UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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Eight years before the publication of this book, I moved from California to Ohio to marry the man of my dreams, a reverse migration, if you will. We loaded all my possessions into my car and drove across the United States, making the trip in six days—one day for every month it took a covered wagon to trek the same distance. The landscape we traveled was sometimes inspiring, sometimes tedious, always vast. I spent hours gazing out the window, already missing my home state desperately, even as I thrilled at the adventure of starting a new life in a new place.
It was then that the idea for Walk on Earth a Stranger germinated, but it would be years before I felt ready to write it. Sure enough, combining history and fiction is its own fraught adventure, and in order to best tell Lee’s story, I took a few minor liberties. For instance, Dr. M. F. Stephenson’s famous speech in Dahlonega’s town square really took place in the summer of 1849, not in early winter as portrayed in the book. And it’s likely that the real-life citizens of Dahlonega would have received word of gold’s discovery in California some months before Lee and Jefferson do. Occasionally, I allowed them to use words that probably hadn’t found popular usage in the eastern United States, such as “nugget” and “mother lode” and “palomino.”
Most significantly, I allowed Jefferson to propose to Lee when she was not yet sixteen, even though the average age of first marriage for women was twenty to twenty-two at that time. I allowed this because there is anecdotal evidence that women on the California trail married early, often out of necessity. Lee’s circumstances seem to me to qualify.
I wanted the flexibility of choosing and directing my own characters, so very few historical personages appear in Walk on Earth a Stranger, and then only in cameo roles. The one character I couldn’t resist, however, was James “Free Jim” Boisclair, an entrepreneur from Dahlonega, Georgia. Not much is known about him, though he probably set off for California in 1850, rather than 1849 as portrayed in the book. By all limited accounts, he was well respected, ambitious, and full of conviction. I hope I have done him justice.
Lee, Jefferson, and their contemporaries refer to Jim and other African-Americans as Negroes, as that was the polite term of the day. Likewise, they refer to Native Americans as Indians. I choose to use “African-American” and “Native American” in general conversation, but I will always honor someone’s personal preference when informed of it.
There is some controversy over whether the term “confirmed bachelor” was used during Victorian times to refer to a gay man. While this euphemism may not be the phrase’s only meaning, there are enough examples in the academic literature and within the LGBTQ community that I chose to use it with this implication. For more insight into specific terminology of the day, as well as some delightfully subjective commentary, I highly recommend the Dictionary of Americanisms, by John Russell Bartlett (New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1848).
No book is written in isolation. I am grateful to the following people for their many insights and expertise: Angela Thornton of the American Indian Library Association, who read an early draft; Marlena Montagna, an accomplished equestrian, who provided expert advice on horses and horseback riding; Jaime Lee Moyer, a critically acclaimed author of historical fiction, who helped me identify and sort through an avalanche of primary sources—diaries, lithographs, newspaper articles, daguerreotypes, etc.
For readers interested in learning more about the journey to California from the emigrants themselves, I recommend the following books, which I found invaluable:
Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, 1840–1849, edited and compiled by Kenneth L. Holmes, with an introduction by Anne M. Butler (Lincoln, Nebraska: Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, 1995)
Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey, edited by Lillian Schlissel, with a forward by Mary Clearman Blew (New York: Schocken Books, 2004 edition)
Most of all, I am grateful to my husband, C. C. Finlay, for reading this book multiple times, for applying his training as both editor and historian to key portions of text, and for listening patiently as his displaced Californian spouse waxed endlessly about her native state’s many wonders and the Gold Rush that shaped it.
Walk on Earth a Stranger is so much better for these contributions; any errors that remain are mine alone.
Today, you can hardly visit any place in California without seeing evidence of the Gold Rush. I’ve rafted down the Tuolumne River through steep cliffs of layered sediment—the result of dredging. I’ve chanced upon ancient wagon wheels, half-buried in sod, while backpacking through Emigrant Wilderness. I’ve cheered the 49ers on to multiple Super Bowl wins, toured the mines and orchards of the Sierra Nevada foothills with my friends, spent days wandering the Golden Gate. Though this book deals primarily with the overland journey in 1849, there is much more of Lee’s story—and California’s—yet to be told.