HOW TO BUILD A BOOK THAT'S NOT FICTION

Most of the advice about writing is based on selling fiction, often thinly disguised autobiography.  This is a description of how I write nonfiction, which might be helpful and might not.  The subject is how the east slope of the Rocky Mountains supplies the area with water, only needing to be channeled.  This is something recurring around the planet and was particularly useful in South America, where it now appears that irrigation allowed the raising of food in amounts that could support cities of considerable size.  Their ruins and pyramids are hidden in the Amazon jungle.  These cities did have writing, though we’re not good at translating it yet, and a religion of terrifying ferocity, worse even than the depiction of crucifixion.  

No one became immortal, so far as we can tell, but we think the amount of blood shed was meant to keep the water coming.  When drought prevented crops, the starvation was more deadly than greedy Spaniards, though the latter did their best.

My first move towards a manuscript which might or might not be eventually presented in a “codex” (pages with a stiff cover) is to read what I can find that seems related.  When a lot of downloads and some summary blog posts seem to have about covered the subject and maybe there is a good political reason to present the ideas, I make a list in no particular order.  The next task is to organize all this stuff that follows into chapters.

Obviously, and specifically with this subject, I go wide and past — beginning with the formation of the planet and coming forward to the present, hopefully ending with some insight that’s useful.  I’ve been in and out of the Pondera Canal Company offices, but have met mostly wariness because they’ve known hostility in the past.  Now the stakes are even higher because the rainfall and snow depth are less (except that this year there was a bonanza, more than was convenient) and because the government wants to get rights and allotments settled for the sake of an orderly world that can be administered.  Ha.

But also I want to pick up the flavor of this place, the weather in all its sweeping glory, the people in all their laughing attempts to cope, the grizzlies who turn up unexpectedly, and the cattle that must drink.  Everywhere the wheat where there was grass.  There’s a lot of history only a couple of generations back, some of it with major impact on what’s happening right now.

I’m particularly concerned with the Blackfeet Reservation and the boom/bust cycle of Valier.  People constantly forget that Lake Frances, next to the town, is not just a recreation hub but also an irrigation impoundment reservoir.  One of the most intense bits of this long, long story is the collapse of the first Swift Dam, which marked the boundary between the rez and the state land around Valier.  I remember it myself.

WATER NOTES

I could organize this by time, by area, by issue, by peoples.  Commonly, I just begin free-associating and then revise as patterns appear.

timelines

maps

Geology

   Ecotone

   Glacier scraping

   Climate change

   Rockies 

Earliest indigenous people before tribes

   Buffalo culture

Culture

   Belgium

   Industrial revolution

   War

   Country/small town as an ideal

Founding and governing water supplies in small towns

   Town ordinances

   Financing

   Aging and changing technology of infrastructure

   Wells

   Private irrigation systems

Transportation

Morality of Western water thru history

   Indigenous

   Boundaries, drawn and natural

   Robare

   Law enforcement

   “Community decay”  the empty center, junk vehicles

   Boundaried cooperative nucleus vs. service area

The siphon and canal systems:  Bypassing nature

Swift Dam

Boom and bust:  oil, dams, 

Conrad brothers

Elevator, Railroad, ocean shipping

Wildlife  

   Grizzlies following canals, protected species

Erosion

   Action  (Rock City)

   Consequences

Washing: laundromats and car washes

GEOLOGICAL

PRE-ENCOUNTER PEOPLE

650 to 1250 AD  “Neo Atlantic Episode”  Warming let crops move north

1250 to 1550 AD  “Pacific Episode” pushed corn south

1300 to 1750 AD the "Mortlach" people combined trading, hunting, and  agriculture.  “Old Woman” culture was pushed north until it ran into “Selkirk” culture.

There was a terrible drought in the 1400's.  "Modern" tribes developed after that when the population built back up. 

Irrigation as we know and use it today meshes with the Industrial Revolution and the cusp between nature and exploitation.  As always, war had a lot to do with it.  In the case of the Civil War, one of the underlying stresses was the difference between using slaves or machines.  The indigenous people refused to be either slaves or machines, but the forces summoned up by the Civil War empowered the cavalry and the killing of the bison herds.  

Before the 19th century, European forces trying to “own” the east slope of Montana included Russia (which mostly stayed on the Pacific Coast and to the north); France with a foothold in New Orleans at the head of the Mississippi complex and another in Quebec; and England which came by ship through Hudson’s Bay and cashed in on fur, esp. beaver fur — those industrious little irrigators.

CIVIL WAR AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT

1803     United States acquires most of Montana in the Louisiana Purchase

1805-06     Lewis and Clark Expedition crosses and recrosses Montana

1807     Manuel Lisa builds first fur-buying fort in Montana on the Yellowstone River

1841     Father Pierre Jean de Smet establishes St. Mary’s Mission in the Bitterroot Valley.

1846     The Oregon Treaty gives the rest of Montana to the US  (the Flathead valley)

1847     Fort Union founded on Missouri River as military and trading post; soon becoming “Head of Navigation” to the East and the world’s furthest inland port.  Steamboats brought gold seekers, fur traders, settlers and supplies, making Fort Benton the “birthplace of Montana” and the first Indian agency.

1863      Johnny Grant starts the first beef herd in the Deer Lodge Valley

1857      First sheep ranching begins in the Bitterroot Valley.

1860      First steamboat reaches Fort Benton

1861      The Civil War begins

1862      Placer miners rush to gold strike on Grasshopper Creek (Bannock)

1863     Mosby authorized to form the 43rd Battalion Virginia Cavalry

1864     26 May, Montana Territory officially created by act of President Abraham Lincoln. Bannack chosen as first Territorial Capital

1865     The end of the Civil War

1870     Open range cattle industry begins on Montana prairies.

Today's irrigation is a worldwide web beginning with water, collecting the food at a grain elevator, transporting it via railroad and ocean ship, and distributing it through the planet.  Much of this is a connected web of international corporations.