Scenic, Historic Virginia--Beth Trissel

The rich history of Virginia, the Native Americans and the people who journeyed here from far beyond her borders are at the heart of my inspiration.  Not only have I lived in the Old Dominion for most of my life, but also several previous centuries in the sense that my ancestors were among the earliest settlers of the Shenandoah Valley (1730’s/1740’s). Chapel Hill, circa 1816, the Churchman family home place on my father’s side, is part of the inspiration behind the old homes in my novels, as are the other early plantations I’ve visited like Berkeley, Shirley and Carter’s Grove.  My Scots-Irish forebears settled Augusta County in the southern valley with names like Houston, Patterson, Finley, Moffett and McLeod.  These clannish people often intermarried, so I can tie in with many other early families depending on how I swing through the ancestral tree.

Colonial Virginia encompassed a vast territory.  Initially  Augusta County named for Princess Augusta, wife of Frederick, Prince of Wales, stretched northward from the present day county of Rockingham to include part of Page; to the South it extended the full length of Virginia’s border, and to the northwest it included the present day states of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and part of western Pennsylvania, all the territory claimed by Great Britain at that time.

Jamestown, the earliest successful English colony, and  Williamsburg,  a vital center in early America, are both in Virginia.  If you haven’t visited Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown, you’re in for a real treat.  These sites are wonderfully  restored so it’s like stepping back in time to another age, one that fascinates me.

Virginia is steeped in history.   How could I not be drawn to this wealth of stories here?  They span centuries.  And if the earth could speak what tales it would tell, some of them horrific.

Virginia is also the site of more battles than any other state in the union, encompassing the Indian Wars, the Revolution and that most uncivil of wars, the Civil War.  Not to mention, Virginia has more ghost stories than any other state.  Also fodder for the imagination and yet more stories.

Native American Historical Romance

The opening to both of my Native American Historical romance novels, THROUGH THE FIRE and RED BIRD’S SONG were inspired by dreams, as were some of the subsequent scenes in them.  I also encountered several of the key secondary characters in that mystical realm.  Behind these stories lies an immense wealth of research.  Boggles the mind how much work went into them (into all my stories, really).  I have shelves of books and piles of manuscripts given to me by historians, old journals, etc, heaped here and there in my house.  Now, of course, there are all the online sources too, but back in the day, there weren’t.   And I began this research fifteen plus years ago.

Apart from all of these non-fiction sources, I’ve read very little NA based fiction.  And I’d already written Red Bird’s Song before I got around to seeing the superb 1992 film,  The Last of the Mohicans.  Granted I loved the movie, but never set out to reproduce it in any of my novels, only to say that they have that sort of flavor.

My admiration for Native American peopleand their culture is a long-standing one, as is my profound regret at the horrific treatment they suffered at the hands of Western man.  In my stories, I aim to depict both points of view with varying the shades of grey.  No one group is ever all bad or good–people are people the world over.

I tire of some readers telling me my hero, if he’s a warrior, wouldn’t do this or that.  First, he doesn’t have to fit a Native American cookie cutter mold.  He’s an individual.  And yes, I consulted historians, anthropologists, archeologists, reenactors and even some of the Shawnee themselves before and during the writing of these stories, so I had a good idea what comprised traditional behavior for that era, and there’s no one size fits all for warriors.  It just all depended.

Bear in mind that Eastern Woodland warriors intermingled heavily with the whites, or could have, through trade, acting as guides…not to mention the inevitable warfare and captive situations that threw the two groups together.  Many warriors spoke at least some English and possessed an awareness of Western ways.   Again, to various degrees.   Some were educated.  The eloquence of their words are with us still, at least in those instances where they’ve been preserved.

Back to the interaction, remember, the first settlers to the New World arrived  in the late 1500′s (think Roanoke Island and The Lost Colony), and Jamestown was established  in the early 1600′s.   So, Eastern  Woodland Tribes had a lot of experience  with Europeans by the time period my stories take place.  Unlike western and Plains tribes, some of whom hadn’t even seen whites until the mid 1800′s.   Makes an enormous difference.

I’m at work on the sequel to Through the Fire, a story that also builds on the history of Red Bird’s Song and follows closely on its heels time wise.