Why I Wrote Land Shadows
Why I Wrote This Book
A Bucket List, the Pandemic, and What I Didn’t Know About My Wife
It all begins with an idea.
In my case, it started with a bucket list—and an incredibly intelligent wife.
Jenn is a writer, a historian (Master’s in History), a college librarian (Master of Information and Library Science), and has taught creative writing at the college level. She also knows the business of writing inside and out. I knew none of this when I married her six years ago.
And then there’s me.
I’ve had “write a novel” on my bucket list since working on my high school paper—so long ago that, as a senior, the military draft was on my mind more than college.
When I was teaching at Vista Grande High School in Taos, New Mexico, Jenn was working as a librarian at Lamar Community College in Colorado. I drove to Lamar every weekend, or she came to Taos. Then COVID hit, and we were both told to work from home. I hated to leave Taos, but it made no sense to pay rent in two places.
At the time, I was living in a rented adobe home. Jenn did some research and found it was built in 1820. When she came to help me load up the U-Haul, I casually mentioned that with COVID shutting everything down, I’d have time on my hands.
“I think I want to write that book that’s been on my bucket list,” I told her. “Something about the history of the Southwest—but not another western full of bullshit like the ones I grew up on in public school in Albuquerque, or the endless TV shows about the indestructible white cowboy hero. You know, Have Gun – Will Travel, Bonanza, The Rifleman, Johnny Yuma—all that How the West Was Won nonsense that celebrates Manifest Destiny like it was some divine plan. That painting by John Gast, the one with the blond angel floating through the sky holding a Bible and a telegraph wire, while Native Americans flee in terror? That kind of B.S.”
I thought she’d laugh.
Instead, she rattled off her writing credentials. “You can do this,” she said, smiling. “I’ll coach you.”
I decided not to write in Lamar. Instead, I immersed myself in the landscape of Cimarron and Taos. I parked my camper near Eagle Nest Lake, landed a gig at the Michael Gorman Gallery in Taos silversmithing, and started writing in my little camper.
Growing up around Albuquerque and Taos, I’d always heard about the Maxwell Land Grant, the Colfax County Wars, and the displacement of Native Americans. But it wasn’t until I read Translating Property by Maria Montoya that things started to click. I began to wonder why there were so many ranches with Scottish surnames around here.
Then I stumbled onto the history of the Highland Clearances—the forced removal of Gaelic tenants from the Scottish Highlands to Canada, the U.S., Australia, and other locales. Their homes were burned to the ground, and they were violently and brutally forced from places like the Isle of Barra and Uist. Some ended up in New Mexico as ranchers. I started to wonder about these people—forced from their homes—ending up on land that was stolen from others. It was ironic, and it sparked my curiosity.
The Stories I Wanted to Challenge
I didn’t want to write a cowboy saga with an indestructible white hero and a stereotyped Indigenous side character. I was done with the sanitized mythology of the West—the one that filled my childhood with rifles, ranches, and righteous white men "civilizing" the frontier.
Those stories never talked about land grabs, broken treaties, or stolen inheritances. They never mentioned the Native children sent to boarding schools to “kill the Indian, save the man.” They didn’t talk about the Mexican landowners stripped of their titles. Or the mixed-blood families caught between legal systems, cultural identities, and survival.
They sure as hell didn’t mention women like Archange Ouilmette—a Potawatomi woman, a diplomat, and one of the early founders of Chicago—who helped negotiate land agreements and protect settlers, yet was still forced from the very land she helped secure.
Archange is Carrie Mae Darling’s ancestor—and mine. You meet Carrie Mae in Land Shadows, but it’s Archange’s legacy that lives in her shadow.
The sequel I’m working on will follow Archange’s story more fully—through her removal, through the court battles to reclaim what was stolen, and through the quiet strength of a woman history tried to erase.
I didn’t want to write a Western. I wanted to write back at the Western.
To take the tropes I grew up with and pull back the curtain. To show what Manifest Destiny really was—not divine purpose, but a brilliant marketing slogan. Coined in 1845 by a journalist named John L. O’Sullivan, it was propaganda dressed up as providence. It made the brutal conquest of Native Americans feel like a calling.
It told white settlers they were chosen by God to take land, and told everyone else—Native, Mexican, or mixed-blood—that they didn’t belong in the future America was building.
I wanted the land to speak, and the people who were silenced to speak through it.
In future blogs, I’ll talk a bit about each chapter—and later, the writing process.
—R.J. Striegel
Sources Cited
O'Sullivan, J. L. (1845, July–August). Annexation. The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 17(1), 5–10.
Stephanson, A. (1995). Manifest Destiny: American expansion and the empire of right. Hill and Wang.
History, Memory, and the Stories Left Untold
It all began with a bucket list and an incredibly intelligent wife.
Jenn is a writer, historian (M.A. in History), college librarian (Master of Information and Library Science), and former college-level creative writing instructor. She also understands the business of writing. I did not fully appreciate any of that when we married six years ago.
And then there is me.
I had “write a novel” sitting on my bucket list since my high school newspaper days, back when the military draft weighed more heavily on my mind than college applications.
At the time, I was teaching at Vista Grande High School in Taos, New Mexico, while Jenn worked as a librarian at Lamar Community College in Colorado. We spent years driving back and forth between Taos and Lamar every weekend. Then COVID arrived, and suddenly we were both working remotely. It no longer made sense to maintain two homes.
I hated leaving Taos. I had been renting an old adobe house, and during the move Jenn discovered it had been built in 1820. As we loaded the U-Haul, I mentioned that with the world shutting down, I might finally have the time to attempt the novel I had always wanted to write.
“I want to write something about the history of the Southwest,” I told her. “But not the simplified version of the West I grew up with in television shows and old novels, the mythology of heroic conquest and endless frontier triumph.”
I expected her to laugh.
Instead, she smiled and said, “You can do this. I’ll help you.”
I wrote much of Land Shadows in Lamar, Colorado, but I also immersed myself in the landscapes that shaped the story: Taos, Cimarron, and Eagle Nest. One summer I parked a small camper near Eagle Nest Lake, worked as a silversmith at the Michael Gorman Gallery in Taos, and spent long evenings writing in the quiet mountain air.
Growing up around Albuquerque and Taos, I had always heard stories about the Maxwell Land Grant, the Colfax County Wars, and the displacement of Native communities in the Southwest. But it was not until I read Translating Property by Maria Montoya that the pieces began to connect. I started wondering why so many ranches in northern New Mexico carried Scottish surnames.
That question led me to the history of the Highland Clearances, the forced removal of Gaelic-speaking tenants from the Scottish Highlands and Islands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Families were uprooted, homes destroyed, and entire communities scattered across Canada, the United States, Australia, and beyond.
Some of those displaced families eventually settled in New Mexico.
I became fascinated by the irony and tragedy of people driven from their own ancestral lands eventually finding themselves living on land taken from others. That tension, the collision of survival, displacement, memory, and belonging, became the emotional foundation of Land Shadows.
The Stories I Wanted to Tell
I did not want to write a traditional Western centered solely on conquest and rugged individualism. I wanted to explore the people who often existed at the margins of those stories: Indigenous families, Latino communities, mixed-heritage settlers, women navigating impossible circumstances, and immigrants struggling to find a place in a rapidly changing world.
The history of the American West is layered and complicated. Behind the familiar myths are stories of land disputes, broken promises, cultural erasure, displacement, and survival. Those histories shaped generations of people whose voices were often minimized or forgotten.
I was especially drawn to figures like Archange Ouilmette, a Potawatomi woman, diplomat, and one of the early founders of Chicago, whose story reflects both resilience and loss. Her legacy helped inspire parts of Land Shadows, particularly through the character of Carrie Mae Darling.
The sequel I am currently researching will explore Archange’s life more directly: her removal from her homeland, the legal battles surrounding her family’s land, and the extraordinary strength required to endure those upheavals.
More than anything, I wanted the land itself to feel alive in this novel, to carry memory, conflict, grief, endurance, and hope.
I wanted to write a story that looked beyond familiar frontier mythology and instead explored the human cost of expansion, ambition, and historical change.
And I wanted the people history often pushed to the edges of the page to speak again.
In future blogs, I will discuss individual chapters, the research process, and the journey of writing Land Shadows.
— R.J. Striegel