Favorite Author and Guest Blogger Shirl Henke on HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THE WEST AND “HALF-BREED” HEROES

“If either Freud or the Navajo speak true, westward we shall find the hole in the earth through which the soul may plunge to peace.” -- Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision: 1846

When Regan invited me to blog during her Western Romance month, I was honored and delighted. I love writing the West. But as the quote above might indicate, I was a history teacher before I became an author. The Western frontier has always fascinated me. I believe it is a thing of the imagination, not of boundary lines. To the European, a frontier is simply a diving line bordering a foreign nation. To the American the frontier is as limitless as his own dreams and aspirations.

Why does the West still hold such a deeply rooted place in our imagination? It promised many things to many people. It was freedom to begin again, to reinvent oneself in whatever form a man or a woman required, perhaps to escape the long arm of the law, or the crippling despair of poverty. The West offered the lure of quick wealth, but people came for a great deal more than material success. Trailblazers like Hugh Glass and John Colter thirsted to see what was beyond the far horizon. Lewis and Clark’s journals narrate an epic adventure that surpassed Jason and Odysseus by over a thousand miles.

These frontiersmen were surely hero material, friends. The West of their dreams was as spiritual as it was material. In fact, I believe it is the stuff of primal myth. I don’t think it’s accidental that Star Trek became a classic franchise. The opening line says it all: “Space, the final frontier….” Marshall Dillon and Captain Kirk had a lot more in common than Hollywood ever imagined.

What infinite potential for great stories with fascinating characters to fill them! No other time and place in history ever brought so many people from across the earth to participate in so vast a movement as did the western expansion of the 19th century on the American frontier. Every national, racial, religious and ethnic group lived in the West. Native Americans battled to survive as land-hungry peoples from around the globe challenged them, beginning with the Spanish conquistadors whose legacy reached from Mexico across the arid plains of Texas all the way to sleepy Old California.

Czarist Russians crossed the Bering Straits and staked their claims as far south as California. Then came French fur trappers from distant Quebec and steamy Louisiana, colorful and intrepid adventurers who first dared the treachery of the Missouri, a river to make strong men weep and rich men poor. Anglo riflemen from the hardscrabble hills of Kentucky and Tennessee were next, those of Dan’l Boone and Davy Crockett‘s fame.

Cattle barons were often literally barons, titled gents from England, France and the Germanies. The dispossessed came from everywhere—Scandinavians searching for rich farmland, wily Scots merchants who drove hard bargains, brawling Welsh and Irish to dig canals and lay rails across a continent. Chinese sailed from Canton to do the most skilled and deadly job of all, opening the hard rock mining frontier. Kanakas from Hawaii became scalpers on the Texas/Mexico border. Blacks, newly freed after the bloody carnage of the Civil War, poured across Texas and all the way up into Kansas. The Freedman farmed and punched cattle, became gunfighters, lawmen, and the Buffalo Soldiers of legend. There was not a city of any size in the West that did not have a Jewish community. Can you imagine any venue offering richer raw material for storytelling than this?

The Western and the historical romance compliment each other uniquely. What is more primal and powerful than the male/female relationship, marriage and the recreation of life? What better place for a man and a woman to start a new life than in the West—to reinvent themselves, and in the process of self-discovery, discover love?

Back in the late Pleistocene when I first started to daydream, all my plot ideas were set in the West. Of the thirty-plus books I’ve published to date, most are Western. I’ve set novels in Regency England, Renaissance Italy, the Caribbean and Revolutionary War Georgia, but I can’t resist crossing the Mississippi again and again. Let me back up and give you a little personal history, and yeah, admit as Marsha Canham says, that I’m one of the authors who started working when chisels were the only tools and writing was done on stone tablets.

I grew up in the era of the TV Western: Maverick, Have Gun—Will Travel, Gunsmoke, Cheyenne, Bonanza, and many more. I read Luke Short and Zane Grey, and went every Saturday to the movies to see Joel McCrea and Audie Murphy. As a kid I was hooked on “cowboys and Indians.” Then my parents took a trip from our hometown of St. Louis to Wyoming. As the jagged majesty of the Tetons appeared on the seemingly endless horizon, I grew spellbound. That same summer the movie Shane was released. I thought I knew all about what made the West, well, The West—gunfighters, cowboys, and the cavalry rescuing wagon trains from marauding Indians who were mostly the villains.

Then I majored in history in college where I learned that the West was a great deal more complex—and fascinating. The concept of “West” is linked to our nation’s expansion. The first settlers pouring across the Cumberland Gap defined it as Kentucky. Men pursued by the law crossing the Sabine called it Texas. Dirt farmers saw the promise in what scoffers labeled “the Great American desert.” They called it Kansas. To gold seekers, it glittered in California, then rode on Nevada’s zephyr winds and beckoned under Montana’s Big Sky. Later it called from the lofty grandeur of the Colorado Rockies and finally, the ice palaces of Alaska.

Remember, I never started out to become a writer. I was just a dreamer who drifted into college teaching. My years in academe fed my fascination with the American frontier. Then I discovered historical romance! I read voraciously in my spare time, and over summer breaks, devouring mostly Westerns by such pioneers as Lisa Gregory, LaVyrle Spencer, Francine Rivers and Rosemary Rogers. Around this point I gathered up my courage and admitted I wanted to write a book. Finally, I dared to scribble down eleven pages of plot outline for a story set in Old California. Disclosure: one of my favorite TV Westerns was Zorro. Then I called my best friend and read those pages to her. She loved ‘em! Considering that I used more “white-out” than paper, she offered to type for me. Yep, this was before computers were available. I sharpened a dozen pencils, opened a ream of loose-leaf notebook paper and wrote my first novel, GOLDEN LADY.

At the time I began reading historicals, romance authors had written about Native American heroes and Anglo heroines for many years. Although the books were bestsellers, I had a problem believing that an Indian man from a tribal society, no matter how noble, could build a relationship with a woman educated in the white world. How much more credible would it be if that hero was a man caught between those two worlds, a half-breed who was educated yet still rejected by white society? Ironically, because of his white blood, he seldom could gain full acceptance in his tribe either.

To most white women in the 19th century West, all Indians were “savages.” But how exotic and forbidden for a heroine to be attracted to a man of mixed blood, a man outside the pale of “civilization.” His education might intrigue her, but it would only make him aware of the boundaries between them. But with such a bold and unconventional woman, he could trade quips and even quote Shakespeare. In spite of everything against them, the half-breed and the heroine could bond intellectually, not just physically. It would be them against the prejudices on both sides of the racial divide.

For my third novel I had a story concept that didn’t fit anywhere I wanted to go. It was about a disinherited son. His father wanted to replace him with a new heir for a vast estate. Unfortunately, the idea sounded like a Medieval and I wanted to write Westerns. But if my hero was a half-breed and his father was a white cattle baron, I could use the plot, and try my hand at creating my first hero caught between red and white worlds. The result was Hawk Sinclair. His father sent him East to school to be “civilized.” But he quickly learned that he had no greater acceptance there than he’d had from the cold, ruthless Noah Sinclair. When Hawk grew up, he became a gunman, drifting aimlessly, belonging nowhere—until he met his father’s new wife. Younger than him, Carrie was also a victim of his father’s cruelty, forced into a loveless marriage that left her desolate.

Before I was halfway finished writing CAPTURE THE SUN, I loved Hawk, especially when he and Carrie started to spar. It really worked having him shock her with his erudition and charm her with his wit. Yeah, I was on to something with my twist on Indian heroes. I could explore racial prejudice while I built sexual tension. Part of the “code of the West” was that white women did not marry “breeds.” This prejudice caused irreparable splits in families.

In A FIRE IN THE BLOOD, it was the heroine’s father who disowned his only child. In NIGHT WIND'S WOMAN, I created the Irish mercenary Conal Quinn, the most purely evil villain I’ve ever written--although the uncle in Endless Sky comes a close second. All these men hated those they considered “their inferiors.” The intelligence, education, honor and decency of my mixed blood heroes only served to underscore the virulence of society’s bigotry.

After I wrote about Hawk, the Cheyenne, I created Lipan Apache, Sioux and Muskogee protagonists. These were all proud, lonely men who stood outside looking in at two societies, neither of which accepted them. To hide their pain, oh, and I do love to torture my heroes, they became hard-edged and mistrustful…until they met the right women, whose unconditional love made them whole. Only then could they belong for the first time in their lives.

One truism in history is that it’s always written by the victors. What really happened at the Little Big Horn? Crazy Horse might have won the battle but the U.S. Army won the war. Ultimately, all the Sioux, Cheyenne and their allies paid a bitter price. Telling their side of the story compelled me to write THE ENDLESS SKY. My half-breed hero was the heir to the Remington fortune in Boston, yet gave it all up to return to his father’s people. He and his white wife lived with the Indians whom Custer attacked. I recreated that epic battle with them as eyewitnesses. They survived but Chase Remington's beloved Cheyenne family did not fare so well after the story ended.

To that point, my heroes had always longed for acceptance in red society. They tried to return to the simple and honorable traditions of tribal loyalty. What if my educated half-breed hero rejected his Indian blood and wanted to be white instead? Wow, where did that one come from? I mulled the idea over and wrote the outline for SUNDANCER. Cain turned his back on his mother’s people in a vain attempt to win recognition from his cold and ruthless railroad baron father. Roxanna forced him to realize he needed to accept both red and white sides of his heritage before he could find peace and their love could flourish.

As I said, I’m always trying a different twist. What if the heroine had mixed blood? PALE MOON STALKER actually came about because of a young girl I introduced in THE RIVER NYMPH. Sky Eyes, raised in both white and Sioux worlds, was the foster sister of the white hero. I had to pair a mixed blood woman with a white man to set up a good cross-cultural conflict. I decided on an English lord turned bounty hunter. Max was the perfect guy for a formidable gal like Sky—an embittered remittance man who earned his living in a dangerous profession. It just so happened that he needed a wife to regain his title, and she needed a fast gun to bring her dead husband’s murderer to justice. Marriage of convenience works in a Western just as well as in a Regency.

As you can see from the above examples, most of the characters in my books appear in my other books. Sometimes they are descendants of protagonists from earlier stories. When Sky and Max rescued a little Cheyenne girl named Fawn, she wrote the epilogue to that book for me. I knew she would be my first full-blooded Indian protagonist, the CHOSEN WOMAN. Educated in St. Louis society, she was destined to guide her Cheyenne people during the turbulent era of the Oklahoma land rush. And, like Sky, she would meet her match in an unlikely white man.

As yet, I have not created a full-blooded Native American hero, but since the Indians have at last received recognition in fiction, if sadly not in fact, I’m sure I’ll come up with a worthy hero to make some heroine’s heartbeat speed up. But he’ll have to be able to exchange quips with her and quote poets. Some things don’t change…at least for me.

I’d love to have a discussion with Regan’s readers on this blog. Please give me your opinions. I’ll be happy to reply to anyone who comments. Also, I'll be giving away my book, CHOSEN WOMAN to a random person (in the US) who comments!

Why do you like or dislike Western and/or Indian romances? What are your personal keepers? (Regan has posted her Best Western Romances list and I’m pleased to be on it!)

Do you think characters from various ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds enrich Western/Indian romance? Before Capture the Sun was published in 1988, do you know any other Indian romances with mixed-blood protagonists who have been educated in the white world?