Fiction in Public History

A few weeks ago, we went to the Clark County Historical Society with Virginia.  One of the things that came up during our tour that tweaked me the wrong way was Ski's use of Alan Eckert in talking about the Battle of Piqua.  Tecumseh is one of my personal heroes, but something I said about Crazy Horse in my presentation holds true for Tecumseh as well, he can be a hero because there are large elements of his life that we know nothing about.  From what I have read of Tecumseh, he appeared as a leader around 1805, and before that we know very little; we know his father died at the battle of Point Pleasant when Tecumseh was young, we know that his older brother died fighting against settlers with the Cherokee and we know that Tecumseh and his brother rose to prominence as part of a nativist movement in 1805.  From then on, we know much more about him, but the first forty years of his life are obscured by shadows.  Ski, in his interpretation of the Battle of Piqua poster, said that the child guarding the dog was supposed to be Tecumseh and then he started talking about Eckert's depiction of the battle.  Bill McIntyre, the archivist working with the Dayton Daily News collection said that one of his professors said something similar in regards to Eckert, that if you don't know Eckert, you don't know Ohio's history during its settlement.

This brings me to a question, how much do we allow depictions of fiction cloud our views on an actual historical topic?  How many people know about Rome simply from Gladiator or about Scotland from Braveheart?  They're good movies, but how much research went into making sure that those movies are accurate and license isn't taken for story telling reasons?  Eckert, for instance, has a huge series of books on the frontier wars, and I have read some of them.  My first real glimpse at Tecumseh was through his A Sorrow in our Hearts, which frankly takes so much license and does so much romanticizing of history that it is hard to take the book seriously, knowing history.  Tecumseh is depicted as being the biggest genius of warfare on the frontier, and being able to predict the future (that part always makes me laugh at its ridiculousness).  Where Eckert, in my opinion succeeds is the minutiae of his tales, those elements are well researched and because they don't deal with putting thoughts and motivations into a major historical figure's head, are far more historically relevant.  That being said, with all the things that Eckert puts in about what characters like Simon Kenton or Tecumseh or Blue Jacket (Eckert is also the one who helped popularize the myth that Blue Jacket was a white man... with little to no evidence supporting that theory) are thinking, I have a hard time seeing his books as historical or accurate.  When fictionalized history like this is the only means by which people know about historical figures, it becomes much harder to actually talk about history in an intelligent way; I once had a discussion with someone who thought the movie 300 was historically accurate, how do we combat this?

I have wanted to write books based on historical events, but one thing that I am determined not to do, is to put major historical figures in the book and write what I think their motivations are.  Rather, I think the responsible way to deal with this, is to create a character, a character who has his own motivations living in that time period and dealing with the events of that time.  This character can interact with real historical figures but those people should be in the background and not main characters in the book.  And always make sure that it is obvious that this is fiction, not fiction masquerading as history.  Historical fiction should allow readers to connect and understand in a way that a dry history text or a biography can't, to relate to a character who is understandable.  But please, lets allow our real historical figures have the facts speak for them. 

A good biography on Tecumseh was written by John Sugden called Tecumseh, who also wrote a good biography on Blue Jacket called Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnee.  There is a great biography on Tenskwatawa, Tecumseh's brother, by R. David Edmunds called The Shawnee Prophet.  And Daniel Richter's Facing East from Indian Country is a great book on the motivations of Indian nations that does not delve into fictive events.  Currently I'm reading Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne about the Comanche, which, for a book based solely on stating facts, is very engaging.