February 29, 2024

Even more rare than "once in a blue moon”, leap day is once in four years!

I asked my smart phone what folks born on today usually do for birthday parties and she answered that they had the choice of February 28th or March 1st. I think that makes them unique, having a choice three out of four years, then a special day all their own.

So this is a special day for me, also: my first blog for my revamped website!

I may occasionally write of my life and events as I have in older blogs—and, yes, maybe even a wild turkey hen post if she returns—but for now it's all about THE BOOK(s)!

I'm pleased to share with you A Woman of Marked Character - The Imagined Portrait of Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix 1812-1891, Book One 1812-1848.

As I move closer to publication and my launch date, I'll be updating links to where you can buy the book and events surrounding publication, but in this blog I'll share tales and tidbits that have led me to this day and forward, as I leap into this special time of my life!

Nancy Stanfield Webb

Magic

As I write in the opening line of my Author's Note in Book One, "I believe in magic—call it coincidence, happenstance, or Fate."

Magic placed me beside Sarah Ridge's grave at her family cemetery underneath the live oak trees at Smith's Point, Texas, on January 8, 1991—the 100th anniversary of her death date.

Now I'm not saying I was transported on a magic carpet ride or appeared by the flick of my fairy godmother's wand, but I arrived through the magic of curiosity.

In the early part of my 33-year intermittent quest to research Sarah's story, when I traveled to each place she had lived I followed research trails, usually from memoirs written by those long-dead who had crossed paths with anyone in Sarah's realm.

I stood on a vacant lot in Van Buren, Arkansas, where her soft-yellow brick home used to be, and saw her blooming flower gardens and heard her children playing. I later listened to a babbling creek and imagined the sound of gunfire, a rearing horse, and the fall of an old man. In archives and museums, when I discovered an amazing letter among boxes of papers, I wanted to shout it out. Of course, I didn't. Shhhh. 

The fun and magic of researching.

In the final five years of writing the two novels, the internet took the place of travel and allowed me fewer exciting adventures. Yet still, the thrill of my curiosity was fulfilled from my slipper rocker with my MacBook in my lap.

I had read quotes in various publications of a speech made by Sarah's father Major Ridge during the signing of the Treaty of New Echota in December 1835. It read in part: 

I am one of the native sons of these wild woods. I have hunted deer and turkey here for more than fifty years. I have fought your battles. I have defended truth and honesty and fair trading.

We can never forget these homes, I know, but an unbending, iron necessity tells us we must leave them. I would willingly die to preserve them, but any forcible effort to keep them will cost us our lands, our lives, and the lives of our children.

There is but one path of safety, one road to future existence as a nation. That path is open before us. Make a treaty of cession. Give up these lands and go over beyond the Great Father of Waters.

Powerful words that have lasted almost two centuries.

How were those words recorded? No reporters were holding out their cell phones as we see all the time! Did someone take notes? Was there a notebook that survived over the ages?

Curious, I followed a footnote from a book to the original publication in a 1885 Georgia newspaper, The Cartersville Courant. I found that Major Ridge's words (and others) came from a memoir by a man named John Underwood who—at age sixteen—had attended the signing of the treaty with his lawyer father. He wrote also that "Mr. Boudinot ... and Sallie Ridge were there." I was delighted to find that Sarah was at New Echota. I had found no mention anywhere else, but it made sense that she and her mother Susanna would be there.

So a new character came to life, young John Underwood! We can assume, unmentioned, at night by the light of a candle in the tent he shared with his father, that the budding lawyer made notes of his days and of what he had heard. I found a drawing of him as an adult, and imagined him de-aged to a young man. 

Hence, Chapter 18, "Lamentation for a Dying Nation," where Sarah and young John stroll among the assembled Cherokees—listening and absorbing it all—as he stored his memories for writing of the event some fifty years later.

Magic.