A stowaway fleeing tyranny in Ireland finds peace and a new life on the Louisiana frontier.

Now That Should Be A Movie!

It is called The Wayfaring Stranger.

It is a Western Romance

In the vein of When Calls The Heart.

It is like Hatfields and McCoys meets Christy.

It follows bitter Irish Immigrant Joseph Moore

And joyful Redbone teenager Eliza Clark

As they search for peace, freedom, and love in the Outlaw Strip of western Louisiana.

Problems arise when local ruffians don’t take kindly to outsider Joseph, and timber companies try to drive the Redbone people off their land.

Now together Joe and Eliza will through the love of God and the power of community overcome hardships and sustain a relationship.

The idea came to me when I read The Wayfaring Stranger while traveling through western Louisiana.

My unique approach is a Western set in the forests, hills, and swamps of Louisiana.   

A set piece is when the timber companies set fire to the forest underbrush to drive off the Redbone people. The people gather at a river crossing for safety. Someone shouts that a widow is missing. Joseph jumps on his horse and rides through the smoke. “Who is that fool,” someone wonders aloud. “It’s that Irish foreigner,” a Redbone replies.  Joseph rides to a creek, soaks his horse and saddle in the water, climbs up the bank, and takes off into the firestorm. The widow is sitting on her porch, praying as the flames lick at her cabin. Suddenly Joseph comes galloping out of the billowing smoke. He takes the widow and places her on his horse. Then with her in his arms, he takes off into the flaming forest as the cabin burns behind them. The smoke clouds choke him and sting his eyes as the flames singe his hair, but he gallops on. Then he bursts out of the firestorm and is at the river crossing! The Redbone people cheer! He has been accepted into their clan.

The target audience would be men and women (30-80), fans of Westerns, period pieces, Janette Oke, and Francine Sandra Rivers, nature lovers, and Louisianians.

People would want to watch the miniseries because of the themes of love, freedom, forgiveness, finding peace, the power of community, the beauty of nature, and the romance, adventure, and excitement of frontier Louisiana in the 1840s.

Today’s candidate for a movie, or TV miniseries is the Wayfaring Stranger: A Journey to Louisiana by Curt Iles, from Creekbank Stories.

In the early 19^th century there was a stretch of land between the Texas and Louisiana territories which was disputed by, first Spain and France, then Spain and America, then Mexico and America, and finally Texas and America. It went by a variety of names: The Neutral Ground, the Free State of Sabine, and No Man’s Land. It was during the US-Spanish dispute that the area became a no-go zone for law enforcement, turning it into a haven for outlaws and independent pioneers, resembling the Wild West even after the frontier had moved farther west.

The Wayfaring Stranger follows Joseph Moore, a stowaway fleeing a famine-stricken Ireland after killing the English landlord’s hound, as he wonders in search of freedom and peace. He is discovered on the ship by a Frenchman who tries to throw him overboard. In a twist of irony, the man who defends him against the French crew, persuading them to allow Joseph to work on the ship as it journeys to New Orleans, Louisiana, is English.  In New Orleans, Joseph encounters Father James Mullon at St. Patrick’s in the Irish Channel area who sets him up to live with an Irish immigrant family. For a time Joseph thinks he has found a place to settle down, and gets a job repairing a breach in the levee during a flood. Then tragedy strikes again in the form of a work accident and once again Joseph flees from heartbreak.

This time he takes a riverboat up the Red River. Along the way he sees slaves working the fields as they sing the traditional song “Wayfaring Stranger.” In Alexandria he learns about a place across the Calcasieu River called No Man’s Land, where many drifters and desperados go to start a new life. Facing discrimination from the people in Alexandria, Joe decides to cross over the deadline, The Calcasieu, into the mysterious woods of west Louisiana to see what he will find.

There he meets Eliza Clark, a young pioneer woman who is part of the mysterious, little-known people called the Redbones. The Redbone People have black hair, and deep, fierce brown eyes. They are biracial, like Creoles, but their exact lineage is not known. One speculation is that they are descendants of Portuguese pirates who sailed under Jean Lafitte and, after moving inland when his base at Galveston was destroyed, intermarried with Native Americans and runaway slaves. The Redbones themselves are not a tribe, preferring to isolated, individualistic independent lives free from outside interference. The Wayfaring Stranger has also been following Eliza Clark’s story as she comes to age in the Ten Mile area and along the banks of Cherry Winche Creek. She’s your typical teenage country girl, curious and full of joy even if she has to keep an eye on her younger, mischievous brother Eli. She is also looking for love, engaging in all sorts of old-time folk superstitions, like believing that if she hears a whippoorwill calling on her sixteenth birthday, it means that her future husband is thinking of her.

While The Wayfaring Stranger is a romance novel featuring the old-fashioned courtship of Eliza Clark and Joe Moore, it is also a Western adventure that men and boys will enjoy. Despite being set in Louisiana, the book contains all the tropes and dangers of the Western genera, some of which are historically documented.  In place of a prairie fire, there is a forest fire that Joseph must ride through to save the life of a widow, gaining the respect of the Redbone people. There is a rattlesnake encounter when a young boy is bitten while doing chores. This leads to a respectful portrayal of Native Americans when a medicine woman is brought down from the Choctaw Tribe to heal the young boy of the bite. The woman is a Christian, which many Native Americans in the eastern United States were, and makes their forced removal to Oklahoma even more shameful.

There are highwaymen who murder a stranger on the road and then disappear. Rough outlaw types, like the Arkansas-toothpick-wielding Amos Long and his friends, who do not take kindly to foreigners, especially an Irishman like Joe, coming into their territory and trying to marry one of their women. A feud ensues between them and Joe, which includes the cabin Joe worked so hard to build being burned to the ground and ends with a climactic fistfight. There’s another feud between the Wilson and Tyler families. Instead of a range war, there is a timber war between the Redbones and squatters of Ten Mile and the Piedmont Timber and Turpentine Company in the West Calcasieu Land War. Unk finds that his sheep have been poisoned while grazing near the lumber company’s camp. Eliza and one of her friends are assaulted by some of the timber men but are saved just in time. Finally, the forest fire Joe rode through is blamed on the timber company, the locals believing that the outsiders had tried to burn them out. 

There’s a host of colorful characters, some based in truth, such as Unk who is touched in the head yet is kind to all those he meets. A godly, friendly elderly couple named Aunt Mollie and Uncle Archie, who says “well” like “whale,” much to the amusement of the young people, and takes Joe duck hunting. A wise preacher named Joseph Willis, a real historical figure. An old wise widow woman named Miz Girlie Perkins who thinks her Catahoula Cur, Jezebel, is better than most of the men who come sniffing around. Together, they share both the simple joys and hardships of agriculture life. An old fashion dance, complete with fiddlers playing the folk tune “Eight of January,” is held.

Lovers of nature and the great outdoors will love the intimate strokes with which Mr. Iles, a native of western Louisiana, paints the portrait of the nineteenth-century wilderness. The longleaf pine forest and hills come alive as he describes the way the winds blow through them or lighting strikes at treetops. The passage of time is marked by the description of frost on the ground in January, the appearance of birds in spring, and snakes shedding their skins during August.

Most importantly the book contains a powerful message of the hope and peace that comes with forgiveness. The Englishman Gill says to Joseph, “A man is either going to get better or bitter.” Preacher Willis reiterates this same message, telling Eliza he has had to forgive and forget many injustices done to him over his life due to his biracial lineage. Hardships can either make you a better or bitter person is a central theme. The scenes in Occupy Church where Preacher Willis delivers his sermons about having “a wagon full of children” and the congregation sings old-time hymns harken back to a simpler time when one’s faith had to be strong to survive in the harsh frontier environment.

Because Joseph and Eliza are based upon Mr. Iles’ great-great-great-grandparents, he writes their story passionately in Stranger. The book is one that both men, because it has plenty of action, and women because it has plenty of romance, and anyone interested in Louisiana and early American pioneer history will enjoy. As a lover of historical dramas, westerns, and Louisiana history, I would love to see The Wayfaring Stranger by Curt Iles as a feature film or miniseries. There is a niche for it alongside beloved period pieces like Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons, Christy, Hatfields & McCoys, When Calls the Heart, Sarah Plain and Tall, The Big Valley, Anne of Green Gables, and Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. Maybe Michael Landon, Jr. Neill Fearnley, Brian Bird, Sean McNamara, or Brian Baugh could direct an adaption for Louisiana Public Broadcasting, BBC America, or the Hallmark Channel. I know I would be tuned in.

Because it is an exciting, well-written Western set in Louisiana with a message of forgiveness, I believe that The Wayfaring Stranger by Curt Iles Should Be A Western Movie or Miniseries filmed in Louisiana!

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