A Family Struggles To Survive And Ultimately Thrives In The Backwoods of Louisiana During The War Between the States.
Now That Should Be A Miniseries.
Today’s book I would like to pitch as a miniseries is A Good Place: A Novel by Curt Iles, from CreekBank Stories.
It is a Pioneer Saga.
Is in the vein of Old Yeller.
Its basically Tom Sawyer meets Little House on The Prairie.
It follows young and mischievous Mayo Moore
And his determined and strong-willed pioneer parents, Joe and Eliza
As they struggle to eek out a living in the wilderness of western Louisiana.
Problems occur when Joe leaves for the Civil War and tragedy strikes the Moore household.
Together they must come together to take lessons from the land and trees around them to endure and have faith.
I got the idea that Mr. Iles’ book should be a miniseries when I read it after years of traveling through what was once “No Man’s Land,” the setting of the book.
My unique approach would be the spiritual journey of an adventurous boy.
A set piece would be when Eliza has sunken into depression after a tragedy. A neighbor, Miss Girlie, comes over and helps with chores around the Moore homestead. In thanks, Mayo goes over to Miss Girlie’s place to help out. While he is there, a big, wild bull shows up and begins damaging the place. Miss Girlie, an elderly lady, grabs her rifle and has a showdown with the bull. Mayo returns home and relates the story to Eliza. She finds the story so hilarious that it helps bring her out of her depression.
There is definitely an audience for this kind of story. Young boys would enjoy the adventures of Mayo, and older men and women would appreciate the life struggles and lessons of his parents. There is also a niche faith-based audience that enjoy westerns and pioneer dramas.
Audiences would like to see its universal themes of endurance, faith, community togetherness, and spiritual lessons from nature.
The second book in the Westport Series, A Good Place is the sequel to Iles’ first novel The Wayfaring Stranger. Like the first, it is set in No Man’s Land along the banks of Ten Mile, Whiskey Chitto, and Cherrywinehe creeks and Westbay marsh. Many of the colorful characters from the first book, such as Joe and Eliza Moore, return. There’s Unk, still as innocent and wise as before. The strong-willed widow and midwife Miss Girlie, who receives a new nickname, The Bell Cow. The good-natured prankster Eli is now Uncle Eli, a grownup who leaves early in the book to join the Confederate army.
This book is narrated by Joe and Eliza Moore’s oldest son Mayo as he chronicles the joys and hardships of living in No Man’s Land during the American Civil War. In this manner it bears resemblance to other classic American literature about country boys. Like in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, there’s a treasure hunt for gold as well as an encounter with thieves. Mayo’s adventures with his dog Bo are similar to that of the protagonist and the yellow dog in Old Yeller. There’s a scene that is like one in Fred Gipson’s book in which Mayo encounters a wild bull, Old Roscoe. He is treed by Roscoe until Bo comes to the rescue. His adventures along Ten Mile and Cherrywinche creeks, such as otters stilling the catch off his fishing line, are reminiscent of those found in The Sugarcreek Gang series by Paul Hutchens.
Since western Louisiana remained a wild frontier due to American settlement bypassing it as the US borders expanded westward, much like Appalachia, the genera of the miniseries would be western. Although a cattle drive is seen when cowboys drive a herd cross the Calcasieu River on the way to feed the Confederate armies east of the Mississippi, the thrilling excitement of one occurs when the men of the community, known as Ten Milers, perform a log float.
Rafts replace the cattle, as they float down the Calcasieu, their cattle trail, to Lake Charles, a sawmill town instead of a cattle town. The float starts off with the Ten Mile men “rounding up” the trees by cutting them down and “corralling” them at a log dump on the side of the river after “herding” them by dragging them through the forest. They even brand them with axe cuts, “MT” for Ten Mile. Along the way they encounter alligators, flying fish, mosquitoes, water moccasins and snapping turtles instead of coyotes, buffalo, antelope, rattlesnakes, and prairie dogs. Instead of cattle stampedes, the dangers are the rafts crashing into and snagging on sandbars.
Standing in for Native Americans are Cajuns who live on stilt houses instead of teepees. A traiteur, instead of a medicine man, heals one of the Ten Milers who has had an allergic reaction to wasps’ when his raft floated under their nest. Instead of an Indian Princess, Mayo meets an Arcadian girl who teaches him a little French.
Lake Charles is similar to a cow town, with some of the Ten Mile Men losing all their money gambling. Although a bar fight is replaced by Mayo throwing rattlesnakes through the window of an eating establishment after being denied entrance by a prejudiced proprietor. On the way back to Ten Mile, there’s a holdup by Jayhawkers who later find justice at the long end of a rope. The Ten Milers encounter Confederate cavalry instead of US cavalry. They also stay with local families living in pioneer conditions.
The log float deserves to be a whole episode of a miniseries based on A Good Place. The lumber industries and loggers did much to build our great nation but are hardly featured in popular media. Maybe it is because my grandfather was a logger, but one reason I think the journey of the Ten Milers down the Calcasieu should be featured in a TV show is to honor lumberjacks.
A Good Place is prime historical fiction as it entwines the saga of the Moore family with the history of the Redbone people, feuds, the Civil War, traditions, and rural life in western Louisiana. The Moores face many dangers. One is an actual hurricane which hit southwest Louisiana in 1862, which causes a tree to fall on their house and start a fire that burnt up their kitchen. “I’m ether coming from, in or heading to a storm,” Joe observes. They lose crops to bad weather, which threatens a “Hungary July,” and domestic animals to wild ones like boars. The hardships of a frontier life are portrayed when sudden deaths strike wagon trains that are passing through No Man’s Land. The funerals take place at the unusual Talbert-Pierson Cemetery, where the dead are buried inside wooden houses.
There’s humorous and quaint moments. Mayo tries to play a prank on his father by whipping a sluggish chicken snake on the ground when he comes by with the milk. Instead, the snake goes flying and the milk goes spilling. Mayo and some friends also steal the clothing of skinny dippers. There’s a fox hunt that most of the men spend sitting around the campfire under the stars, swapping tales and listening to their hounds. “A craic,” Joe calls it in reference to his homeland of Ireland. Since western Louisiana was open range, there is a brush burning when the Ten Milers come together, and control burn the forest floor in hopes that the green grass that would grow back would be better for their livestock.
The fire leads to one of many spiritual lessons that can be taken from nature. After the hurricane, Joe Moore looks around at the fallen trees, “plenty of firewood come winter,” and makes the observation that many grand trees had fallen due to being rotten inside. After the fire, there are several trees that looked dead due to being burned. But a few weeks later, those same trees are green again. Like humans with deep roots and thick bark, they were able to survive. Other life and spiritual lessons are taken from wild geese, turkeys, shooting stars and mockingbirds. Just to name a few.
It is because of these spiritual lessons that I think the pacing of a miniseries would be best for an adaption of A Good Place.
Another reason is because each of the three episodes in the book has self-contained character arcs. In the first part, “The Storm,” we see Mayo grow when it comes to grief. The second part, “The Journey,” shows how Joe comes to a conclusion on whether he should participate in the War or not.
The third part, “The War,” proves that a miniseries could best capture the spirit of the book because of a plotline that goes full circle. In the Ten Mile area, people governed themselves by coming together to help their neighbors out during tough times. And they were expected to payback in kind. Sometimes it was large group activities like disposing of the body of a dead bull. Sometimes it was small things like household chores. Mayo comes of age helping Miss Girlie after she took care of the Moore house after a tragedy.
After the hurricane hits, the people holler to their neighbors or use a cow horn, an actual horn cut from the head of a bull, to blow signals to see if they’re okay. Eliza Moore insists on going to check on a rather shady family who has just settled in the area, The Merkles. At first Joe does not want to but since the Ten Mile women are really in charge, the Moores pay the family a visit. For their thanks, the family robs their smokehouse. But let’s just say that over the course of the book, things come full circle between the two families in a good arc.
These spiritual lessons and full circle journeys can still be felt in the woods of western Louisiana, making it indeed a good place. Like I said in the post for The Wayfaring Stranger, there’s proof enough of an audience for pioneer family sagas. There’s also a lot of locations in present day Louisiana where it could be filmed. State parks include Sam Houston Jones in Calcasieu Parish at the Calcasieu and Houston rivers and Indian Bayou convergence. Chicot State Park in Evangeline Parish which features both rolling hills and swamps. The Louisiana State Arboretum, in the same parish, shares similar terrain. And South Toledo Bend in Vernon Parish and North Toledo Bend and Hodges Garden in Sabine Parish. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has the natural settings of west Louisiana preserved at Westbay, Marsh Bayou, Clear Creek, Peason, Sabine Island, Alexander Forest, Grand Cote, Thistlethwaite and other wildlife management areas. Westbay itself is one of the locations featured in A Good Place. On the federal level, there is Kisatchie National Forrest through which Calcasieu River and Cherrywinehe Creek flow. Fort Polk also offers forest preserves such as Alligator Lake, Government Pond, Blue Hole and Little Cypress recreational sites and areas. Other recreational areas include Hickory Ridge, Sam Forse Collins, Crooked Creek, and Indian Creek. Then there are parish and city parks like Holbrook, White Oak, Lorrain, and Alligator Park in Calcasieu, Longville Lake, Bundicks Lake, and Purple Heart Memorial Park in Beauregard, and Methodist Landing Recreational Park in Vernon. The land is also preserved through private campgrounds, RV parks, hunting clubs, and tree farms. One such place is Dry Creek Baptist Camp, which is featured in Iles’ devotional books. So, there’s plenty of land in western Louisiana that would make great locations for historical dramas and westerns. And with the folks in Baton Rouge getting their act together with the film tax credit program, maybe we could soon use them as such.
Because of its chronicles of pioneer life and parables of nature in Louisiana, I believe that A Good Place by Curt Ile’s Should Be A Miniseries.
