Why I Wrote Land Shadows

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