G is for Grizzled Old Traveler

Grizzled Old Traveler was my very first blog. It ran from 2008-2010 with a total of 199 posts. It was mainly a travel blog with some random personal stuff thrown in. I stopped writing it when I got a paid blogging gig at Gadling (there's another G for you) and saw no reason to continue.

It's still up and got 447 hits last month! Nice to know somebody's still reading it. Or maybe those were just spambots. Whatever. My favorite posts are Ten Reasons the Moon Landing Conspiracy Theory is Stupid and The Thunderbird Photo and False Memory Syndrome. I also wrote a lot about Spain, where I live much of the year.

F is for First Kansas Colored Volunteers

For me, the most fascinating unit in the Civil War west of the Mississippi is the First Kansas Colored Volunteers. Most of the soldiers for this Union unit were runaway slaves from Missouri and Arkansas, many of them "stolen" on raids by Kansas guerrillas and given their freedom in Kansas. These raids were often led by abolitionist Kansas senator Jim Lane. It was Lane who created the unit in 1862, against the direct orders of President Lincoln, who was still waffling on the issue of black soldiers.

The regiment got its "first taste of powder" on 26 October 1862 when they fought and defeated a much larger force of rebel guerrillas at the Battle of Island Mound. Until then, most white people North and South assumed that blacks wouldn't make good soldiers. The First Kansas Colored Volunteers started to change this racist mentality.

I'm shopping around a book proposal about the First Kansas and am having trouble finding a publisher or agent to take it on. This seems strange to me considering that I already have more than ten books published, including two on the Civil War. I'm no stranger to book rejections, it's part of the business, so I'll keep trying. It's a story worth telling.

E is for England

While I love adventure travel, one of my favorite places to go is England, where I am right now. My wife, son, and I spend every Easter and summer in Oxford. It's a nice change from Spain and a good way to keep the kid bilingual. These are working vacations for us. My wife has collaborators at the university's astronomy department and I research my books at the Bodleian Library, one of the largest English-language libraries in the world. This shot is of Queen's Lane, part of my way to work.

Oxford has been a university town since the Middle Ages and is rich with history and tradition, like the Eights Week boat race. There are lots of historic sights nearby. Iffley village on the outskirts of Oxford has a Norman church and a pagan grove. My kid used to go to school right down the street from it when we lived there a couple of years ago.

For more about the sights in and around Oxford, check out my Gadling posts about travel in Oxfordshire.

D is for Derringer

Here's a cute little gun that's fun for all ages. It's called a Derringer, a small pistol used for personal protection. They were mostly one-shot models, although a double-barreled Derringer was also produced. Being so small they didn't have room for a magazine or cylinder.

These guns were so small they could be hidden in pockets or even ladies' stockings and were favored by gamblers, prostitutes, and other citizens who sometimes had need to protect themselves. A newsboy even fired one at Jesse James and his gang when they held up the Missouri Pacific Express in 1876. The newsboy objected to one of the gang members stealing his assortment of pies and tried to plug him. The gang took it in stride and laughed, "Listen to that son of a bitch bark!"

Below is the most infamous Derringer of all, the one that was used by John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

C is for Columbia, Missouri

It's the third day of the April A to Z challenge. Today's letter is C and so I'm picking Columbia, Missouri, one of my many hometowns. I went to university here. When I was a university student I made the smart move of making friends with lots of so-called "townies". Unlike Tucson, another of my hometowns, my circle of friends hasn't scattered to the four winds. I even set my Civil War novel A Fine Likeness in and around Columbia with a bunch of inside jokes only my Missouri friends will catch.

Like most people who have lived there, I have mixed feelings about Columbia. It's one of Missouri's liberal flight towns and has a great community of artists and thinkers, yet on the other hand it has some serious racial issues most people pretend don't exist. One of my friends, Tyree Byndom, is tackling these issues and it's hard going. Like his Facebook page. He'll challenge your thinking and won't mind if you challenge him right back.

So what was Columbia like during the Civil War? It was a Unionist oasis in a secessionist countryside and that was not a very comfortable thing to be! A Union blockhouse was placed at the intersection of 8th St. and Broadway and a local militia constantly guarded the town. In my novel I add a fictitious militia company led by the equally fictitious Captain Richard Addison so I can have them go of on adventures that aren't found in the history books. Addison makes damn sure there's no written record of some of the things he sees and does!

The real Columbia didn't see much action during the Civil War, except for a raid by some Confederate bushwhackers to bust a comrade out of jail. There are also plenty of local ghosts stories involving Civil War soldiers and a few period homes like this cabin.


Photos courtesy Horncolumbia via Wikimedia Commons.

B is for Bushwhackers

It's the second day of the A to Z Challenge and so of course B is for bushwhackers!

Bushwhackers were Confederate guerrillas. They generally did not have an official position in the Confederate army and fought the war "on their own hook." They were especially rife in Missouri and Arkansas, where they burned bridges, tore down telegraph wire, ambushed Union patrols and supply wagons, and even attacked small towns.

One of the protagonists of my Civil War novel A Fine Likeness is teenaged bushwhacker Jimmy Rawlins. He and his friends cause trouble in Missouri until they meet up with the band of Bloody Bill Anderson, the most notorious bushwhacker of them all. Jimmy is fictional, but Bloody Bill was all too real.

This photo shows three of Bloody Bill's men, well equipped with Colt Navy revolvers and bottles of liquor. Number 2 is Dave Poole, who has a memorable scene in the novel at the Battle of Fayette.

B is also for the Battle of Boonville, the first battle in Civil War Missouri and one of the first anywhere in that war. While it only lasted twenty minutes, it had an important effect on the war west of the Mississippi. Hit the link to see an article I wrote about it.


Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

A is for Adventure Travel

Hello and welcome to the A to Z blogfest, where I and hundreds of other bloggers are going through the alphabet this April! I bet you expected I was going to post something about the Civil War. Andersonville? Antietam? Ambrose Burnside? There will be plenty of Civil War posts in the days to come, but today I want to talk about another of my interests--adventure travel.

I've always been a keen traveler and got my first real taste at age 20 when I worked as an archaeologist in Israel. After university I spent a year hitchhiking across Asia, going from Bulgaria to Turkey, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Thailand. In total I've been to 31 countries, most of which I've stayed in for a month or more. I prefer to travel slowly and solo in order to get a feel for the place and get to know people.

Now I work for the travel blog Gadling. I've written several adventure travel series for them, including one on a road trip around Ethiopia, living in an African city, and visiting Somaliland. This photo shows me feeding the hyenas outside the Ethiopian city of Harar. I'm hoping to do a couple more adventures this year to countries I haven't visited yet. Stay tuned!