Pioneer Stories

PW Talks with Karen Fisher

by Amy Boyer -- Publishers Weekly, 5/30/2005

How are you related to the real Emma Ruth, who's one of your characters in A Sudden Country [reviewed on p. 33]?

She's my great-grandmother's grandmother. My grandmother handed down a typed carbon copy of Emma's chronicle, but we don't know what happened to the original. My great-grandmother mentioned her grandmother using old family documents to start kitchen fires. It was just old paper—no one needed it. I'd already written a draft of the book when my uncle rediscovered the chronicle. It was so much more interesting that I rewrote the book.

You grew up in smalltown California, then homesteaded in Idaho. That must have been a big change.

My family was like Beaver Cleaver's—two sisters, a dog. It was very safe, but my parents would tell about relatives on both sides who came west in covered wagons. Every child has their superhero: mine was Jim Bridger, the mountain man. When it was time to start a family, my husband and I both wanted land, and those pioneer stories were part of who I thought I was—that I could just pick up and live in Idaho. Everyone else thought it was very brave. I didn't. Everyone else was much more sensible. But we found out we could survive with no money, eating what we could produce—and a lot of deer meat. You can't fake those experiences.

Did you retrace the emigrants' trail?

Idaho was home ground. And some of the family never left Portland, so I was familiar with Oregon. I did drive back and visit places I hadn't seen enough of. The box elder canyon, where [Emma Ruth] had a picnic and went berry picking—I drove out there and turned up a road, thinking, this looks about right. And then I recognized it from what I'd written. The hair was standing up on the back of my neck.

Tell me about the trappers, the McLarens.

There were a lot of people traveling before Lewis and Clark, mostly Canadian men. So I learned about the Hudson Bay Company trappers. McLaren's character started forming, and then I came across a journal by Richard Leigh. I felt like I'd found the person I was writing about. Five of his kids died of smallpox; he married a woman he'd helped deliver. He wrote about the first yellow flowers of spring. In Idaho the first flowers are little yellow dogtooth violets, and they're so important after the long, hard winter! I had such excitement at seeing that flower in his words. His daughter said, "I never saw him drink, but he was a great one for patent medicines." That gave me a sense of the things he'd gone through and the solaces he'd found.