The Dolomite Difference

by Alethea Williams

My grandmother immigrated to ‘Merica from the mountainous Tyrol region of Austria, which had just been ceded to Italy as the spoils of World War I. Saddened at leaving her family and the agricultural way of life she knew, she never could bring herself to repeat the harrowing two-week long boat ride that brought her here. The memories of paralyzing fear heightened by extreme nausea stayed fresh in her mind. She never again visited her beloved Val di Non.

Where other children might see their grandparents at holidays and vacations, my grandmother, my nona, lived next door. So it would be logical to assume that I knew her story and that it would be easy for me to write a novel of a Tyrolean woman escaping the poverty of war-ravaged Europe by accompanying her new husband to the coal mines of southwest Wyoming.

That assumption would be wrong. 

The author's mother and her Nona

Because of societal pressure to fit in and be American, when asked, Nona reluctantly agreed that our heritage was Italian. In the 1950s everybody knew about pizza and spaghetti; no one in the small town where I grew up had ever heard of canederli or polenta. I took it for granted that everyone of Italian descent ate their canned peas cold with vinegar and oil, and their rice was eaten topped with brown butter and bacon bits.

I did hear the story of Nona, at the age of twelve, being passed to a rich family to work off a debt her father owed. She survived by eating potato peels and the crusts of brown bread. I was aghast at the thought of a mere child being bonded out for labor. By the age she was in the story, I already towered over my tiny grandma, probably the result of my nutritious American diet and multivitamins.

I’m happy to say I wasn’t completely oblivious. Some questions did occur to me along the way. They owned farm animals in Val di Non? Yes; the lower level of the houses were stables and the people lived on the second story. Well, if her parents owned land, why were they so poor? Nona would get a faraway look, and then say she couldn’t explain. We spent a lot of time together in her kitchen. Words were easy, concepts were difficult. If I asked for the words for cup, fork, arm, leg, she would say, “Do you want to know how I say it, or the nice way?” The “nice” way being Italian, and not the mountain dialect—which is in danger of dying out now even in the Tyrol.

But I never asked the right questions. The deeper questions. The questions that would have allowed me to write a story based on her life, even twenty years after she was gone.

Many people tell me now they’re disappointed that Willow Vale isn’t a true story because it seems so real. Even though my main character, Francesca, comes to America in 1924 with her new husband to a coal mining town in Wyoming just like my grandmother, the similarities between Francesca and Nona end there. The rest I had to research, and although I’m happy to say no one has reported major inaccuracies in the book, I’m sorry that I didn’t know as a kid some of the things I later included in the novel. I think Nona would have been happy to know I finally realize there are mountains of difference between Italians and Tyroleans, the Dolomite range of mountains as a matter of fact.

Nona said she was pretty when she was young and her picture on the cover of Willow Vale bears her out. I’m flattered when people say I look like her. I’ve been asked what she would have thought to have her picture on my novel, and I like to think she would be pleased—although I’m willing to bet she would be nonplussed by the fact that the distance to the Tyrol is so short in this modern world of virtual travel that her pretty face can be accessed on screens anywhere in the world.

In memory of Nona

Orsola Angeli

1899 – 1979

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Alethea Williams is the author of Willow Vale, the story of a Tyrolean immigrant’s journey to America after WWI. Willow Vale won a 2012 Wyoming State Historical Society Publications Award. In her second novel, Walls for the Wind, a group of New York City immigrant orphans arrive in Hell on Wheels, Cheyenne, Wyoming. Walls for the Wind is a WILLA Literary Award finalist, a gold Will Rogers Medallion winner, and placed first at the Laramie Awards in the Prairie Fiction category.

 

The History of Náápiikoan Winter

by Alethea Williams

I don’t remember how I stumbled on David Thompson's Narrative of His Explorations in Western America 1784-1812, but I do remember that it was in the days before internet searches and that I had to use interlibrary loan to borrow a copy from a library in Montana. I had never been much of a student of history, so when this book started opening up historical vistas I had little interest in previously, I was anxious that I only had two weeks to absorb all the richness of details of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in what is now the Canadian interior and Montana. So I spent $20, which at that time I couldn’t afford, to photocopy the whole book.

Later I found a discard copy at a library sale of Richard Lancaster's 1966 book, Piegan. Lancaster's book was helpful mainly as another example of a book about an outsider white man in Native culture, but also for his accounts of trying to learn the Piikáni language and his recounting the mannerisms and patience of one of the elders of the Blackfoot tribe. Many of the events in my story follow those David Thompson records in the last four chapters of Part One of his book, which deal with his recollections of a young clerk of the Hudson’s Bay Company trying to foster trade by living among the Plains Indians at about the turn of the nineteenth century, and in particular his dealings with the "Peeagans," one segment of the fearsome five-pronged Blackfoot Confederacy.

That is the story behind the second part of the book, “Rupert’s Land,” a fictionalized account of many of the true circumstances of David Thompson’s Narrative.

The first part of Náápiikoan Winter, “Nuevo Mexico,” is the story of a woman kidnapped by Apaches in what was Spain’s second attempt to colonize the New Mexico area, her subsequent capture by the Utes, and being traded again and again up the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains until she, too, lands with the Piikáni. The interaction of my fictional character, Donal Thomas, the Mexican/Piikáni woman Buffalo Stone Woman, and the passionate nature of a people depicted in popular fiction as emotionless, makes up the rest of my novel. The book is divided into two parts and the main characters figments of my imagination because I didn’t want it to be “her” story or “his” story. It’s the story of a small segment of history that came to have unimaginable consequences for the people who lived it: the conquering and settlement of a Native land by the Europeans.

I have to thank the many fine writers whose work I consulted in order to bring Náápiikoan Winter to life. There is a partial list of sources I used in the back of the book. Since the novel took 20 years to see publication, not all places where I found pertinent details of everyday life among Native peoples are included since I didn’t write down all the books I read while writing my own. 

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Alethea Williams is the author of Willow Vale, the story of a Tyrolean immigrant’s journey to America after WWI. Willow Vale won a 2012 Wyoming State Historical Society Publications Award. In her second novel, Walls for the Wind, a group of New York City immigrant orphans arrive in Hell on Wheels, Cheyenne, Wyoming. Walls for the Wind is a WILLA Literary Award finalist, a gold Will Rogers Medallion winner, and placed first at the Laramie Awards in the Prairie Fiction category.

Why Writing Historical Fiction Is So Much Fun

 by Carolyn Niethammer

While readers can learn a great deal from historical fiction, it’s even more of a treat for writers.. For my novel The Piano Player, I read The Tombstone Epitaph on microfilm to learn what life was like in that dusty frontier town in the 1880s. It is said that Tombstone at that time had the best food between St. Louis and San Francisco, and the menus published in the paper confirmed that fact with offerings of  fresh oysters, lobster, six salads, five roasts, four different pies and three puddings all at one restaurant on one Sunday.

Researching what a fashionable young woman might wear led to an enjoyable afternoon in the historical society library looking over old ladies’ magazines with pictures and descriptions of bustles and bows and laces. Then there were the fabulous hats. The under garments were even more fascinating, calling for layer upon layer of fine batiste and corsets with whalebone and laces.

One of my characters, the real life Nellie Cashman, had mining interests in Alaska and Yukon Territory, so I went to Fairbanks to look at the old mining records. Down in a locked cage in the courthouse basement, in huge dust-covered books, I found Nellie’s signature when she signed for her claims. Seeing her actual handwriting sent a chill down my back. Did it ultimately make a difference to what I wrote about her? Probably not, but it sure was fun.

Next I went to Dawson City in the Yukon, and out to Nolan Creek where Nellie Cashman mined. When I figured out approximately where her claim was, I sat on a rock and willed her spirit to speak to me, to help me make her character come alive. Alas, no appearance from the other side with guidance on my project.

Stories have been told about the founder of the Arizona Historical Society and how she would attend funerals of the old-timers, accosting their relatives for diaries or memoirs. She was considered brazen, but she did collect an astounding amount of material that gives great insight into Arizona life in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Reading those fading typescripts, now carefully preserved in acid-free folders, were windows into lives both mundane and exciting.

Now all this research has been woven into my novel The Piano Player. Well-bred Mary Rose follows her dream to Tombstone and quickly discovers that she is not prepared for the challenges of being a piano player in the Bird Cage Theater. Help comes from her landlady, Nellie Cashman, proprietor of The Russ House. It is an unlikely friendship. Years after each has left Tombstone, they join up again to seek their fortunes during the Alaska gold rush. Together they deal with a lover who turns out to be a murderer, imprisonment in a Mexican jail, near death falling into the icy Yukon River and disappointment when their quest for gold is dashed. They postpone romance with the men who love them until for one, it becomes too late.

               You can find The Piano Player at Amazon.com 

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Carolyn Niethammer grew up in the territorial capital of Prescott, Arizona and now lives in Tucson in a downtown historic district. She is the author of nine nonfiction books on southwestern subjects including five cookbooks and two biographies. The Piano Player is her first novel. Find her at www.cniethammer.com.