Jennifer Bohnhoff is a native New Mexican who grew up in a lot of different places before she returned to the Land of Enchantment. She taught High School and Middle School History and Language Arts before retiring and turning to full time writing. Where Duty Calls and The Worst Enemy, book 1 and 2 of the trilogy Rebels Along the Rio Grande, are set in New Mexico during the Civil War. Book 3, The Famished Country, will come out during the spring of 2024.
Why is historical fiction important?
Historical fiction brings history to life. When I first began teaching New Mexico history to 7th graders, I got told – a lot – that history was boring. History isn’t boring, but the textbook certainly was! I ended up using the textbook as kind of a spine, then I fleshed out lessons with stories of real people, their dreams and struggles, and the little quirks that made them human. I started getting calls and emails from parents saying that New Mexico history is what my students talked about during dinner and in the car. They were excited about history because they were excited about the people who lived it.
What typically comes first for you: a character? An era? A story idea? How do you proceed from there?
I almost always begin with a setting, then ask myself ‘what happened here?’ The idea for Code: Elephants on the Moon began when the family took a bicycling vacation through Normandy in the summer of 2005. I’d thought I’d be more interested in the Normans and the early medieval period, but the way the Normans treated Americans – still! —as their liberators impressed me. Many older people wanted to share their wartime experiences, and those stories started me thinking.
How do you conduct your research?
I start with general history books of the period. Books like John Taylor’s Bloody Valverde helped me nail down a timeline and determine what events had to be included in Where Duty Calls, and which could be left out. Then I go to the bibliography in the back and find sources that are closer to the actual event. John P. Wilson’s When the Texans Came: Missing Records from the Civil War in the Southwest is a compilation 282 letters, intelligence dispatches and eyewitness accounts. Horn and Wallace’s Union Army Operations in the Southwest includes all the first-hand official reports written by Union soldiers. Don E. Elbert’s Rebels on the Rio Grande is an edited version of the journals and drawings of a Confederate Volunteer named A. B. Peticolas. Other, older memoirs and books written by veterans were harder to find, but the patient librarians at the Special Collections Library helped me find them either in the archives or through interlibrary loan. And where there were no books, those librarians helped with newspaper searches that revealed articles both from the period and written long after by the men who remembered the events. For instance, John Norvell and Frederick Wade both rode into New Mexico with Sibley’s Confederate forces. Both survived and became newspapermen. Their reminiscences in the paper included a lot of funny or sobering stories that became tidbits in my novels.
Do you have a specific system for collecting data?
Index cards! I am old school, and I have hundreds of cards to sort and shuffle as I find what fits into the timeline. I have one card for each book with all the publication details, then dozens and dozens of cards that have the initials of the book and a page number at the top, and then the quote or information below it.
What is your favorite thing about research?
Finding real stories that are vivid and amusing that I can give to my characters. While my secondary characters are almost always real people, I’ve found it almost impossible to find one single person who experienced everything I’d like to write about, so I create a primary character and then give him or her the stories from real people. Just about everything that happened to Sarah McCoombs, the protagonist of The Bent Reed, my novel set in Gettysburg, actually happened to someone. I took events from four or five diaries and journals, plus some newspaper accounts and gave them all to Sarah, and I plunked her house right between Sherfy’s Peach Orchard and Devil’s Den so that she could be in the middle of the action.
What’s your least favorite thing about research?
I hate it when I find contradictory stories! William Marshal, for instance, was the last man wounded during the Battle of Apache Canyon, which is part of The Worst Enemy. The official casualty list just says he died. One memoir says he was shot in the gut with a rifle. Another says it was a pistol wound, to the head. Both were eyewitnesses, but their accounts, written years after the event, are so different that one of them, and maybe both must have forgotten! I had to choose one version to include in my book, and I am sure that someone is going to tell me I chose wrong.
What comment from a reader makes you happiest?
I am absolutely over the moon when I hear someone say that they learned a lot reading my book. Very few people seem to know that there were Civil War battles in New Mexico. When they are inspired to go to Glorieta or Fort Craig and see where my stories took place, I am thrilled.