The inspiration for ‘Ghosts of the West’, my new Drabble and Harris mystery, came during a boat trip on the Thames. We had just passed Rotherhithe and voice on the loudspeaker pointed out the Mayflower pub – named after the famous ship that took pilgrims to North America in 1620. The 102 would-be migrants aboard founded what would become the oldest continuously occupied settlement on the continent at Plymouth Bay in Massachusetts. (Another crowd founded Jamestown in Virginia 13 years before, but that was temporarily abandoned giving honours to Plymouth.)
As the title of ‘Ghosts of the West’ implies, the plot has at least something to do with the West – and as you’ll discover if you read it the Great Plains of the United States. Unsurprisingly it therefore has a strong Native American dimension.
Which soon fed into my motivation for writing the book. For as well as having the opportunity to venture into the Western genre – and who doesn’t like a Western? – but I also wanted to highlight what one could argue is one of the greatest crimes in American history.
A great deal of important soul-searching has gone on in the US and elsewhere in respect of the Atlantic slave trade and in the US, the plight and legacy of Southern slavery. But there’s been less attention on what happened to the original inhabitants of North America.
When those first colonists landed in North America, it is estimated that around 500,000 Native Americans lived across the vast continent, though some people believe it was much higher than that. By 1900, however, most are agreed however that just 300,000 Native Americans were left. At the same while the European immigrant population had risen from zero to more than of 76 million.
In addition to seeing their population decline through warfare, outright oppression and having their ecosystems destroyed – I’ll come to that – the Native American popular had by then been shepherded into several hundred reservations. Today the United States has 574 federally recognised tribes spread over 326 Indian reservations covering 15 million square acres, an area of territory a littles smaller than Latvia (and you don’t need a geography degree to know that compared to the expanse of the Pan-Continental United States that’s not much.)
So while ‘Ghosts of the West’ is set in 1938, the wider story of what happened between 1600 and 1900 is very much part of my narrative. In the book it is personified in the character of an aged chief named Black Cloud, who is in part inspired by Red Cloud (1822-1909), a real life chief of the Oglala Lakotas, a branch of the Great Sioux Nation, who was described by one prominent contemporary as ‘the Red Man’s George Washington.’
This means that, whatever the ostensible crimes at the heart of my story, the greatest crime touched on by the book is that committed by generations of European-white migrants. And it took hundreds of years. In a sense the stage of the ‘Indian wars’ that took place in the 1860s and 1870s in the great plains of the West, was the last major campaign in war last several hundred years.
Ultimately, it was won by exterminating the source of the Native Americans food and shelter, the buffalo – they ate its meat, used its hide for clothing and to weatherproof their tepees. American military strategists and leaders –President Grant among them – saw the annihilation of the buffalo as the solution to the ‘Indian problem.’ As a result some 30 million bison were massacred from 1850, with the last of the great herds destroyed in 1883-84. (Much of it was to feed the demand for leather in Europe, too.) With the bedrock of their civilisations destroyed Plains Indians had no choice but to accept life as farmers on the reservation.
That the lands set aside for reservations were often those that whites did not want will tell you something of the quality of the land. (‘The Wasichus [white men] had slaughtered all the bison shut us up in pens,’ said the medicine man Black Elk, bemoaning his starving people. ‘We could not eat lies.’) But in addition to coping with hunger and the enforced dependence on inadequate handouts, the Native American’s whole culture and belief systems were under grave assault. If you are a semi-nomadic warrior and a hunter who is forced overnight to become a farmer, what do you teach your children?
Of course the United States is not alone in having done horrific things in the past: Britain ruled an empire covering a quarter of the world’s population at its fullest extent in the 1920s, and sadly the long term effects of that corrosive colonialism can be observed still. But there is a point of difference: Britain, either willingly or at gunpoint, finally quit its colonies. As did the other European colonial powers, (with varying degrees of magnanimity). But the ancestors of immigrants Americans are still there and – for obvious reasons – aren’t going to go anywhere.
‘The past,’ L P Hartley famously wrote, ‘is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ Thank goodness for that. One of the benefits of fiction is that it helps us to remember and revisit our stories, including crimes of such enormity and general cultural acceptance that we sometimes don’t even see them for what they are. It also offers the chance to ask, ‘What if?’ And that’s an opportunity, too.
When daring journalist Sir Percival Harris gets wind of a curious crime in a sleepy English town, he ropes in his old friend Professor Ernest Drabble to help him investigate. The crime is a grave robbery, and as Drabble and Harris pry deeper, events take a mysterious turn when a theft at the British Museum is soon followed by a murder. The friends are soon involved in a tumultuous quest that takes them from the genteel streets of London to the wide plains of the United States. What exactly is at stake is not altogether clear - but if they don't act soon, the outcome could be a bloody conflict, one that will cross borders, continents and oceans... Meanwhile, can Drabble and Harris's friendship - which has endured near-death experiences on several continents, not to mention a boarding school duel - survive a crisis in the shape of the beautiful and enigmatic Dr Charlotte Moore?
More information about Alec Marsh and his Drabble and Harris series can be found on his website. You can also follow him on Twitter @AlecMarsh
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