Joins writers’ celebration at Central Library Saturday

James Alexander Thom, national winner of the first Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, administered by the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library Foundation, will participate in a program celebrating Indiana writers at the Central Library on Saturday, Sept. 26.

Thom, who was born in Gosport, Indiana, in 1933, is known as one of the country’s most successful writers of historical fiction. Thom’s novels include Long Knife, the story of George Rogers Clark, Follow the River, based on the Draper’s Meadow massacre, Panther In the Sky, concerning the life of Tecumseh, and From Sea to Shining Sea, dealing with the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Thom’s books have a deeply felt, often Midwestern, sense of place. He has also come to be known for his understanding of indigenous Indian culture.

Thom lives with his wife, Dark Rain Thom, in a 150-year-old log cabin he restored in 1981 in the woods in Owen County. Recently, he visited NUVO for a conversation about writing, history, culture and Indiana.

We present him, in his own words.

Writing historical fiction

The historian stands in the present with all his authority and says 200 years ago something happened and here’s who did it and here are the consequences for the present. The historical novelist says we are now in the 19th century or the 18th century; something’s about to happen. Here’s the guy who’s running the show – George Rogers Clark, say – and we’re here, right in the middle of it. You can smell the rotting buffalo meat over by the waterfall. You can hear the drums. You have to provide so much to the reader’s senses and you have to research what the world was like at that time. History books have already told how things came out — but they haven’t been written yet.

I’ve tried to associate with some of the historical novelists who take their craft as seriously as the historian does. We try to create historical stories that will catch somebody up to the point where they feel personally involved. But at the same time, the history should be accurate enough that a real historian would not be embarrassed to write a blurb for your book.

Historians

Without putting historians down, they do have a tendency not to want to be left out of the consensus. When I first started writing about Lewis and Clark, back in the ‘80s, there was a certain image of what they were and what they knew. By the time the bicentennial was over, so many scholars had been working on this stuff, the whole consensus had changed and everything looked different. Even the name of Meriwether Lewis’ dog had changed.

Inventing stuff

You don’t have to invent stuff to dramatize history. Dayton Duncan is a historian who wrote a lot of Ken Burns’ Lewis and Clark stuff. Dayton is a wonderful fellow — he has all the heart and passion of a novelist, but he’s a historian. He says anybody who thinks a historical novelist has to make up something to make history more dramatic just doesn’t know what it was really like then.

Indiana today

Indiana has been rich in coal. We use a huge amount of it to generate our electricity. I understand that. I know some coal miners and I know some utility people who say we’ve got to use it because it’s the only thing we have plenty of. But at the same time, it’s contributing to the detriment of our environment. We live in the woods. If I’m on the back porch and a pick-up truck drives by a hundred yards away, I can smell it for five minutes.

Indiana is also a very big agricultural state and, as Wendell Berry points out, being an agricultural state these days means that you are totally oil-dependent. Everything that you get in the store has got barrels of oil behind it – to plough the ground and ship the stuff from coast to coast.

Indiana has always changed with the times. It’s going to have to keep doing it. We’ve got enough sunshine here and enough wind that we can do an awful lot with clean energy and phase out coal.

What we glorify

We’re almost entirely recycling other people’s mistakes. And, in doing so, we create our own. What’s happened now is the technology has gotten so powerful that you do a lot more damage in much quicker time. But they could be quick in the old days, too. You know how the Indiana state seal has the guy cutting down a tree with an axe? Well, that happened with a remarkable swiftness. But it didn’t happen with the pioneer cutting down the tree all by himself. He had slaves, he had animals and, instead of cutting down those trees, he girdled them and they died and he could burn them for firewood.

At that time, wonderful forests covered 80 percent of this state. The pioneers came through and they got terrible claustrophobia because they never saw the sky. They couldn’t wait to bring down all those trees. Eventually they did. There are very few places in Indiana that have any virgin timber left.

We tend to glorify the wrong things. The pioneers were tough, brave, enterprising and all that. But an awful lot of them were not what you would call the cream of society. They were trying to get away from the law, trying to get out someplace where there weren’t rules. They would deplete things. Daniel Boone was an exporter of resources.

The Indians

One of the things I’ve become aware of in my 25-30 years with the Indians is they had sustainability. They had an ethic that you did not take more than you put back. Now they had learned that the hard way. They had wiped out the mastadon. Out at Cahokia in the Mississippi Valley they had tried to concentrate too much population, found they couldn’t do it and dispersed as nomadic bands using the earth wisely again. So much of what we need to know is what they already knew. When Europeans came over here, Indians had been here for 10,000 years and it looked like nobody was home. Now we’ve been here 300-400 years and they don’t want it back. Everything they consider sacred and life-giving has been taken away and used up, including their culture.

The shapes of culture

I see the two cultures in terms of two geometric shapes. The culture that was here was a cyclical thing. You were born, you matured, you died and became part of the earth again. The Creator gave you certain things that you knew would come back around if you didn’t use them all up. So the idea was that all your descendents would have the same blessings the Creator gave you. Therefore, you didn’t use everything up.

People who came over from Europe had a linear point of view. They had learned that you go from Point A to Point B and you take advantage of things and you make things happen and, after you’ve gone from Point A to Point B, nothing will be the same because you’ve made progress. Now this straight line of progress is manifested in many ways. A dam across a river is a straight line. A railroad from Chicago to San Francisco is a straight line – it carries the buffalo hunters to wipe out the buffalo so the Indians won’t have anything to eat. That was not just happenstance. That was the idea.

We’re beginning to get to the point where we realize we can’t just keep going in a straight line and changing things because we’ll get to the point where nothing means anything and there won’t be anything.

Being a part of history

I’m so glad that I grew up with the sense that the past isn’t “back there:” History isn’t “back there.” We’re still in it. It’s a river: Everything that goes into it affects everything else and we’re creating more of it. I was born long enough ago that I can remember going to the funerals of Civil War veterans. So I’ve always had a sense of being a part of that. I’ve always had that dimension of time.

I was talking to a lady down in Owen County and she said she was trying to get her daughter interested in history because she wasn’t doing well in school. She wasn’t interested in PBS or even family discussions about their own ancestors. She sat her daughter down and asked, "Why do you refuse to be interested in something as fascinating as this?" And the girl said, “I’m not in it!”

I told the lady, “You tell her she is in it. She just hasn’t shown up yet.”