CIVIL WAR
NOVEL SHOWS FLORIDA AS WILD
AS WEST
"Mitchell was at the bar, his back to the door, sipping from a shot glass. There was no sign of the pot-bellied man or any of the girls. For a man in boots and spurs, Tree made very little sound as he walked on the sawdust. Light from the doorway shone on Mitchell and cast both his and Trees shadows across the bar."
"Mitchell didnt look up from his glass until he heard a voice growl and then bark out: "Hey, you!" Trees right hand already was on the butt of the belt gun when he shouted. Mitchell tried to draw, but the Colts cylinder didnt clear the belt before Tree fired."
Another showdown in another cow town saloon. Its a scene thats been repeated countless times during the century-or-so that writers have been penning tales from the sagebrush. But this time its different. The saloon isnt in Dodge City or Tombstone or any other the other hundreds of names, both real and fictional, of rustler-plagued towns in the West.
This saloons in Enterprise, Florida, Yep. Florida. The state thats known for theme parks and drug smuggling, but not for cattle raising and rustling. But, Florida is now and always had been more of a cattle state than most Western states. And its history is filled with action as wild as anything that ever came out of Texas, Arizona, or anywhere else west of the Mississippi. Take, for example, Enterprise. Its now a little community sandwiched between the city of Deltona and Lake Monroe north of Orlando. But, 130-odd years ago, Enterprise, along with other Central and Northern Florida cities, were trail towns as tough as Dodge, Tombstone or anywhere else. This is the Florida portrayed in the novel Guns of the Palmetto Plains, written by Rick Tonyan, a Civil War buff and ex-newspaper reporter.The book deals with the final years of the Civil War in Central and Northeastern Florida. But to say that it is a historical novel taking place in the South during the War conjures up images of Gone With the Wind and its imitators.
Those images are wrong. There are no mint juleps with fluttery belles and their swains on verandas of plantation houses.Instead, there are gunfights, stampedes and
trail drives. Although fiction, the novel is rooted in fact and details are
historically accurate. It is set in a time when Florida was a frontier with little law
enforcement.
The state became a haven for deserters from both Confederate and Union armies. Deserters
organized into outlaw bands that terrorized settlers throughout the state.
Florida was important to the Confederacy because of the vast herds of cattle that grazed on the grasslands of the states interior. Those cattle supplied most of the beef for the South from the fall of Vicksburg, Miss., in 1863 to the end of the war in 1865.
The Confederate government organized a militia group, the Florida Cattle Guard, to drive herds to market and protect the beef supply. Guns of the Palmetto Plains tells about members of the Cattle Guard and their struggles against Yankees, outlaws, the elements and each other.
Because of its subject matter, the book frequently reads like a Western. But its hard to describe something as a "Western" when most of its action takes place within 30 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. A Sarasota publishing house, Pineapple Press, solved the problem of how to categorize the book once Tonyan submitted his manuscript to the firm. Although he didnt know it at the time he first contacted Pineapple, even as Tonyan was writing, the publisher was developing a home-grown genre of fiction. Pineapple calls its infant genre Cracker Westerns."Cracker" comes from the nickname for rural Floridians,
particularly those who worked cattle. Historically, most cattlemen use whips to drive
their stock. The name "Cracker" refers to the sound of the whips.
Tonyans book has much of the same kind of action as a Western, but with a
Southeastern flavor. Instead of sagebrush, landscapes are dotted with palmetto scrub and
sabal palms. Instead of coyotes howling in the night, alligators bellow. But there still
are the gunfights on cow town streets. Outlaws still ambush cattle drives. Lone horsemen
still ride trails and hire out their gunslinging abilities.
Floridas
history leads itself to that kind of treatment. Cattle drives and range wars are as much a
part of the states heritage as real estate development and drug dealing.
Take, for example open range laws. Those laws allowed cattle and other livestock to roam
free over unfenced land. Ranchers didnt have to fence in their livestock. Most
Western states did away with open range laws during the early 1900s. Floridas open
range didnt close until 1949. To try to explain this frontier heritage, Guns
of the Palmetto Plains has a section of
historical notes.
... as historically
accurate as anything Zane Grey
or a Louis LAmour wrote," --Tampa Tribune.
"... plenty of
romance and action.
Characters in Tonyans novel are rough, skilled,
violent; some are evil, some well-intentioned;
all of them are believable and interesting."
-- New Smyrna Beach News and Observer.
"Whether
its a five-pound Walker Colt .44 revolver
or a holiday dinner menu or Miz Louisa Fatios
boarding house in St. Augustine, Tonyan knows whereof
he writes... Theres lots in Guns of the Palmetto Plains
for Civil War buffs and local historians as well as Western-lovers..."
-- The Putnam County Courier Journal.
"Tonyan, like
John Jakes did with the America series of novels,
brings history alive and makes it interesting to learn while
at the same time he tells a very good story with very well fleshed out characters.
" --New Volusia Magazine.
Include your name and address.
If you intend to give the book as a gift, also
include
the name of the person to whom you are giving the gift,
plus the occasion (birthday, anniversary, Christmas, etc.).
For the hardcover
edition,
enclose $16.95 plus $5.00 for postage and handling.
For the paperback copy,
send $9.95 plus $3.00 postage and handling.
Also, Rick Tonyan is available for lectures and
demonstrations on Florida History, particularly the early
history of the cattle industry and of the Civil War in the
state, and on writing, especially research techniques that
lead to successful projects.
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