Velda Brotherton

Researching Stone Heart’s Woman

The idea for this book came when we drove north out of Oklahoma one fall day headed for Nebraska. It’s my husband who usually thinks of specific places to visit because he’s a consumate reader of both fiction and nonfiction. We stopped first at a former fort, Camp Supply, that is now used as a prison. Men there care for horses, and we were treated to a visit with one of the inmates and some of his horses. We were also allowed to tour the old fort and go in some of the buildings.

This is where I first heard about the Northern Cheyenne and their flight to freedom. As we traveled on north, hubby said let’s go to Ft. Robinson. That’s where they fought their final battle with the soldiers. Of course, he’d read some of the stories about this tragic trail, not made nearly so famous as the Trail of Tears. None of the tales of desperate acts of survival by Indians have been so heart rending at the 1500 mile flight of these people when they fled Indian Territory in 1878 headed back to Yellowstone country and their original home.

It’s a story of epic proportions. The army pursued them, taking lives as they could. But the Cheyenne persisted until they reached Ft. Robinson, where the small remainder of their numbers were locked up. I still didn’t have my book, though. I wanted to write a western historical romance set during this time, but so far, didn’t have much to help me there.

Then I bought a book called Cheyenne Autumn written by Mari Sandoz and in it saw this simple sentence: “Then there was a light-haired boy called Yellow Swallow, the Cheyenne son of General Custer.” That was a first hint at a character. Not this boy, perhaps, but a man, the son of Custer when he was much younger, who would be the right age to take part in this war. But on whose side would he be? He would certainly be pulled in two directions.

Then I was reading an old article written about Dull Knife, the leader known as Morning Star by the Cheyenne, and a quote at the end of the article, mentioned Stone hands joining. And Stone Heart was born. He had a white name, but not one of any consequence. He would be my hero, a man torn between two worlds who would have to make a choice between his father’s people and his mother’s. What a wonderful character he would be, with his golden hair like Custer’s, and his mother’s bronze skin. A boy educated in the white ways, whose father is doing his best to destroy the Indian culture.

But wait. A romance needs a heroine too. I had already written several books having to do with heroes and heroines of mixed blood (Cherokee and Sioux) as I’ve always been fascinated by how such children would handle their ethnicity. My father had Cherokee grandparents on both sides, as well as white ones, so the curiosity is understandable.

In my imagination I finally discovered an Irish girl living with her mother and brothers in St. Louis, who followed her fiancé west into Nebraska when he promised to marry her. He abandoned her in a small town not far from Ft. Robinson and she took to the stage, singing and dancing to entertain men and earn enough money to go home. But the good women, led by the preacher’s wife, decided to run her out of town on a cold January day in 1879, just about the time of the final outreak of the Cheyenne and the ensuing bloody battle around Ft. Robinson. A battle Stone Heart has decided to join to help his mother’s people escape.

After our trip to Ft. Robinson and driving along the trail the Cheyenne walked on that long ago day, I knew this was a story that needed telling. But through the eyes of this white woman and Stone Heart as they struggled to come to terms with what life had handed them. Did Custer have other children with the Cheyenne women? It is said he did. The Cheyenne told of a daughter with yellow hair, so I figured it wasn’t too far a reach to add another son to the mix.

Historical research can carry us into the most adventuresome of worlds. Since I began to write historical romances, I’ve learned to love history for the stories it tells and those it makes possible to tell. How fascinating to create fictional characters and place them in the middle of a factual time and place to see how they’ll react. What unusual things happen when we do something like this. It’s like visiting the past ourselves and living there for the time it takes to write the novel.

I had a long way to go in my research, but I was ready to begin my story. Usually, I do the basic research until an idea springs forth, then I begin to write the first draft, making notes in the margin where I’ll need to do more research. It takes me at least a year to research and write my novels. Stone Heart’s Woman is the seventh published historical romance, all in the western sub-genre. The first six are available on Kindle. I’m working on another one discovered when we took another trip, this time west through Texas. The research is finished, a vague synopsis written. I never outline a book, just write out a few pages of who, what, where, when and how. I can’t wait to begin the draft. No telling where it will lead me.

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Stone Heart’s Woman is  available from The Wild Rose Press in paperback at http://www.tinyurl.com/7shy2sy   The ebook will be available Feb. 17th.

Velda’s website is at http://www.veldabrotherton.com/ and her blogs can be read at

veldabrotherton.blogspot.com

vbrotherton.blogspot.com

velda-brotherton.blogspot.com

Having read about Arbuckles’ so often, I decided to try to discover a little bit more about the “Coffee That Won the West” and see what had become of it.

Right up through the Civil War, coffee was primarily sold ‘green’ and had to be roasted by the consumer.  This was done in a skillet over the campfire on the range or in a wood burning stove at home, and it had to be done in small batches:  while green coffee beans could be stored indefinitely, roasted beans were subject to oxidation, leaving the beans rancid within a couple of weeks.  Furthermore, such individual roasting made for inconsistency, and one burnt bean could ruin an entire batch. Beans sold by grocers pre-roasted were subject to not only this inconsistency but also to mixed quality and to the vagaries of the grocers’ scales.

The family grocery business of Arbuckles’ was established in Pittsburgh in 1859.  John Arbuckle dropped out of college to join the firm, which included his brother Charles, in 1865, and his first innovation was to pack roasted coffee beans in 1-lb. packages, ready for the customer.  In 1871 the Arbuckles Bros. Co. was formed and moved to New York.  John Arbuckle then went on to invent an egg and sugar glaze that “closes the pores of the coffee, and thereby all the original strength and aroma are retained.” (from the back of an Arbuckles’ trade card, circa 1890s). Packed in l lb. packages, the coffee was an instant hit and Arbuckles’ Ariosa Coffee was born.  By the 1880s, Arbuckles’ was the largest coffee importer in the world.

839,972 Pounds Roasted Daily

Part of their success was due to their marketing innovations.  The bags of coffee were packed in sturdy crates, which eventually found their use in grocery store shelving and other impromptu uses such as repairing homes for the Navajo in AZ.  Now collectible, one crate that survived intact recently sold at auction for $300.  The bags themselves had an attractive, bright red and yellow label and contained a peppermint stick; this proved to be a means by which Cookie could bribe cowboys to grind the beans.  Arbuckles’ was also the first, in 1873, to advertise coffee on a full color handbill.  And best promotions of all were the coupons, as Ike Blasingame mentions above, along with trade cards.  The trade cards were works of art in themselves, and the different series included all the US states, countries of the world, humorous sketches, patriotic scenes, and maps.

Card No. 28, North Dakota

The reverse side could be anything from an ordinary postcard backing to advertising slogans, recipes or a picture of the factory as above.  Now collectors’ items, they are often available on eBay, and a cookbook of the recipes has also been released.

While the Arbuckle Bros. diversified into other areas of commerce, including sugar refining, and owned a ranch in WY as well, it was as coffee magnates that they were primarily known.  When 20^th Century improvements in packaging made the glazing of beans unnecessary, the company continued to blend premium coffees.  John Arbuckle developed a ‘Yuletide’ blend that was eventually marketed as Yuban, now owned by Kraft Foods.  Sometime after John Arbuckle’s passing in 1912, the company was sold on to C.W. Post of cereal fame, eventually becoming part of General Foods.

I’m further indebted to the University of Nebraska Press for their kind permission to use the above passage from Ike Blasingame’s Dakota Cowboy,1958.  Blasingame was the rough string rider, or bronc twister, for the British-owned Matador Cattle Co. when it moved from Texas to the Dakotas.  He describes his 8 years with them, from 1904-1912, in highly literate and perceptive language.  It’s a book anyone interested in the history of the Old West should read.  Available here.

But fate took a hand.  In 1878 Frewen went to Texas with John George Adair, a wealthy Irishman who had half-interest in Charles Goodnight’s JA ranch in the Llano Estacado.  Frewen, an adventurer by nature,

Courtesy of Moreton Frewen Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming

became enthralled by the idea of the West’s cattle industry..  Back in England, he squandered the remains of his £16,000 (approx.$80,000) inheritance and returned to America with his brother Dick and into the arms of Clara Jerome.

The Jerome family was wealthy enough and certainly snobbish enough to originally turn up their noses at the younger son of the Duke of Marlborough as a suitor for their middle daughter, Jennie (who would be mother to Winston Churchill), so when, in 1879, the penniless Moreton Frewen began to make his suit, he was hardly in the running.  Moreton went on to Wyoming with Dick and four friends, first for hunting and subsequently to seek out the land to establish Frewen Bros. Cattle Co.  By late December the Frewens were on their own searching for range in an inhospitable climate.  After helping a band of Shoshoni kill enough buffalo for winter food, the brothers decided to use the herd as snowplows, stampeding them through a mountain pass to flatten the snow drifts so that they themselves could get through.  The range they eventually discovered and settled was a swathe of the Powder River Basin extending eighty miles north and south and fifty east to west; their headquarters were more than 200 difficult miles from Rock Creek station on the Union Pacific.

The ranch house that Moreton built avoided the mosquitoes and took advantage of an outcrop of coal for fuel.  Purportedly the first two story residence in Wyoming, it had a solid walnut staircase and woodwork imported from England, papered walls and a ‘minstrel’s gallery’ so that musicians could entertain guests in the dining room, which could seat 20 comfortably, or in the main room which was 40 ft. square.  Materials for a telephone line were brought in and this ran 20 miles from the headquarters to the Frewen Bros. store at Powder River Crossing.  A piano was imported from Chicago along with chintz hangings and chair coverings; a library was well-stocked. There were, of course, living quarters for servants.  It cost Frewen around $900 a month to run and was named Big Horn Ranche (sic); the cowboys called it ‘Castle Frewen.’

Courtesy of Moreton Frewen Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming

And it was all built on borrowed money.

The herd was started with 4500 head bought from the ‘76’ brand; it would eventually increase to ten times that amount with 9000 sheep and some 700 horses.  Sadly for Frewen, the number of herds on the Powder River would also increase.  While the first round-up in Wyoming in 1874 required only 2 divisions, in 1884 there were no less than 31 divisions and the round-up system became law in the Territory. In one division alone 200 cowboys with 2,000 horses worked 400,000 cattle over a 6 week period, with Reps visiting other divisions to get any cattle that may have strayed; 3 ropers succeeded branding 166 cows in 80 minutes!

Moreton, of course, won Clara eventually and the couple were married in high society’s Grace Church in NY, June, 1881.   Clara made the arduous journey out to the ranch where the Frewens had a long list of lords and ladies who came for opulent hunting parties, scouted by ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, in the autumn.  But when Clara joined one group and became ill, thereby suffering a miscarriage, she returned to New York never to set foot in Wyoming again.

By August, 1882, Moreton had bought out his brother and formed the Powder River Cattle Company with himself as unpaid manager, taking shares for the value of the ranch.

From a 24% dividend one year, by 1885 the company was in deep trouble.  Two bad winters had brought losses, and rustlers, raiding Indians, wolves, grasshoppers and prairie fires had taken their toll, greatly exacerbated by overcrowded ranges. These were being reduced by a growing number of homesteaders; ranchers had a policy of filing only for land for water rights or their own homesteads or line camps, often counting on employees to file sections and re-sell in due course.   The open range between these filings was now heavily encroached upon, leaving too little grass for far too many cattle.

Moreton Frewen had innovative ideas for increasing the company’s income by shipping cattle directly to England, bypassing the Chicago meat-packing consortium (much of the thrust for anti-trust laws in the U.S. came from wanting to  break their monopoly). But every venture took money he had to borrow and the creditors began knocking at his door while the Powder River Company was losing money as well, partially due to his mismanagement.  At a time when ocean crossings took 12 days, Moreton was rarely at the ranch (he claimed to have made 100 crossings in his lifetime).  Finally, in 1885, he was dismissed from his position, his own shares worthless.  The most horrific winter of ’86-’87 with cattle losses between 50-75% put an end to the era of the large cattle companies; the final nail in the coffin of the Open Range was Wyoming’s Johnson County ‘War’ in 1892.

While Moreton Frewen had many ideas for money making and investing on a large scale, none came to fruition.    Frewen and his wife simply could not live in any style less than that to which they were accustomed.  Even when the bailiffs were in their house, Clara, who had never lived with less than 7 servants, paid one of the bailiffs 10 shillings to polish mirrors and answer the door!  Yet Frewen was also a man before his time.  He foresaw the Panama Canal 35 years before its completion and the St. Lawrence Seaway some 74 years in advance.  He was  a friend to every President from Hayes to Wilson.   And he was daring to the point of foolhardy: once when his horse went lame on the way to Rock Creek, he made the last 40 miles on foot, a journey of 26 hours through snowdrifts and mountains. He also removed a bullet from his own leg, riding 50 miles into Calgary in heavy snow. And of course he was virtually the first settler on the Powder River when the only white men who lived there were hunters and skinners.  Called “hopelessly visionary” by his father-in-law, the nickname given to him by his brother Stephen’s regiment was “Mortal Ruin.”

Moreton Frewen died, aged 71, in England in 1924 with an estate estimated under £50.

My thanks to John R. Waggener, Associate Archivist and the staff of the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie.

Further reading:

Andrews, Allen, The Splendid Pauper, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1968;

Woods, L. Milton, Moreton Frewen’s Western Adventures, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, 1986;

Woods, Lawrence M., British Gentleman in the Wild West, The Free Press, 1989

A few months ago Ann and I sat down to lunch in NYC where she held me spellbound with tales of the Great and Good–or the Not So Good–who passed through Leadville, Colorado, center of America’s silver mining industry back in the 1800s.  I’m sure you’ll be equally fascinated with what she has to say.

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Thank you, Andrea! As we know, Leadville is a long way from New York City, but the two places have some interesting connections. Back in the Silver Rush heyday from late 1879 through the 1880s, many folks came to Leadville for one reason or another, and many from the East Coast. Among them, are some names familiar even to this day.

For instance, the Guggenheims. Did you know that their fortune was founded in Leadville? From his then-home in Philadelphia, Meyer Guggenheim lent a helping hand in 1880 to an old friend, who had gone West many years earlier to make his fortune. To that end, Guggenheim bought a one-third interest in two Leadville mines: the A.Y. and the Minnie. The mines had been barely “holding their own” in terms of shipping enough ore to pay expenses. Soon after Guggenheim joined in, he took a quick trip to Leadville to examine the properties, and hired mining experts to see what they could do to increase the yield. The amount of ore removed from the mines increased to 50 tons a day, but it wasn’t until a fateful day in August that Dame Fortune smiled. Back once again in Philadelphia, Meyer Guggenheim received a telegram from his Leadville associate that stated: RICH STRIKE. FIFTEEN OUNCES SILVER. SIXTY PERCENT LEAD. For 50 tons of ore removed daily, this translates to $1,000 a day in silver alone! (In today’s dollars that $1,000 equates to $22,000. See http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/index.php) As noted in the book The Guggenheims: A Family History, “The A.Y. and the Minnie would be the bedrock of the Guggenheim fortunes.”

Others came to Leadville, passing through or even staying for a while. For instance, Susan B. Anthony arrived in September 1877, stumping for women’s suffrage. She spoke to the miners in one of the saloons, at the time the largest buildings around and the only accomodations for public speakers. Alas, the Colorado Legislature voted down the bill in October 1877, even though the governor of the state stood by Miss Anthony in Leadville and spoke up in favor of suffrage.

The James brothers—Frank and Jesse both—wandered through town and even staked a claim, although it appears they didn’t hang around for long. Leadville’s Carbonate Weekly Chronicle, September 4, 1880, noted, “It is currently reported that the notorious James brothers are now and have been for some weeks ostensibly engaged in working a mining claim in the near vicinity of Leadville.”

Doc Holliday came through a number of times in the early 1880s. He even settled for a while in 1883–84 and dealt faro in the Monarch Saloon (located not far from the fictional Silver Queen Saloon of my series), and ended up shooting and killing a Constable Kelly. Others of Holliday’s acquaintance that chanced through Leadville at various times included Bat Masterson (a personage I gleefully used in Silver Lies) and Wyatt Earp.

Gunslingers aside, famous visitors to “Cloud City” included politicians and poets, pundits, and entertainers. Former President Ulysses S. Grant came through on a five-day visit in July 1880 (a visit which plays a prominent role in both Iron Ties and Leaden Skies), and writer/poet Oscar Wilde gave a lecture at Leadville’s Tabor Opera House in 1882. Wilde’s visit was well covered in the news of the day. The Leadville Herald Democrat ran an article titled alliteratively “OSCAR DEAR—Wilde Wrestles Wildly With the Art Decorative in this Mountain Wilderness.”

Later, in Wilde’s book Impressions of America, he said the following about his trip to Leadville:

“. . . I was told that if I went there they would be sure to shoot me or my travelling manager. I wrote and told them that nothing that they could do to my travelling manager would intimidate me. They are miners—men working in metals, so I lectured to them on the Ethics of Art. I read them passages from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini and they seemed much delighted. I was reproved by my hearers for not having brought him with me. I explained that he had been dead for some little time which elicited the enquiry, “Who shot him?” They afterwards took me to a dancing saloon where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice:—

Please do not Shoot the PIANIST

He is doing His Best

The mortality among pianists in that place is marvelous. Then they asked me to supper, and having accepted, I had to descend a mine in a rickety bucket in which it was impossible to be graceful. Having got into the heart of the mountain I had supper, the first course being whisky, the second whisky and the third whisky….”

This is just a sample of some of the “rich and/or famous” who once strolled along Leadville’s boardwalks. If you are lucky enough to go there someday, you can walk on the boards yourself, listen to echoes of long ago, and perhaps glimpse a ghost or two while you take in views of mountain scenery that haven’t changed much these past 150 years. As Walt Whitman said of a day’s journey from Denver to Leadville and back through Platte Canyon:

“Talk as you like, a typical Rocky Mountain canon, or a limitless sea-like stretch of the great Kansas or Colorado plains, under favoring circumstances, tallies, perhaps expresses, certainly awakes, those grandest and subtlest element-emotions in the human soul, that all the marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to Thorwaldsen—all paintings, poems, reminiscences, or even music, probably never can.”

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Leave a comment on this post to be eligible to win a Silver Rush mystery prize! Winner will be announced later this week. To see the rest of Ann’s blog tour, check out her Appearances page on her website (http://www.annparker.net/app.htm).

The winner of Ann’s Silver Rush Mystery Prize is Kilian Metcalfe.  Thanks to everyone who left a comment!

Ah, ‘awesome.’  My faithful Oxford dictionary tells me this originates in Middle English and means having “reverential fear or wonder,” while my 1997 edition of Merriam Webster defines it as “inspiring awe, expressive of awe.” To me, the Grand Canyon is awesome, the Rocky Mts. are awesome, but not, as Encarta the online dictionary wishes me to believe, some track on a CD; that may be great to listen to, but it is never going to be awesome.  So am I a grumpy old woman?

Recently, I wrote a description using the word “calefacient.”  Microsoft Word sent out alarms bells in the shape of red underlining which sent me to ‘Look Up’ and on to Encarta.  No results there; the word didn’t exist!  My Merriam Webster happily skips from ‘caldron’ to ‘calendar’ so I went on to Bing, a supposed research site (according to my version of Word) or search engine, and happily found my word.  With a “use it or lose it” notion in my mind, I kept the word in my writing despite my fear that it may now be archaic.  Am I truly that old?  Of course, it has nothing to do with one person’s age; the language is changing as I write, as we speak.  But now, faced with the acquisition of ‘awesome’ in everyday usage and the possible loss of ‘calefacient,’ I’m not so sure how wonderful this all is.  The USA College Entrance Examinations, or SATs, include a large section on vocabulary; is that vocabulary now going to accept the definition of ‘awesome’ as plain old ‘excellent’?

I expect in the end accepting the changes as progress is the best one can do. We may no longer talk about the ‘suspiration’ of the wind or have those little painted stone ‘blackamoors’ outside grand houses to which guests may tie up their horses—both words which critique readers of mine recently admitted to not knowing—yet we can come out of a Shakespeare play having understood the drama perfectly.  Hopefully.  And while I won’t then stand on a street corner and say, “Hark! I believe the M7 autobus approacheth,” (slight mixing of time periods there), I do have a choice as to whether to describe the play as having the ‘sine qua non’ of performances or perhaps find some sesquipedalian ‘bon mot’…like awesome.

I had actually not entered to win (oh,whom am I fooling, please?) but to get feed back on my writing since I had undertaken to start a western historical novel which no one, but no one, in New York reads.  Therefore, I obviously looked to the three judges of this contest for some useful critique.  Two of the judges scored me at 99 and 94 out of 100 respectively and the third—whose marks happily didn’t count as the contest only took the two highest scores­­­­— scored me a whopping 56.  For anyone who’s ever found themselves in a similar situation with a bad review, you’ll know that the only thing to do is to pour yourself a stiff drink.  And that helps until you ask yourself….WHY?  Where the first two judges raved about my dialogue and said they could hear the voices of my characters, No. 3 said they sounded like the 1960s instead of the 1860s.   Whereas Nos. 1 & 2 loved the story and claimed they wanted to read more, No. 3 told me it was over-plotted and maybe I should try writing something else.  In fact, if truth be told, No. 3 didn’t have a single good thing to say about my opus though she did finally concede that I had “flashes of genius!!!”  Not even ‘some bits were ok,’ but actual genius! Hmmm.

So, was she having the literary equivalent of a bad hair day?  Was she simply a hard marker? And who was right?  Is good writing, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder?

Some years ago, in another life in Britain, I co-edited a poetry magazine that took both solicited and unsolicited submissions.  It included work from many well known poets from both sides of the Pond—Ginsberg, James Schuyler, Gerard Malanga, Anne Waldman among them—and a number of then unknown poets, including as yet to go stratospheric Peter Ackroyd (unsolicited).  I remember a lengthy argument via snail mail with a pompous Christopher Hitchens whom we refused to publish; even he now admits he made an awful poet.  What I don’t remember is ever having arguments with my co-editor as to what was or wasn’t a good poem.  On the whole, we pretty much agreed what to take and what not to take.  I accept poetry is a different fish to fiction but can there be such a gap between critics as to explain my results?  And, by the way, I looked at the marks for all 20 contestants and the nearest gap to mine was a measly 20 point differential to my 40.  Did my critic just hate “westerns”?  Or did she see something the others didn’t?

So, is good fiction a subjective concept?  When sentences are grammatically correct can ideas, imagery, voices, story be thought ‘good’ by one person and ‘bad’ by another?  Obviously, it can or critics would be out of a job. On the other hand, the existence of classics and bestsellers says that there is often a general consensus of opinion.  But why (and how and when) does a difference of opinion occur?  The book on which they are voicing opinion has been thought worthy by agents and editors as well as the author.  Maybe one person’s ‘good idea’ is another person’s ‘you must be kidding.’ Or maybe that flash of genius sometimes just doesn’t flash enough…

I mulled this over for a time and the answer I came up with was Identity:  by putting up a sign and giving the place a name, three people had created an identity for themselves.  This, in turn, led me to consider what, exactly, is Identity and how do we see ourselves as individuals?  Are we somebody’s mother or father, somebody’s sister or brother, someone’s daughter or son?  Are we ‘Susie Q from Ohio’ or ‘Peter the yard guy?’  But, of course, our identity consists of far more than the town in which we were born or our place in the family tree.  So, considering all the various factors above, can we actually be someone else entirely, someone only we see as ourselves?

At the wedding of the daughter of some French friends of mine a few years ago, I was placed next to a gentleman who was a French Jew.  After a long and very interesting conversation about what Napoleon had done for the Jews in France, I asked him, did he see himself as French first or a Jew first?  There was the merest pause before he answered, “a Jew.”   This interested me because someone’s religion is generally—but admittedly not always, taking into account the garb some sects wear—a hidden attribute, and in this case certainly was.  I, therefore, hearing his accent, would identify the man in question as a Frenchman. In a similar vein, in the book I just finished, Arthur & George by famed British novelist Julian Barnes, George Edalji sees himself as an Englishman despite his Parsee roots.  The book centers on the true story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s only venture into a real crime for which Edalji was wrongly convicted.  Sir Arthur believed that the conviction centered on prejudice while Edalji, having been born in England and having never set foot in India, could not accept this; he saw himself, despite his dark skin, as English and therefore believed others saw him this way, too.

As for myself, after a lifetime living in the UK, I am now back in the USA suffering an identity crisis.  Born in the US, I have a British accent and seem to be viewed as British — despite the fact I don’t hold a British passport.  I live in New York but my heart is in the West and, I have to say, I see myself as a kind of misplaced westerner.  But who does this make me?  Am I who I think I am or who people view me as being?

It was Scottish poet Robert Burns who wrote, “O would some Power the gift to give us/
To see ourselves as others see us!”  But do we need that power to ascertain our identity or can we go ahead and hang out that sign and say, ‘this is who I am, Population of One’?