One Drink Book Club | Rebel Falls by Tim Wendel

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another edition of the One Drink Book Club. Today we're going to

[00:00:13] be discussing Rebel Falls, a new historical fiction that takes place during the last gasps

[00:00:19] of the Civil War. Tonight my guest is the author of Rebel Falls, Tim Wendell. Thanks

[00:00:23] for being here, Tim.

[00:00:25] Great Jamey, great to be with you and raise a glass to one drink.

[00:00:29] You know, my one mistake is I named it The One Drink Book Club, but I should have probably

[00:00:34] called it The Two Drink Book Club. I ask people to do it, but I stick with one.

[00:00:44] We start talking about the book.

[00:00:47] Would you have brought to the.

[00:00:50] Have a cocktail based on your book, Rebel Falls?

[00:00:53] Well, Jamie, I would have brought a bourbon old fashion and granted,

[00:00:59] you know, a tried and true cocktail right now in our day and age.

[00:01:02] But in 1864, when Rebel Falls is set, this was becoming a very hip cocktail, so much so that

[00:01:09] both the Waldorf Astoria in New York and a club in Louisville were fighting over who had

[00:01:14] discovered it first. And my protagonist, Rory Chase, partakes of one before he's just got to

[00:01:21] dive in and fight against the rebel spies one more time.

[00:01:25] But there's a little bit of my grandfather loved bourbon old fashions.

[00:01:29] And so I was able to kind of all right, they were drinking that then it was kind of hip.

[00:01:34] All right, cool. I'll work it in and have my protagonist abide with one and help her

[00:01:40] summon up for courage a little bit.

[00:01:41] Well. That is exactly what I make tonight.

[00:01:47] Cheers. I had an.

[00:01:51] Oh, that's good.

[00:01:53] I like that stuff and granddad bourbon.

[00:02:07] Seven years old. There you go.

[00:02:09] My grandfather died when he was like 92.

[00:02:12] So I'm like going, I might be told the wrong thing here half the time.

[00:02:16] Actually, the other thing I'm abiding with tonight, which is very pedestrian, but

[00:02:20] I've been fighting bad pollen and allergies down here.

[00:02:23] So I'm doing kind of tea and lemon.

[00:02:25] So I'm very envious of what you're raising there.

[00:02:28] Well, you know, I mean, you.

[00:02:36] That's right.

[00:02:38] Which made it kind of the obvious choice, but I did do a little research.

[00:02:41] I tried to find menus.

[00:02:45] House, yes, I did find some of their food offerings.

[00:02:56] At the hotel.

[00:03:01] Oh, the Westhouse Westhouse, yes.

[00:03:05] Look, so I did do my due diligence to see if I could

[00:03:09] some interesting.

[00:03:12] For a cocktail, but.

[00:03:20] Well, as you well know, Jamie, Rebel Falls is set in 1864.

[00:03:24] And I liked your terminology there, the last gasp of really civil war.

[00:03:29] And we have a woman spy on the Union side

[00:03:33] who's been sent to, believe it or not, the border with Canada.

[00:03:38] Why are we sending spies there?

[00:03:40] That makes no sense.

[00:03:41] But she was sent there because Confederate spies

[00:03:44] were all over the place from Halifax all the way over to Detroit.

[00:03:48] And one reason they were there was they were trying to create

[00:03:51] an international incident, potentially to bring in England,

[00:03:55] may European powers, whatever.

[00:03:57] And my protagonist, the woman named Rory Chase,

[00:04:00] her assignment is to stop Confederate spies

[00:04:04] from seizing the remaining Union warship on the Great Lakes at that point.

[00:04:09] And if they had done that, I think maybe history

[00:04:12] would have been a little bit different.

[00:04:14] Well, of the Civil War fought

[00:04:29] Oh, and in Lake Erie or in the Great Lakes.

[00:04:39] So that was an interesting angle.

[00:04:41] Right. And it was quite a warship, too.

[00:04:43] It was iron hauled.

[00:04:44] It was roughly 165 feet.

[00:04:46] It had great weaponry.

[00:04:48] And so if the Confederate spies had gotten the hold of it,

[00:04:51] their plan and they come they come within a whisker of it

[00:04:55] is without revealing too much.

[00:04:58] They plan to bombard Toledo, Cleveland,

[00:05:01] Buffalo, probably Erie to throw that in on the eve of the presidential election.

[00:05:06] And why is that a big deal?

[00:05:08] Well, we've got war fatigue in the north.

[00:05:10] We've been fighting this war for four years.

[00:05:13] And even within Lincoln's cabinet, Abraham Lincoln's White House,

[00:05:17] the upcoming 1864 election was perceived to be very close.

[00:05:23] I mean, you look at the history books now and it's a landslide for Lincoln.

[00:05:27] But if the rebel spies had gotten the hold of the Michigan

[00:05:30] and the USS Michigan, the name of the warship,

[00:05:34] maybe that tilts the balance right at a very pivotal time in our nation's history.

[00:05:40] Now, what got you interested in this story?

[00:05:44] Of the Civil War.

[00:05:46] I grew up in Niagara Falls.

[00:05:48] I read that. But what kind of.

[00:05:51] Three in.

[00:05:53] Story needing telling.

[00:05:55] Well, I guess a couple of things, Jamie,

[00:05:58] first of all, as you say, there's a family connection there.

[00:06:00] I grew up also 15 miles away from Niagara Falls.

[00:06:04] I've always been enthralled with Niagara Falls,

[00:06:06] even though it gets kind of tiki tack now and and such.

[00:06:09] I mean, the difference between both sides of the border is just mind

[00:06:13] bothering the US side.

[00:06:15] There's a real economic boost.

[00:06:16] And then you go across to the Canadian side.

[00:06:18] That's becoming like Las Vegas on the Niagara River.

[00:06:21] But so but I've always been enthralled with Niagara Falls.

[00:06:25] And I was reading a couple books,

[00:06:28] notably Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin,

[00:06:31] Carl Sandberg's Lincoln.

[00:06:33] And both of them mentioned and just mentioned that's kind of an aside

[00:06:38] these rebel spies, ones named John Yates Bell, real life guy.

[00:06:43] And another guy named Bennett Burley, who was a soldier of fortune from Scotland.

[00:06:48] And one reason, say, Kearns Goodwin mentions them

[00:06:51] is Lincoln did not pardon John Yates Bell.

[00:06:56] He pardoned seemingly everybody else, but he didn't pardon him.

[00:06:59] And so as a result, that ticks off a lot of people.

[00:07:04] One of them being John Wilkes Booth.

[00:07:06] And you start going, what's going on up on the border?

[00:07:09] And you realize that it's funny.

[00:07:11] We tend to have, I think, this perception of Canada

[00:07:15] of as being so innocent, you know, the longest unguarded border

[00:07:19] and all this type of stuff.

[00:07:21] And I can say these things. I'm married to Canadians, so it's OK.

[00:07:24] But but during the Civil War, it's where a lot of spy

[00:07:29] espionage and money was being fostered.

[00:07:33] Richmond would send up money through people like John Wilkes Booth

[00:07:37] and would kind of get filtered down through.

[00:07:40] One of the best descriptions I heard of, say, Montreal was

[00:07:43] was a lot like Casablanca.

[00:07:45] And everybody kind of went to these particular bars like they did,

[00:07:48] like going to Ricks and Casablanca.

[00:07:51] And it's funny because I think sometimes we tend to think of

[00:07:55] Canada's where escaped slaves, freedom seekers were trying to get to.

[00:08:00] And certainly that's true.

[00:08:02] But you also had this other side where at least part of the churches,

[00:08:06] a lot of the businesses were, in a sense, backing the South.

[00:08:11] And that kind of comes out in various odd ways when John Wilkes Booth

[00:08:16] is pulled out of that farmhouse in Port Royal

[00:08:19] after escaping the authorities for 12 days after assassinating Lincoln.

[00:08:24] They're empty in his pockets.

[00:08:26] And it's kind of the typical.

[00:08:27] So they've got some coins and here's a pocket knife and whatever.

[00:08:30] Oh, hang on. Here's a bank note from a bank in Montreal.

[00:08:33] And then in a sense, that's where he had been funded through.

[00:08:37] The money was being kind of filtered through that way.

[00:08:40] It was really interesting.

[00:08:42] And you touch on it a little bit.

[00:08:50] Or the union on railroad

[00:08:59] and the employees of the cataract house being

[00:09:09] on the Underground Railroad and that final vote.

[00:09:19] Or you did it.

[00:09:21] And there were people, as you said, that discover anybody

[00:09:31] hidden in a wagon or trying to get over, you know, to Niagara.

[00:09:46] Yeah, it was like one of the last major stops

[00:09:50] or jumping off points, which you just talked about, Jamie,

[00:09:53] because you could literally see freedom on the other side of the Niagara River.

[00:09:58] And yet it was very difficult to get there.

[00:10:01] It was treacherous either way.

[00:10:03] And as you mentioned, the guys who would camp out near the suspension bridge,

[00:10:07] which was a very eerie kind of construction railroad, was on the top.

[00:10:12] And underneath was this kind of portal where the carriages would go through.

[00:10:16] It looked like something Dante would do with the inferno or something.

[00:10:20] And you had these guys hanging around and they were simply called the bystanders.

[00:10:24] You know, we're quite sure if they're going to blow the whistle on

[00:10:27] some kind of escape attempt or not.

[00:10:29] And people are going bystander.

[00:10:31] Why would they have been there?

[00:10:33] Well, with the fugitive slave law, you could have benefited

[00:10:37] or gotten part of the reward for returning in a sense of slave

[00:10:42] back to his or her owner in the South.

[00:10:45] And the other other one was to simply get across the Niagara River,

[00:10:49] which at that point is whirlpools and currents because it's right after,

[00:10:54] in a sense, the falls literally right there by the precipice.

[00:10:58] And they had 209 steps, a wooden staircase

[00:11:01] that in a sense, the people working at the cataract house maintained.

[00:11:06] And there was always a rowboat there waiting often with somebody

[00:11:10] who was very accomplished oarsman to row you across and get you over to Canada.

[00:11:15] Now, one of the questions I had, you mentioned that,

[00:11:19] you know, the staff of the cataract house often were either escaped or freed

[00:11:23] slaves and they helped slaves get across

[00:11:28] that had come up maybe through the Underground Railroad,

[00:11:30] but also slaves that were vacationing with their

[00:11:35] their masters or the people who owned them.

[00:11:39] And the staff would kind of get them when they were alone for a moment

[00:11:43] and say, hey, look, if you want to get across to Canada, we'll do it right now.

[00:11:47] And very much, which I thought was interesting.

[00:11:50] And I also thought, boy, why would anybody who was traveling with slaves

[00:11:54] come to stay at the cataract house? Wouldn't they get out there?

[00:11:58] I think it and this is all based on fact, too.

[00:12:01] I mean, you know, Rebel Falls is a novel, but was so,

[00:12:04] you know, so much research went into it.

[00:12:06] Everything we're talking about here in terms of escape

[00:12:09] and the cataract house is all legit. It's all based on fact.

[00:12:14] But I think in some ways, it kind of shows how,

[00:12:17] first of all, the cataract house was one of the luxury hotels in the world.

[00:12:21] Pretty much. I mean, Charles Dickens stays there.

[00:12:23] Lincoln stays there at one point.

[00:12:27] It's Uncle Tom's cabin with the list goes on and on.

[00:12:30] And the food was great.

[00:12:31] You know, you looked up the menu and the ambiance was beautiful.

[00:12:35] I mean, the hotel existed till 1945.

[00:12:38] And so I guess folks just couldn't stay away.

[00:12:42] And the other thing they couldn't do too was,

[00:12:44] Oh, hang on. We're going on vacation.

[00:12:47] Well, I guess we better bring we need some help

[00:12:50] so we can't leave everybody back on the plantation.

[00:12:53] And so they would do this time and time again.

[00:12:55] And word certainly got out.

[00:12:56] Hey, there's there's something a miss or a hubbub

[00:13:00] at the cataract house.

[00:13:02] But in a sense, they would still bring some of their slaves with them.

[00:13:07] And I think you touched on something that's really kind of interesting,

[00:13:10] Jamie, because the cataract house staff,

[00:13:13] especially the wait staff and the dining room was very well coordinated,

[00:13:17] but it was all pretty much freed or escaped slaves,

[00:13:20] pretty much all African-Americans.

[00:13:22] And they would come to a slave

[00:13:26] with a southern plantation family or whatever.

[00:13:30] And they would say, do you want freedom?

[00:13:32] Do you want to get away?

[00:13:34] And you had to decide like that.

[00:13:36] It wasn't like, well, let me think it over a little bit

[00:13:38] and get back to me tomorrow.

[00:13:40] It was like, no, either we go or we don't go.

[00:13:43] And I think that's an amazing deal.

[00:13:45] And during the research for Rebel Falls, I came across actual ledgers

[00:13:49] who were kept at the cataract house through the Underground Railroad.

[00:13:53] And it's just each escapee or ones that make it to freedom

[00:13:57] are actually every incident. Some didn't.

[00:13:59] It's recorded there. Oh, wow.

[00:14:01] It's like hundreds of them.

[00:14:03] And it's like the name and how they got away

[00:14:05] and how quickly it was done and if they were pursued and etc.

[00:14:09] And you're just looking at this going, yeah, I could have some fun with this.

[00:14:13] Well, that's amazing.

[00:14:14] Well, it's interesting.

[00:14:16] You've written both fiction and nonfiction.

[00:14:19] When you started researching this, was there a question in your mind?

[00:14:22] Was this going to be a nonfiction perhaps or a fiction?

[00:14:26] When did you make that decision?

[00:14:29] Um, I made it after doing a fair amount of research.

[00:14:33] Jamie, you're right.

[00:14:34] It started nonfiction at first, you know, because fiction

[00:14:38] is a little bit more of a leap of faith.

[00:14:40] And I certainly was doing research on Jane Yates Bell and Bennett Burleigh,

[00:14:45] you know, the kind of the main Confederate spies in this incident.

[00:14:49] But kept going, I need something a little bit more,

[00:14:54] you know, on the union side.

[00:14:56] And there was certainly spies or couriers and espionage against them.

[00:15:02] But at that point, I went, let's see how deep we can go with this.

[00:15:06] And it's at that point I decided I'd like a woman protagonist,

[00:15:10] in part because she wants to become involved with the war effort.

[00:15:15] But that's difficult for a woman to do.

[00:15:18] Whereas if you're a guy in the Savoy, oh, I'd like to fight.

[00:15:21] Oh, yeah. OK. Right down there.

[00:15:22] And you're probably dead in two weeks.

[00:15:23] Sure. Sure.

[00:15:25] So I started playing that out and then I went,

[00:15:27] let's take it another step further, because in my mind,

[00:15:30] the most powerful family or one of them at this point in time

[00:15:34] in our nation's history is the Seward family out of Auburn, New York,

[00:15:38] who's the secretary of state. William Seward is for Lincoln.

[00:15:41] They've become, you know, bosom buddies.

[00:15:43] They work hand in glove.

[00:15:45] And probably a lot of people remember Seward is the guy

[00:15:48] who buys Alaska from the Russians, you know, a very smart guy,

[00:15:52] a very smart guy, even though it was called Seward's Folly.

[00:15:55] Exactly. But I'm going, you know, it'd be great to get

[00:15:58] inside that household somewhat and get close up to this guy

[00:16:04] who's making a lot of powerful decisions.

[00:16:06] So at that point, I decided my major protagonist, Rory Chase,

[00:16:12] a woman, kind of a tomboy, very much wants to be involved in the Union effort.

[00:16:16] But what if she's been the childhood friend of Fanny Seward,

[00:16:20] the only daughter of the secretary of state?

[00:16:23] So then it allowed me to kind of get us inside Washington intrigue.

[00:16:27] It allows me to kind of, you know, almost instantaneously, oh, Rory,

[00:16:31] you want to be involved in the war effort?

[00:16:33] Oh, Secretary Seward is going to send you to the Canadian border.

[00:16:37] And all of a sudden, things started to take off.

[00:16:39] And at that point, you go, if it's rolling like this,

[00:16:43] we got to raise a glass and go for it.

[00:16:46] Well, I think you made the right decision because I really liked

[00:16:49] Rory Chase as a character, and it also allows you to put in dialogue.

[00:16:53] And obviously, you know, Bell and Burley were real people.

[00:16:58] Seward was a real person.

[00:17:00] But you can take some artistic license.

[00:17:03] And put in dialogue that makes the story go fast.

[00:17:06] I mean, I read this very quickly because it was interesting, engaging.

[00:17:10] It read like a novel because it is a novel, but it certainly had

[00:17:15] all the key incidents in it were real.

[00:17:19] So that was to me as a reader.

[00:17:21] I really enjoyed that.

[00:17:23] Do you find it easier to write nonfiction or fiction?

[00:17:28] And really, I don't know.

[00:17:30] I'm going to gauge this a little bit.

[00:17:32] I really do need a stiff drink.

[00:17:35] It really kind of depends on the story a little bit.

[00:17:38] You know, I had the setting soon with Niagara Falls, and I love it so much.

[00:17:43] And as soon as I started hearing about the cataract house and anybody is up there,

[00:17:47] I would urge them to go to the Underground Railroad Heritage Center,

[00:17:51] which is a great museum.

[00:17:54] And, you know, we can walk through kind of a facsimile

[00:17:57] of the suspension bridge has got a lot about the cataract house.

[00:18:00] It's really well done.

[00:18:02] And so I hit upon that ago.

[00:18:03] OK, I got a place now.

[00:18:05] Can I get characters here that will, in a sense, work in this setting?

[00:18:12] And one of the things I do, whether I'm writing nonfiction or fiction,

[00:18:16] Jamie, is I'll talk with my characters.

[00:18:18] OK, that makes sense with nonfiction.

[00:18:21] You interview somebody.

[00:18:23] Oh, that's a little murky.

[00:18:24] OK, I'll go back to them, potentially tell me some more about this.

[00:18:27] Whatever. I'll kind of do the same thing with my fictional characters.

[00:18:32] And that's going to that sounds kind of strange.

[00:18:33] What do you mean? You talk to them.

[00:18:35] I kind of do.

[00:18:37] And it's a great way to be left alone, to write.

[00:18:40] OK, what's your motivation there?

[00:18:42] Why are you doing this?

[00:18:43] And it's important to me, all the characters

[00:18:47] who've been kind of mentioning, you know, John Yates Bell,

[00:18:49] Bennett Burley, Rory, I needed to know at specific times

[00:18:53] what they were afraid of and what they were trying to do,

[00:18:56] what their motivation was.

[00:18:58] And once that starts to click, I'm going, all right.

[00:19:02] But let's just see where this goes.

[00:19:04] And it took me, especially with fiction, a long time to figure out.

[00:19:08] I used to outline more and I still outlined some.

[00:19:12] But when the characters start taking it away from the outline,

[00:19:15] I used to get really mad. How dare you do this?

[00:19:18] I'm writing this story, you jokers.

[00:19:21] But now I go, all right, I wish you'd take this over

[00:19:24] because I'm making a mess out of it.

[00:19:25] Now you often will start to take it.

[00:19:27] No, we're going to go this way.

[00:19:29] Oh, why? And then they'll tell you.

[00:19:30] Interesting. I mean, I find that process really fascinating.

[00:19:34] And one of the things I liked about your characters in this book

[00:19:37] is that they were not black and white.

[00:19:40] They certainly did things where they were motivated

[00:19:43] by various things in their past or their passions or their beliefs.

[00:19:48] But they didn't always do what you thought they might do.

[00:19:52] In Rory Chase, especially, there's some situations

[00:19:55] where she could let somebody go free or let somebody,

[00:19:59] you know, or capture somebody,

[00:20:01] or she could advocate for them in one way or another.

[00:20:04] And it didn't always go like you thought it would go.

[00:20:08] And the same thing with the other characters.

[00:20:09] It was nice even the villains in this,

[00:20:12] the John Yates Bell and Burleigh were complex characters.

[00:20:16] They weren't just, oh, that's the bad guy.

[00:20:20] And, you know, they're twisting their mustache

[00:20:22] and doing evil things.

[00:20:24] You didn't dislike them because they were definitely motivated

[00:20:28] by their own beliefs.

[00:20:29] And they also had their own moral compass in one way or another.

[00:20:34] And so I thought that was kind of interesting.

[00:20:36] And it made it more enjoyable and a little bit more thought

[00:20:41] provoking to know that they weren't just this,

[00:20:43] you know, kind of cartoon character people.

[00:20:47] Yeah. Well, thank you for saying that, because I think in some ways,

[00:20:51] if characters are going to work, especially in a novel,

[00:20:54] but even in nonfiction, we're often contradictions.

[00:20:58] You know, we maybe start one way, something stymies.

[00:21:01] If we go another way, we kind of self-correct.

[00:21:04] And as you say, our moral compass takes us back this way.

[00:21:08] There's some incidents, as you well know, when Rory infiltrates

[00:21:12] kind of the rebel style or whatever, you know, the group.

[00:21:17] And she's coming in very determined.

[00:21:19] I mean, she's very much pro-union and we always kind of know that.

[00:21:23] But she at times gets so caught up in the rhetoric

[00:21:27] of the South and, you know, and they will rise again

[00:21:31] and all this type of stuff that even for a time, she loses her way,

[00:21:35] which I think is very realistic.

[00:21:38] I mean, you get around larger than life people sometimes.

[00:21:41] And your mind may be saying, well, this is nuts.

[00:21:44] I mean, we got to go over here.

[00:21:46] But in a sense, you get swept along.

[00:21:47] And all of them, in some ways, you know, at certain moments get swept up

[00:21:53] either by the company they're keeping or the surroundings and the circumstances.

[00:21:59] And I think that's very human in a way.

[00:22:02] I know I do all the time.

[00:22:03] I get swept up by too many things.

[00:22:07] You know, we talked about that you chose a heroine and not a hero.

[00:22:12] What went into that?

[00:22:13] What was your motivation to do that?

[00:22:15] And was it harder for you to write for a woman?

[00:22:19] Obviously being that you're a man, like what went into that decision?

[00:22:24] Well, a little bit, Jamie, as well, we were talking about before I wanted

[00:22:29] we kind of forget what

[00:22:32] the casualties and how horrific the Civil War was.

[00:22:36] And so pretty much the first obstacle Rory Chase meets is

[00:22:41] she wants to be involved in some way with the war effort.

[00:22:45] She wants to do good.

[00:22:46] And she does want to, you know, sit at home and, I don't know, knit

[00:22:49] socks or something for the guys on the front lines.

[00:22:52] And so this is kind of already pushes her out of her comfort zone.

[00:22:57] And at that point I was thinking, you know, I've almost got to write

[00:22:59] this way from a woman's point of view, because if it was a guy,

[00:23:03] it'd be so easy.

[00:23:04] Sure.

[00:23:04] Yeah.

[00:23:04] Go with this.

[00:23:05] Okay.

[00:23:05] Go ahead.

[00:23:06] I mean, they were just churning through guys on both sides.

[00:23:09] And at that point I started to go, did this really happen?

[00:23:12] You know, I know we had women spies, but for a little

[00:23:15] bit Rory even disguises herself as a man and is in the Union

[00:23:20] army in a regiment.

[00:23:22] And I kept going, did this happen?

[00:23:23] And then you find out that there were women on both sides of the

[00:23:27] conflict who went in disguise.

[00:23:29] One of the most memorable ones was the one named Sarah Edmonds

[00:23:33] out of Michigan with the second infantry out of there.

[00:23:36] Fought was kind of a male carrier went between lines for almost three

[00:23:41] years and then deserted, which cause mentally she was shot.

[00:23:45] And we realized now she was suffering from PTSD.

[00:23:48] They didn't know about that back then.

[00:23:50] And then years later decided I'm having some economic problems,

[00:23:56] some financial problems.

[00:23:57] It'd be really good if I had my pension service pension.

[00:24:03] And she actually went to court, revealed herself to her former

[00:24:08] regiment folks that she had been a woman and she got her pension.

[00:24:12] Oh, wow.

[00:24:13] And I want at that point, I went, all right, there's a very,

[00:24:17] you know, determined woman.

[00:24:18] And I think in some ways there was two windows here that I

[00:24:22] felt the civil war ignores.

[00:24:25] One's the role of women, whether it's Belle Boyd or, you know,

[00:24:29] somebody like Sarah Edmonds or whatever.

[00:24:31] And the other one was just kind of the other front being in the

[00:24:36] border and how this was, it was like a Tinder box waiting for something to

[00:24:41] happen in England and the European powers are watching this.

[00:24:44] And if something like rebel spies, these in a warship or something,

[00:24:49] it becomes the thing that ignites it.

[00:24:51] And some people have said, Amanda Foreman wrote a great book called

[00:24:55] A World on Fire about this time period.

[00:24:59] And it pretty much the point is this is almost, almost the

[00:25:03] beginning of the first world war.

[00:25:06] Because you have all these other countries kind of watching our huge war.

[00:25:12] They're seeing how many people are being killed.

[00:25:13] They're seeing the weaponry being used and they're going, should we get in on

[00:25:17] one side or the other?

[00:25:18] Should we be a power broker here?

[00:25:20] And all they were waiting for was maybe one incident, which would

[00:25:25] give them an excuse.

[00:25:26] That sure.

[00:25:27] Which is really interesting.

[00:25:28] And I suppose lucky that it didn't happen because it would have just

[00:25:33] extended the bloodshed and everything else.

[00:25:37] There were a couple of other characters that were prominent in the book.

[00:25:41] There is a woman who lives in Niagara Falls, who is kind of a spy who

[00:25:48] also worked very closely on the underground railroad with Mr.

[00:25:51] Douglas at the Cadillac house.

[00:25:53] And in their exchanges, Mr.

[00:25:56] Douglas would send her, he was African-American, Reit was not,

[00:26:00] and he would send her these poems.

[00:26:03] And you kind of allude to almost, you know, a romantic interest between the

[00:26:08] two of them.

[00:26:09] They're clearly old friends, but I mean, was I imagining that or was

[00:26:13] that something you were clearly trying to portray?

[00:26:18] No, you picked up on it.

[00:26:20] And it's funny because I love the Reit character and in part because she

[00:26:25] runs this photography store or what it's called, sometimes called in that

[00:26:30] era, a likeness store.

[00:26:32] And in a sense we suddenly had the ability to do photographs,

[00:26:35] tint types, whatever they might've been.

[00:26:37] And everybody now going off to the front, you know, who signed up for

[00:26:41] the war, last thing they'd do would probably go down to the Reit store

[00:26:45] and get an image made that they could kind of give to their family.

[00:26:48] And it's very similar in some ways to what's going on now with us,

[00:26:53] maybe with AI or streaming video or things like that.

[00:26:57] This was like the technology change and a lot of people, Lincoln, for example,

[00:27:03] I think one reason Lincoln gets elected as president is he gives that famous

[00:27:08] speech in New York City, I believe, a house divided, cannot stand, et cetera.

[00:27:13] And then he went down to Matthew Brady's likeness or photography store

[00:27:17] and had that picture made of him.

[00:27:20] And that becomes then the one that's bandied all around before

[00:27:24] the Republican convention.

[00:27:26] I mean, he was very savvy about going, this is a new technology.

[00:27:29] This will take a guy who's just unknown from Illinois or whatever,

[00:27:34] and put them front and center.

[00:27:36] And it certainly did.

[00:27:38] It's interesting how we can look back at certain times and we tend to

[00:27:42] think, oh, photography, who cares?

[00:27:43] But at that point it was cutting edge because it was also bringing in

[00:27:47] images from the battle zone to people's living room.

[00:27:50] Very similar in some ways, maybe to what we saw on our television

[00:27:55] sets during Vietnam, suddenly the war was there.

[00:27:58] Absolutely.

[00:27:59] And I think photography has played a big part in our perceptions of any war.

[00:28:05] And I think you're right with Vietnam.

[00:28:07] If you say, think about the images you remember from Vietnam.

[00:28:11] I think most people, the assassination of that young man or woman running from

[00:28:18] the napalm who was a 12 year old girl at the time.

[00:28:21] And so it is really interesting.

[00:28:23] And it's kind of that beginning.

[00:28:25] Television made a massive change in how we perceived politicians.

[00:28:31] I don't think Franklin Roosevelt would have been able to be elected had

[00:28:35] television been a prominent medium at the time and Kennedy, it really helped

[00:28:40] Kennedy against Nixon.

[00:28:41] So I think it's interesting that you did that in Rory, your main character

[00:28:46] was an artist and part of her value in this whole excavate for the spies

[00:28:53] was that she could draw things and they wanted to use it as propaganda.

[00:28:56] So I think Reed's character was good.

[00:28:58] And I liked the play of the forbidden love interest there.

[00:29:03] That was a nice, nice addition.

[00:29:06] You know, so one of the things I did and I always get into this is I looked up

[00:29:11] photos of the USS Michigan and I looked up photos of the cataract house and,

[00:29:16] and all of those things.

[00:29:17] It's really fun for me to look at that.

[00:29:19] And I would encourage anybody who reads rebel falls to kind of do the same

[00:29:22] because those things really did exist and it's neat to see those

[00:29:27] images of those things.

[00:29:29] And another thing you mentioned, one of the things I like about living in

[00:29:32] Washington is there's so much history here.

[00:29:35] And you mentioned that there was kind of an offhand comment that

[00:29:41] Walt Whitman would hang out at the corner of L in Vermont and

[00:29:48] Lincoln would often pass by in his, at the time motorcade, but it wasn't

[00:29:52] a motorcade, it was just him on a wagon and he would nod at him and

[00:29:57] they would kind of acknowledge each other.

[00:29:59] And what struck me is, I mean, you, you put that specific cross street in the

[00:30:04] book and my office was at L in Vermont for 15 years.

[00:30:09] We just moved about a year and a half ago.

[00:30:11] And so I thought to myself all those times I have walked by that corner

[00:30:16] thousands of times really, and never knew that it had this place in

[00:30:20] history that I was standing where Walt Whitman would stand and watch

[00:30:24] Lincoln go by.

[00:30:25] So I thought that was really cool.

[00:30:27] Oh, that's nice.

[00:30:28] And, and you know, as we're talking about that's legit.

[00:30:31] I mean, Whitman did that time after time.

[00:30:35] There's a great book, I think it's just called Whitman and Lincoln or

[00:30:37] something that I read in the course of doing this.

[00:30:40] And, and it's a little tragic because they both knew of each other

[00:30:45] and they both really respected each other.

[00:30:48] And I was, I believe it was in that book or maybe some other

[00:30:51] research I was doing where Whitman was somewhat backed financially by John

[00:30:57] Hay, you know, one of Lincoln's secretaries, you know, and they would

[00:31:00] try to help him out in this type of thing.

[00:31:03] And Whitman now were a couple of weeks before the assassination in

[00:31:08] 1864, actually they said, come to the white house, we're trying

[00:31:12] to help you out on this and Lincoln was there and they kind of were

[00:31:16] in the same room, but they didn't talk.

[00:31:19] Interesting.

[00:31:20] You know, they weren't introduced and Whitman didn't want to intrude

[00:31:23] or whatever.

[00:31:24] And, you know, you look at say some of Whitman's papers and such later was an

[00:31:28] opportunity lost in a way because then too soon Lincoln was taken from us.

[00:31:33] So, uh, I love those things where they were major individuals in

[00:31:38] different fields will kind of recognize, you know, may the greatness

[00:31:42] or the good work being done by somebody else over here.

[00:31:45] And that's certainly the case with those two individuals.

[00:31:47] Absolutely.

[00:31:49] And I will say that part of the reason he would nod at him is that he

[00:31:53] didn't have a motorcade because when I first moved to Washington, about

[00:31:56] 28 years ago, the first motorcade that stopped me on my commute home.

[00:32:01] I thought this is really cool.

[00:32:02] The president's right in front of me.

[00:32:03] And then everyone after that, I was annoyed and would shake my

[00:32:08] fist at them saying you've got a helicopter use it.

[00:32:11] Where are you going at six o'clock?

[00:32:14] You need to start all traffic in downtown DC.

[00:32:17] That's right.

[00:32:17] Why are you keeping me from getting home?

[00:32:18] I hear you.

[00:32:21] As one of us to live in DC too, I feel your pain.

[00:32:24] Yes.

[00:32:26] Well, we recently moved our office to Roslyn, which is just

[00:32:30] across the river in Virginia.

[00:32:31] And I have to say the commute is much better.

[00:32:36] I know Roslyn.

[00:32:37] I used to work at USA today on that.

[00:32:39] Oh, sure.

[00:32:41] Right across the street from where I worked down.

[00:32:42] Yeah.

[00:32:43] Yeah.

[00:32:44] Yeah.

[00:32:45] So, well, tell me what projects are you working on now?

[00:32:48] What's, what's next for you?

[00:32:51] Oh, you know, we're kind of throwing some things against the wall a little bit,

[00:32:57] Jamie, but I liked hanging at this time period along the Niagara river.

[00:33:03] And I've, and a lot of people don't have maybe haven't heard of this group,

[00:33:09] but called the Finians and they were veterans of the civil war, mostly

[00:33:13] on the union side and they were mostly Irish, Irish American.

[00:33:17] And for a time, a very short time, they invaded Canada and you're

[00:33:23] going why they invade Canada?

[00:33:25] Why would they do that?

[00:33:26] And they were so desperate to get help, you know, for Ireland at

[00:33:31] that point, which was under lock and key by great Britain.

[00:33:35] It's very bizarre plan, but it had some merit and was working for a little bit.

[00:33:40] Their idea was let's seize parts of Canada and we'll

[00:33:43] exchange them for parts of Ireland.

[00:33:46] And they were a fighting machine because they had made it through the civil war.

[00:33:53] Many of them using the same weapons, the rifles and such they had used.

[00:33:57] So I began to play around that a little bit and it allows me to keep,

[00:34:02] you know, characters like Reet, maybe even Rory, you know, certainly Mr.

[00:34:06] Douglas, the cataract house hotels still go into town.

[00:34:10] So we'll see, we'll see where this goes.

[00:34:15] Well, I know you're doing some things to promote the book.

[00:34:17] Where can people find out about where you're going to be to do readings?

[00:34:21] Where can they buy the book?

[00:34:23] Yeah.

[00:34:24] Well, certainly may the best place to go is my website, justtimwendel.com

[00:34:29] and you'll see on the front page, it kind of extends down a little bit

[00:34:32] where I'm going to be over the next four, six, eight weeks.

[00:34:37] And it's kind of, it is jumping around a bit.

[00:34:40] We just signed up a gig at the Seward house, believe it or not,

[00:34:43] in Auburn, New York.

[00:34:44] So that'll be fun.

[00:34:46] And you know, the book can be found pretty much anywhere.

[00:34:49] And if you've got the wherewithal or whatever, I would urge you

[00:34:54] to go to your independent bookstore.

[00:34:56] I may just order it through there.

[00:34:58] Hopefully they have it already, but you know, the independents

[00:35:01] always need some help.

[00:35:02] So, you know, you can find it and also too, Jamie, I would say anybody

[00:35:07] who's got more questions or whatever they want to know, what was he talking

[00:35:12] about?

[00:35:12] You can always reach me through the website too.

[00:35:14] And there's a contact button on there.

[00:35:17] I'm happy to hear from you.

[00:35:19] Well, I noticed that you're going to be at Politics and Pros in

[00:35:22] DC on May 19th.

[00:35:24] So if I can make it by, I will come by and say hello in person.

[00:35:29] Yeah.

[00:35:29] And I'll be in conversation with Ethelbert Miller, who's a force of nature.

[00:35:35] I'm not quite sure what Ethelbert's got up his sleeve.

[00:35:38] Ethelbert's, this is a wild combination of stuff.

[00:35:41] He's a poet.

[00:35:43] He taught at Howard.

[00:35:44] I believe he ran for mayor of DC at one point.

[00:35:47] And he also was a Grammy award nominee for the spoken word.

[00:35:52] So I'm just a gog at the guy.

[00:35:55] Yeah.

[00:35:55] Quadruple whatever.

[00:35:57] Part of me is going, I'm not sure what I've gotten myself into, but if people

[00:36:01] want to see, yeah, come on down to Politics and Pros on May 19th,

[00:36:05] Sunday, May 19th at 3 PM.

[00:36:06] And you can see what Ethelbert's got up his sleeve for me.

[00:36:12] Well, Tim, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about the book.

[00:36:17] I really enjoyed it.

[00:36:17] If you go out, definitely check out Rebel Falls.

[00:36:22] And if you are listening to the podcast, I suggest subscribing either on Apple,

[00:36:28] YouTube or whatever platform you listen to your podcasts.

[00:36:31] And thanks again, Tim.

[00:36:33] My pleasure, Jamie.

[00:36:34] And yes folks subscribe.

[00:36:35] This is a great show.