# First post! Questions about setting for a horror-western...



## luckyscars (Dec 20, 2011)

Hello all.

This is my first post on this site. I was going to do the whole 'introduce yourself' thing but didn't feel up to it in the end, so this is my first post  Really hopeful about the site, looks great!

So, I'm currently writing a novel set in the early-20th century, concerning a malevolent force (haven't quite decided what that malevolent force is yet!) in a Mexican border town. It's kind of a horror-western type novel. Without wanting to give too much away think spaghetti western meets salems lot with elements of a noir-mystery. stylistically it's influenced by cormac mcarthy, particularly his 'border trilogy' (though i like to think my writing style is a little more readable than his) I've been outlining this project for god knows how long now but it's only in the past couple of months that I've really had the time to sit and right the damn thing (as bad unemployment is for my wallet, it's great for my writing). but here's the problem. while i have a pretty good idea about the story I'm telling, and a decent idea of characters and so on, i'm finding it increasingly tough to make the narrative sound convincing enough without an expert knowledge of the history and geography of the location.

now don't get me wrong, i have done research. heck i've been 'researching' for years now. but the problem i have is those petty but oh-so-necessary details. i'm also having problems establishing a definite period for the work. so i'd dearly love to hear from anybody who writes, or at least reads, fiction set in early 20th century southern USA/northern mexico.

there's also historical events and so on that i'd like to include, albeit mainly only for backdrop and context, but from what i gather they occur at significantly different periods and that makes it all the more harder. obviously history is, unfortunately, not something that can be altered for convenience and it's really quite important to me that the 'realistic' part of what is essentially a magic-realism book is just that. so i will probably have to compromise on this. i'd love to hear from anyone who knows about early 20th century American history.

so, to start off, here's a few random 'clues' about the content of the book for purposes of synopsis, followed by questions. i'd post everything i've written so far but there's a little much + not all of it is relevant + i don't want to seem like i'm expecting people to wade through all my crap just to help. but if anyone would like to read what i have so far let me know and i'll send you an extract!

_- the novel begins with a family of mexican peasants traveling north to cross into the united states. they are escaping their hometown for unspecified reasons and are carrying all their belongings with them...  -_with this idea i was considering setting the novel during the Mexican Revolution, with the idea that some kind of battle or skirmish (?) could have caused the family to flee. does this sound like a realistic occurence in a border town? if so, what areas of northern mexico should i use? i was thinking of either using the sonoran or chihuahua desert but haven't been able to figure out which one sounds most historically/geographicall appropriate?

_- there is a father, son and mother and they are traveling on horseback on a trail-road through a small range of mountains that divide the two countries, in the middle of the night - _at what point was the infrastructure in northern mexico developed enough that traveling via trails on horseback was no longer common? what kind of horse/pony was commonly owned by poorer people at that time? i made the novice mistake of using the word 'burro' in an earlier draft before i realised that a 'burro' is a donkey and would probably not have been used for human transport over a long distance. 
-_the mother is suffering from an unknown illness and is not conscious. she has a fever and is asleep on the back of the father's horse. the father tells the son she will be better once they get to the town they are heading for in America. -_ what kind of illness would have been common and almost certainly serious among that demographic at that time? I was thinking of going with either tuberculosis or scarlet fever but, frankly, neither of those strikes me as being particularly original and ideally i need the name of a disease that has symptoms similar to demonic posession.
other, miscellaneous history-related questions i have are:

- during what period did oil-exploration take place in northern mexico? i would like to incorporate this somehow into the story, and for oil-exploration to be the primary motivation of a main character. i have found very little material pertaining to mexican oil discovery, though i am aware it took place because i know it was nationalized later in the 20th century. would the search for oil in northern mexico coincide at all with the revolution?

- what would the primary qualifications for being an oil-prospector be at that time?

- aside from pancho-villa, were there any other prominent figures active in the mexican revolution in the north of the century i.e around the border towns?

- what was the legal status of alcohol in the US border states up until and during prohibition?

and, finally, i mentioned a malevolent force being present in this mexican border town. aside from the usual - vampires, werewolves, etc (which i'd like to stay away from this time) - are/were there any well-known 'monsters' that tie in well with mexican/southern folklore?

thanks for any and all help with this, admittedly quiteunusual, subject matter.

here's a few random questions i'd like answered to help with my research.


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## C.M. Aaron (Dec 20, 2011)

Prior to 1900, most of America's oil came from Pennsylvania. Spindle Top, in east Texas, was drilled in 1901. Many of the early Texas oil men came from Pennsylvania. The guy who drilled Spindle Top claimed to be able to smell oil fumes coming out of the ground. He also believed that Spindle Top, a dome-shaped hill, had been formed by pressurized oil pushing from below. No one else believed him until he actually struck oil. At that time, most oil wells were sunk only where oil was already percolating up through the surface naturally. Geology was still in its infancy. Anyone who thought they could find oil by studying rock formations was ahead of his time but there were a few visionaries who did just that. Some of these visionaries were already associating salt deposits with oil.

What little I know of the Mexican Revolution tells me it was all about agrarian land reform. The wealthy land owners were not letting the peasants use land to the peasant's advantage. Mexicans had large families and with each generation, the farm plots got smaller and smaller until they were too small for a family to live on. Oil drilling would have represented a new use for land, and I do not see much interest by Mexicans in oil exploration at this time. The wealthy land owners would have been quite content to keep making money off of the land the same way they always had, and the peasants would have had little understanding of oil. Now certainly, there could have been some outsiders who might have tried to manipulate the revolution to facilitate oil exploration, ie the oilmen might have thrown their support behind whichever side was willing to help the oilmen.   Good luck.  C.M.


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## Cran (Dec 20, 2011)

> These exotic carvings are usually attributed to pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, but not a single crystal skull in a museum collection comes from a documented excavation, and they have little stylistic or technical relationship with any genuine pre-Columbian depictions of skulls, which are an important motif in Mesoamerican iconography.
> 
> They are intensely loved today by a large coterie of aging hippies and New Age devotees, but what is the truth behind the crystal skulls? Where did they come from, and why were they made?
> Museums began collecting rock-crystal skulls during the second half of the nineteenth century, when no scientific archaeological excavations had been undertaken in Mexico and knowledge of real pre-Columbian artifacts was scarce.


 - full story: http://www.archaeology.org/0805/etc/indy.html




> *Chupacabra: blood-sucking mythical beast 'found in Texas'*
> 
> *Two men in Texas believe they may have discovered the body of a chupacabra – a    mythical beast rumoured to suck all the blood out of its prey.   *


- full story: Chupacabra: blood-sucking mythical beast 'found in Texas' - Telegraph


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## Cran (Dec 20, 2011)

> Although explorers drilled Mexico's first petroleum well in 1869, oil         was not discovered until after the turn of the twentieth century.         Commercial production of crude oil began in 1901. By 1910 prospectors         had begun to define the Panuco-Ebano and Faja de Oro fields located near         the central Gulf of Mexico coast town of Tuxpán, and systematic         explorations by foreign companies came to supersede the uncoordinated         efforts of speculative prospectors. Mexico began to export oil in 1911.


- Mexico - Oil




> In the early 20th century, a career in oil  exploration was a very tough option. “I was lucky that my colleagues in  the Anglo-Persian Oil Company [APOC] found exploration as exciting as I  did,” recalled Dr John Vernon Harrison in 1961, in his acceptance speech  on receipt of the prestigious Lyell Medal from the Geological Society  of London. Harrison, who joined the APOC – the forerunner of BP – as a  geologist in 1918, carried out exploration work for the company in  Honduras, Mexico, British North Borneo, Peru, Jamaica, Venezuela,  Trinidad and Colombia, as well as in Persia (now Iran), before resigning  in 1938 to become a lecturer in geology at Oxford University, UK.
> 
> Harrison’s description of his exploration days as ‘exciting’ was  something of an understatement. In his day, exploration fieldwork was  carried out on foot and horseback, and geologists camped out under the  stars while mapping vast swathes of unexplored territory in their search  for promising oil seeps, anticlines (dome-shaped structures) and other  promising leads.


 - (with link to full pdf version) Technical evolution | BP Magazine | BP



> *OIL EXPLORATION*. In the early days of petroleum  prospecting in Texas most oil finds were the result of digging or  drilling near known oil and gas seeps, as Lyne T. Barret  did in 1866 at Oil Spring in Nacogdoches County, or of accidental finds  while drilling for water, as with George Dullnig's 1886 strike in Bexar  County or the discovery of oil in Corsicana in 1894. Because of  abundant seeps, guesswork and good luck were sufficient for finding oil.  Most prominent salines and salt domes had been recorded by the 1890  Geological Survey of Texas but did not necessarily become the focal  point of oil exploration due to numerous unexploited seeps. *Amateurs in  geology, such as Pattillo Higgins,  used geological hunches and knowledge of existing seeps to promote  drilling for oil at Spindletop in 1901. At Batson in 1903, the Paraffin  Oil Company, another group of amateurs, founded their venture on  petroleum residue in soil samples collected from near a gas spring. This  was the first time that "paraffin dirt" was used in prospecting for  oil.* Despite these finds, oil companies generally held the use of  geology in low regard prior to the 1920s, when geophysical methods of  exploration that enhanced the oil prospector's knowledge of subterranean  strata began demonstrating an advantage for finding oil. Tools used by  oil and gas explorers were fairly basic and depended on fundamental  variables in the earth's physical condition: gravity change, magnetic  field change, time change, and electrical resistance. The torsion  balance was one of the earliest geophysical instruments used in the  exploration for salt domes along the Texas Gulf Coast.


 (bolding mine) - OIL EXPLORATION | The Handbook of Texas Online| Texas State Historical Association (TSHA)


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## Cran (Dec 20, 2011)

> There were three very strong revolutionary groups throughout the revolution that contributed to the rise and fall of the leaders. These were lead by *Emiliano Zapata, Francisco "Pancho" Villa, and Pascual Orozco.* Zapata was from the south and his troops covered that area while *Villa and Orozco were from the north* covering those areas (Summary 5).
> In 1911 Orozco and Villa began taking control of cities in the northern areas while Zapata took control of Cuautla and cut off the road to Mexico City. Orozco and Villa captured Ciudad Juarez and these events combined convinced Diaz to resign and forced him to flee to Europe. Even though he fled, Diaz left a large army under the command of General Victoriano Huerta and a provisional president. Soon after he left Zapata rode into Mexico City where he met up with Madero. Madero was then declared president (Summary 5).


 - History of the Mexican Revolution
(*The Mexican Revolution: An Overview* *by: Lynn Davies*)


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## luckyscars (Dec 20, 2011)

wow! thanks, you guys are awesome. i will begin looking through those links now...


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## luckyscars (Dec 23, 2011)

i've decided to place the main narrative of the novel in the late 1920's, with flashbacks to the civil war (mexican) era. does anyone know, aside from steam, what methods of transport would have been commonly used during the 1920's in the US southwest? was the infrastructure developed enough to facilitate motor cars (outside the major cities, that is) or would horse power still be the status quo? that's aside from steam, which i will be using too (since as far as i'm aware diesel trains weren't operational nationwide until after WW2).

also, what was the liquor situation in texas/arizona in the 20's? did prohibition apply? more importantly, was it enforced to any meaningful degree?

thanks!


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## Cran (Dec 23, 2011)

> The prohibition movement influenced Texas and American politics from the 1840s to the 1930s...
> 
> In the twentieth century the prohibition movement advanced from the  rural counties of North Texas to convert a majority of the state's  voters. As before, the liquor industries opposed the measure with  well-financed publicity and well-placed financing of political leaders.  In 1903 the _Home and State_ began to counteract liquor  publicity, and the Texas Local Option Association united dry groups.  That association merged in 1908 with the state Anti-Saloon League[SUP]qv[/SUP],  which had appeared in 1907. The league, formed in Ohio in 1893, was  bringing new zeal and organizing skills to the dry campaign around the  United States. In Texas the drys in 1908 and 1911 tried again for a  prohibition law but lost the referendum by a close margin. Although the  statewide dry campaigns had failed, the number of dry counties was  increasing. North Texas was dry; only areas with relatively large  concentrations of African, Hispanic, and German Americans continued to  license the liquor industries.


-PROHIBITION | The Handbook of Texas Online| Texas State Historical Association (TSHA)



> Starting in the 1870s, Texas had enacted laws that made it possible  county by county to prohibit the sale of alcohol.  So as the United  States moved toward Prohibition, Texas was becoming dryer and dryer. As  you might expect, it was rural counties that led the way – at least  those in the eastern and northern part of the state – and it was those  counties in urban areas and along the border that resisted the  temptation to get rid of strong drink.
> Alcohol remained legal in Mexico during Prohibition in the US, and  that country was a major source of illegal alcohol distributed  throughout Texas and beyond...


-Prohibition in the Borderland | Texas PBS


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## Cran (Dec 23, 2011)

Ford had begun mass production of cars and trucks, making them affordable to many. But a number of smaller manufacturers were also producing before 1920. The traditional "Western" culture (gun-toting horsemen, and horse-drawn wagons) had all but disappeared anywhere a navigable track (road) could be found. 

It may be that direct diesel-burning engines were not in use prior to WWII, but steam generators were converted from coal to oil burning before 1920. 



> Spurred on by state land grants of over thirty million acres, railroads  grew from 1,650 miles of track in 1875 to 9,867 in 1900. The new track,  more than half of which was laid between 1875 and 1885, crossed the  state both east-west and north-south to provide faster and cheaper  transportation for people and products. Yet in the 1880s control by Jay Gould  and Collis P. Huntington of most railroads in Texas led to reduced  competition and uniform rates. Farmers and small businessmen began to  complain of monopolies and trusts, and political debates and government  regulations followed...
> 
> Water-well drillers on the W.T. Waggoner Ranch in Wichita County in  1911 found oil instead, creating the Electra field. In 1917, W.K.  Gordon, general manager of the T&P Coal Company's mines at Thurber,  discovered the Ranger field nearby. *Ironically, the wealth of oil at  Ranger, and elsewhere in the state, encouraged railroads to switch their  locomotives from coal to oil and helped kill the coal-mining town of  Thurber...*
> 
> ...


-Oil and Texas: A Cultural History | Texas Almanac


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## C.M. Aaron (Dec 23, 2011)

I agree, where the infrastructure was in place, cars replaced horses by the 1920s, but even today the west is less developed than the east. I grew up in the east in the 1970s and never saw a dirt road despite numerous visits to the country. I live in the west today and see dirt roads all of the time. It would be a mistake to impose eastern standards of infrastructure onto the west of the 1920s. One of the infrastructure variables for the 1920s in the rural west was the availability of gas stations. The farther one got out from town, the fewer gas stations there were. I've seen pictures from the era of long distance drivers carrying gas cans strapped to the sides of their cars. Eisenhower, the future general and president, was part of an army maneuver in the 1920s that crossed the US with a combat division. It took them more two months because so many western roads were unpaved, and they could not find fuel and spare parts along the way for broken down army trucks. Later, he saw how easily the German Army could move around on their autobahns, so in the 1950s President Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System.

Tractors started appearing on American farms in the 1920s, but some farmers continued using horses into the 1930s. These farmers probably used trucks out on the roads and only used horses in their fields. Horses and cars don't always play well together on the roads. Once a tipping point was reached of more cars than horses on the roads, the horses and their owners quickly retreated off of the roads.

Throughout the 1920s, the 18th Amendment was in effect. Local enforcement efforts varied widely from place to place, depending on such variables as whether the local chief of police/sheriff liked to drink or not and how susceptible this person was to taking a bribe. Prior to the 1960s or 70s, policemen everywhere were widely believed to be corrupt (with justification). Many 19th century western sheriffs had colorful careers on both sides of the law. The old saying "send a thief to catch a thief" definitely applied.


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## Cran (Dec 23, 2011)

I agree, CM. The time (~1890 - 1920s) and place (Northern Mexico - Texas, New Mexico) for the most part went through an extended transition from horse-drawn to horsepower. Motor vehicles were limited to towns, and the most direct dirt roads between them; horses (and often donkeys or mules) everywhere else. Paved roads were rare and mostly restricted to cobbled paving in the wealthier town centres. Concrete and ashphalt (macadam) were probably myths spread by visiting Easterners.

Among the motor vehicles, there might have been also the earliest motorcycles and sidecars. Spare fuel drums were a must for out-of-town travel; spare tyres less so. A punctured tyre was more likely to be de-tubed and stuffed with whatever brush material was handy (sagebrush, or similar). 

Regardless of the type of vehicle, it was mostly unglazed (it might have a windscreen, or the remains of one), hard seats (or fruit boxes), and had little or no suspension - affectionately called "rattle traps". They were air-conditioned only in as much as there was little or no escape from the wind, dust, or rain; whatever the air was outside, it was inside. Conversations were shouted; radio was just another myth.

30 miles per hour was probably recklessly fast under most conditions.

Many farm and independent long haul vehicles were modified to run on home-made alcohol or biodiesel (extracted from a distilled mash of unsaleable/inedible vegetable matter and/or animal wastes). These were popular during the Prohibition, Depression and War Years.

It's also true that many roads in the lesser populated areas remain unpaved to this day; it's the same in "Outback" Australia, where even so-called highways are still unpaved between towns.


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