From the ‘Dark Ages’ to a Dark Frontier: Matthew Harffy, author of the Bernicia Chronicles, explains why he’s written a Western — and how it’s not such a big leap after all.
I have wanted to write a Western for as long as I can remember. I always enjoyed Western movies and fell in love with the literary genre when I first read the superlative novel Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. After that I read all I could get my hands on, from Louis L’Amour’s traditional pulp paperbacks to the modern gritty tales spun by Joe R Lansdale.
Until now though, I have only written novels set in the early medieval period; an era of darkness, swords and conflict. Quite a departure to write a book set in 19th-century America, you might think; but I have come to realise that all of my stories have been Westerns at heart. They may not feature cowboys and six-shooters, but the fundamentals are the same.
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Men and women must stand against those stronger than them, on the fringe of society, fighting to protect their land and family on the frontiers of a savage land. My Dark Ages books are truly all Westerns; they are just set in a different time and place.
When I finally got up the nerve to tackle the Western genre, like a nervous cowpuncher moving close to an ornery steer, I decided it might be best not to approach it head on.
I wanted to keep some of the tropes that readers expect and love; but I wanted my story sit within the genre, but also offer something a little different; a path less well trodden.
To reflect that I am an Englishman writing in a quintessentially American genre, I chose to have the protagonist also be English.
The main character is Gabriel Stokes, retired Lieutenant of the 10th Royal Hussars who, after serving in the second Anglo-Afghan War, joined the Metropolitan Police in London, where he has been putting his skills and not inconsiderable determination to good use bringing all manner of despicable criminals to justice until shortly before the novel begins.
Instead of the more traditional setting of classic westerns with their dust-swirled cattle drives and heat-blasted southern states of Texas, New Mexico or Arizona, I decided to set Dark Frontier in the Pacific Northwest, in Oregon, where many of the westward pioneers settled at the end of the dangerous trail across the seemingly never-ending expanse of the plains of Kansas and Nebraska, countless river crossings and the towering, snow-draped Rocky Mountains.
I also chose to write about a slightly later period than that typically covered in classic westerns, which tend to focus in the years immediately after the American Civil War. I settled on the year 1890, which allowed Stokes to have seen active military service and also to have witnessed the terrible murders of Jack the Ripper, both of which would have a huge impact on his character and mental health.
1890 is an interesting year. It is often considered the end of the US western frontier. The Superintendent of the United States Census of 1890 declared “there can hardly be said to be a frontier line, in the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.”
The frontier line was defined as a point beyond which the population density was fewer than two persons per square mile. Because of this declaration by the Census Bureau, 1890 has often been cited as the year the American West was effectively tamed. However, the reality was that in many areas things were far from safe.
This was a country recently ripped apart by civil war, and many of the men had fought and had first-hand experience with firearms.
Following the American Civil War, the Indian Wars raged on for decades until effectively ending on 15th January 1891, with Kicking Bear’s formal capitulation to General Miles, shortly after the terrible massacre at Wounded Knee.
While I wanted to include cattle, cowboys and Native Americans in the novel, I wanted to find a different focus for the narrative, a conflict that was not so frequently told.
I found it in the wars waged between cattlemen and sheep farmers on the open range of the West.
Cattle and sheep wars in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries claimed the lives of 54 men and over 100,000 sheep. More than 100 such engagements were recorded across eight different states. The problems would often begin with the arrival of sheep onto public land, as the sheep had a tendency to overgraze, making the range unusable for cattle for months afterwards. There was also a fear of disease, such as sheep scab, that could infect the water sources that cattle drank from.
Perhaps the most notable, and certainly the bloodiest, conflict and feud between a cattle rancher and a sheepherder occurred in Arizona and became known as the Pleasant Valley War. It was fought between the families of John Tewksbury and Tom Graham and started when a Basque sheepherder working for Tewksbury was murdered in 1885. By the time the Pleasant Valley War was over in 1892, some 25 men had been killed, including all of the men in the Graham family and most of those in the Tewksbury family.
Oregon saw its share of sheep and cattle wars too. When the Cascade Forest Reserve was created in 1898, sheep owners who had used the Cascade Mountains for their summer range were forced to look elsewhere to graze their flocks.
This resulted in a sudden increase in sheep numbers in the Blue Mountains, disrupting the balance that existed there between cattlemen and local sheep herders.
Eventually, the cattlemen organized themselves into groups known as Sheep Shooters with the goal of driving sheep owners back from the range they claimed for their cows. They created what they called a ‘deadline’, across which sheep men were not permitted to graze their sheep. Trees were marked with notices tacked on the sheep side of the line.
Several mass killings of sheep occurred in Central Oregon as a result of the increasing tension between sheep and cattle operators. The largest slaughter taking place in 1903, when nearly 2,400 sheep were killed.
The Blue Mountain Forest Reserve was established in 1906. This soon became the Deschutes and Ochoco National Forests, and the government granted grazing allotments there by 1907, which controlled the number of livestock that could be grazed and the location of animal grazing. This ended the major conflicts between cattle owners and sheep owners in the area.
Gabriel Stokes finds himself embroiled in such a battle for the land which has already led to murder. He travels to Oregon in search of a bucolic wilderness. The country itself is everything he had hoped for, vast, beautiful and wild. Unfortunately, it is populated with men and women who are not so different from those he has left behind in England.
Just as I have come to realise there is little to separate the humanity of the Dark Ages from that of the American frontier of 1890, so Stokes discovers that despite the pristine landscape, no matter how far he travels, the same crimes and evils are present, and, inevitably, it is impossible to flee from one’s own nature.
Dark Frontier by Matthew Harffy is published on 4 July, 2024.
Find out more about this book.
Matthew grew up in Northumberland where the rugged terrain, ruined castles and rocky coastline had a huge impact on him. He now lives in Wiltshire with his wife, their two daughters, and a slightly mad dog. He’s the author of the critically acclaimed Bernicia Chronicles and A Time for Swords series, and he also presents the Rock, Paper, Swords! podcast with Steven A McKay.
matthewharffy.com
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You may be interested in Matthew’s other features for Historia, including:
Greek Fire, the early medieval weapon of mass destruction
Al-Andalus: Islamic Spain in the 8th century
From slave to queen: an extraordinary medieval woman
Battling with history: how to write fight scenes and battles in historical fiction
Bebbanburg 2020: the lessons I learned from a seventh-century siege
The power of alliance in the Viking Age
To read more on related topics, have a look at:
Black Elk, Lakota Sioux holy man, warrior, survivor by Alec Marsh
Historia’s interview with John Larison — author of the HWA Gold Crown Award-shortlisted Whiskey When We’re Dry, which challenges the traditional values of the Western — by Frances Owen
Images:
- Detail from What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost by Frederic Remington, 1895: Yale University Art Library (public domain)
- Emigrants Crossing the Plains, or The Oregon Trail by Albert Bierstadt, 1869: Butler Institute of American Art via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Royal Horse Artillery fleeing from Afghan attack at the Battle of Maiwand, from Maiwand: Saving the Guns by Richard Caton Woodville, 1883: Wikimedia (public domain)
- What’s left of Big Foot’s band (photograph of the surviving members of the Miniconjou Lakota Sioux tribe; their chief, Spotted Elk, and at least 150 others were killed at Wounded Knee), 1891: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (public domain)
- A Sheep Raid in Colorado from Harper’s Weekly, 13 October 1877: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Sheep herder on the trail, Madras, Oregon by Arthur Rothstein, 1936: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (public domain)
