We tend to absorb the history of our
environment As it was for many, Alaska
was romantic to me as a frontier, romantic while living in the city. Of a sudden someone would leave Minneapolis
for Alaska. My brother went there to do
legal work after he had worked with Indian Legal Aid in Duluth. While he was on the south coast, I thought of moving. I read up on the state and became caught up
in its history. The issues about swans in Alaska and their
near extinction in the United States sidetracked me into reading more about
that subject. Soon I was thinking about
settings and planning a story.
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| Image courtesy of Matt Banks FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
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| Image courtesy of worradmu FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
Learning about Alaska was like learning
grammar through a foreign language. I've
never read a history book about Minnesota though I have Midwestern ancestry
going back to the mid-1800s. Mining
hopes in Alaska were very similar to those on Minnesota's Iron Range in the
early 20th century. The influx of people
in Northern Minnesota had similarities to Alaska’s new population. Sometimes they were the same people. Like Alaska, the fur trade began Minnesota
history. I'd heard much about the 1920s
on the Iron Range from my mother.
Boomtowns and sudden wealth mapped the region.
After being fascinated with two books
of Alaskan history, I researched swans.
I read how warehouses with thousands of swan pelts were discovered, more
than 10,000 at a time. Eventually
hunting laws were enforced and a positive environmental chronicle was
documented. I began my Alaska story as a
shorter fiction about an Irish immigrant couple who bought shore property where
swans migrated. But soon the story led
to a coastal town and characters emerged.
When I thought of the swans being
killed in masses, I knew that few women were part of such a money-making
venture. How much did women help such an
environmental campaign in a lone setting when a particular species were illegal
to hunt? It is known how women responded
to Prohibition then.
Not until I was rewriting the book as Young Adult did I realize the inspiration for the swan hat. Of course, it was meant to be the white hat of the western. But I remembered from my grade school years the pheasant pelts one of my brothers brought home after hunting. He hung the pheasant pelts on the wall of his room and then in the basement. These pelts fit neatly on the head so that, with my friends, I wore a pheasant hat - until my mother found out and scared us about lice. There is method to storytelling, after all.
The Swan Bonnet tab at this blog provides links to sites where the book can be sampled and purchased.
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| Image courtesy of Nixxphotography FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
