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I planned to write about the holidays this month, but no story emerged from my busy brain. Below is background information concerning the Civil War novel I am writing about a capricious young woman named Bonnie Faye Doolittle:
Before dawn on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Ft. Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor. That action marked the beginning of the most devastating war in United States history and sent shock waves across a divided nation.
Trouble had been brewing about the issue of slavery for many years, but
few areas of the massive conflict were to be as affected as a small
patch of land colloquially known as Lapland. A place where the
confluence of politically drawn borders fluidly “lapped” over each
other.
The battles at Wilson’s Creek and Pea Ridge are less well
known than battles east of the Mississippi – Antietam, Bull Run, and
Gettysburg, but the early warfare to make Missouri part of the
Confederacy were catastrophic to the residents of extreme southwest
Missouri. It is one thing to read about war in a newspaper and quite
another when the action occurs in your own backyard.
There were many problems. The South was poorly prepared for
warfare. The horde of Southern men gathered on the Cowskin Prairie were
ill-equipped. They lacked uniforms, guns, ammunition, and food. This
forced them to range about the countryside looking for any needed
supplies. Moreover, they were not very particular about how they
obtained their acquisitions.
Random, ferocious attacks by bushwhackers were a part of life
from the early days before and during the war until the bitter end.
Although many schoolchildren are taught that the war ended with Lee’s
surrender after the battle of the courthouse at Appomattox, it was not
that tidy. President Lincoln learned of this momentous event before he
was shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14. Texas continued to have
spotty resistance until the war was declared over on April 2, 1866. By
that time, Lapland was an empty wasteland.
Bonnie Faye Doolittle was born in Lapland – a crossroads of
geography, political divide, and cultures. Located at the end of the
Mason-Dixon line that separated the North from the South, it abutted
Indian Territory and was down the road from Bloody Kansas.
Precisely, Bonnie Faye was born in Pineville, Missouri, the
County Seat of McDonald County nestled in the western Ozark Mountains.
Its land and residents were trampled by armies and bandits of both the
North and South during the four long years of the war.
Bonnie Faye’s parents migrated from Tennessee to the
southwest corner of Missouri in 1840, and she came into the world in
1842. She was born under poor circumstances. Despite everything her
father, Dr. Papa, could do, he could not save his beloved wife from
bleeding to death when Bonnie Faye was three days old. As the town’s
only physician, he knew that a neighbor, Little Feather McClain, had
lost her baby only a few days before, so he hired her as a wet nurse to
save his baby daughter. Little Feather, heartbroken at the loss of her
own child, nursed her with care and affection.
Dr. Papa had no inclination to marry again, so with Little
Feather’s help, he raised Bonnie Faye. She flourished under their hands
and developed an opinion that the world centered on her belly button,
although she would never have described it in such a crude way.
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