Why I Wrote This Book

It all begins with an idea.

A Bucket List, the Pandemic, and What I Didn’t Know About My Wife

In my case, it started with a bucket list—and an incredibly intelligent wife.

Jenn is a writer, a historian (Master’s in History), a college librarian (Master of Information and Library Science), and has taught creative writing at the college level. She also knows the business of writing. I knew none of this when I married her six years ago.

And then there’s me.

I’ve had “write a novel” on my bucket list since working on my high school paper—so long ago that, as a senior, the military draft was on my mind more than college.

When I was teaching at Vista Grande High School in Taos, New Mexico, Jenn was working as a librarian at Lamar Community College in Colorado. I drove to Lamar every weekend, or she came to Taos. Then COVID hit, and we were both told to work from home. I hated to leave Taos, but it made no sense to pay rent in two places.

At the time, I was living in a rented adobe home. Jenn did some research and found it was built in 1820. When she came to Taos to help me load up the U-Haul, I casually mentioned that with COVID shutting everything down, I’d have time on my hands.

“I think I want to write that book that’s been on my bucket list,” I told her. “Something about the history of the Southwest—but not another western full of bullshit like the ones I grew up on in public school, or the endless TV shows about the indestructible white cowboy hero. You know, Have Gun – Will Travel, Bonanza, The Rifleman, Johnny Yuma—all that How the West Was Won nonsense that celebrates Manifest Destiny like it was some divine plan. That painting by John Gast, the one with the blond angel floating through the sky holding a Bible and a telegraph wire, while Native Americans flee in terror? That kind of B.S.”

I thought she’d laugh.

Instead, she rattled off her writing credentials. “You can do this,” she said, smiling. “I’ll coach you.”

I wrote a significant part of the book in Lamar, Colorado but also immersed myself in the landscape of Cimarron and Taos. I parked my small camper for a summer near Eagle Nest Lake, landed a gig at the Michael Gorman Gallery in Taos silversmithing, and wrote in my little camper.

Growing up around Albuquerque and Taos, I’d always heard about the Maxwell Land Grant, the Colfax County Wars, and the displacement of Native Americans. But it wasn’t until I read Translating Property by Maria Montoya that things started to click. I began to wonder why there were ranches with Scottish surnames around here.

Then I stumbled onto the history of the Highland Clearances—the forced removal of Gaelic tenants from the Scottish Highlands to Canada, the U.S., Australia, and other locales. Their homes were burned to the ground, and they were violently and brutally forced from places like the Isle of Barra and Uist. Sound familiar? Some ended up in New Mexico as ranchers. I started to wonder about these people—forced from their homes—ending up on land that was stolen from others. It was ironic, and it sparked my curiosity.

The Stories I Wanted to Challenge

I didn’t want to write a cowboy saga with an indestructible white hero and a stereotyped Indigenous side character. I was done with the sanitized mythology of the West—the one that filled my childhood with rifles, ranches, and righteous white men "civilizing" the frontier.

Those stories never talked about land grabs, broken treaties, or stolen inheritances. They never mentioned the Native children sent to boarding schools to “kill the Indian, save the man.” They didn’t talk about the Mexican landowners stripped of their titles. Or the mixed-blood families caught between legal systems, cultural identities, and survival.

They sure as hell didn’t mention women like Archange Ouilmette—a Potawatomi woman, a diplomat, and one of the early founders of Chicago—who helped negotiate land agreements and protect settlers, yet was still forced from the very land she helped secure.

Archange is Carrie Mae Darling’s ancestor—and mine. You meet Carrie Mae in Land Shadows, but it’s Archange’s legacy that lives in her shadow.

The sequel I’m working on will follow Archange’s story more fully—through her removal, through the court battles to reclaim what was stolen, and through the quiet strength of a woman history tried to erase.

I didn’t want to write a Western. I wanted to write back at the Western—and so I wrote a novel with characters who are seldom mentioned in the genre: strong Latino people, an unshakeable Indigenous woman, and a white rancher at the center who is anything but typical—as is one of his sons.

To rip apart the tropes I was raised on and drag them into the light. To expose Manifest Destiny for what it really was—not divine purpose, but a slick sales pitch. Coined in 1845 by a newspaperman named John L. O’Sullivan, it was propaganda wrapped in the language of providence. It made genocide feel like a mission.

It told white settlers they were chosen by God to take land, and told everyone else—Native, Mexican, or mixed-blood—that they didn’t belong in the future America was building.

I wanted the land to speak, and the people who were silenced to speak through it.

In future blogs, I’ll talk a bit about each chapter—and later, the writing process.

—R.J. Striegel

Sources Cited

O'Sullivan, J. L. (1845, July–August). Annexation. The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 17(1), 5–10.

Stephanson, A. (1995). Manifest Destiny: American expansion and the empire of right. Hill and Wang.