Self-referential

I do not like it when I can't reconstruct the trail of my own thinking.  Two days ago I was looking for a photo of a character in my story "White Caps."  In the story, William Patterson is the Surveyor General of New Mexico.  My memory said that I took that name and other biographical details from the historical Surveyor General in 1906.  That quickly revealed itself as false.  In fact I had trouble locating any William Patterson in a position of significance in New Mexican territorial history.

So I spent a lot of time combing through my notebooks.  I found material on a second character, Creighton Foraker, and his brother, Senator Joseph Foraker.  In scouring Google Scholar and Google Books I even found new and interesting material on a third character, Cipriano Baca.  But it took me until last night to find William H. Patterson, an attorney and functionary in the territorial government… not in the first decade of the twentieth century, but in the 1880's.  He was the representative for Surveyor General George Washington Julian in a number of important cases.

And then, finally, my memory kicked back in.  For dramatic reasons I moved the Gorras Blancas forward in time twenty years from the mid-1880's.  I decided I wanted a particular kind of person to pursue them: ex-Civil War, ex-Reconstruction army officer, someone with a nineteenth-century liberal (i.e. laissez faire capitalist) ideology coupled with the pseudo-scientific racism popularized by Theodore Roosevelt and his friends.  I wanted a clash of ideas between him and Territorial Assemblyman Pablo Herrera.  And I didn't want to be overly distracted by the details of either G.W. Julian's life or that of Morgan Llewellyn.  Julian was an abolitionist from Indiana who came to New Mexico deeply prejudiced against Mexican Americans.  Llewellyn was a 22-year old whose qualifications seem to be that he was a corporal in Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, although he never saw service in Cuba.  Patterson allowed me a blanker slate.

And while I am engaging in self-referential reflection that is probably of interest only to me, I will add here that the Surveyor General would not have been involved in enforcement activities, even regarding the land grants.  As a historian, this is all unconscionable.  As a writer, it's fine.  I only hope the story holds the reader's interest.