin to lead him, blind leading the blind. Old dog want to go a-hunting one more time.”
Once Walker sins by omission, putting together the expedition is a matter of turning down applicants rather than beating the brush to find them. Such are the times and Walker’s reputation.
The meat of the story is in the quest that follows, a quest no less exciting for lack of an immediate answer to the question, “If he doesn’t want gold, what is it Joe Walker does want that is worth risking his life and those of the men so willing to follow him?”
There’ll be no spoilers here beyond my observation that the ending offers as much excitement leading to as much beauty as a hawk on the wing. When the desert Southwest is once more a place to create first rate motion pictures, Joe Walker’s story will be waiting.
[Steve Russell comes to The Rag Blog after writing for The Rag from 1969 to the mid-seventies. He is retired from a first career as a trial court judge in Texas and a second career as a university professor that began at The University of Texas-San Antonio. He is now associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Russell is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a ninth grade dropout. He is living in Sun City, just north of Austin, and working on a third career as a freelance writer. He is the author of Lighting the Fire: A Cherokee Journey from Dropout to Professor. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. ]
Aw, thanks, Steve. I really appreciate it. I’ll pass this on to the Walker descendant who was kind enough to befriend me and confirm some of my guesses. If any of you all out there between the Balcones Fault and the San Andreas Fault wants to talk to me about screenwriting my book, please let me know. Steve Russell knows how to reach me.