Old Hollywood and the Shoraps (Shoshones & Arapahoes)

I know, I promised to write about my now-in-progress novel, and I will. But I just got the cover for the new Wind River mystery that will be out September 1. And it is fabulous, which I can say because I had nothing to do with it. But here it is—The Silent Spirit.

Father John, after a sabbatical in Rome where I sent him (actually, the Provincial sent him) at the end of The Girl with Braided Hair, is back on the rez, and he and Vicky are back solving another mystery. This one moves between the present and 1920s Hollywood when the Arapahos and Shoshones appeared in several silent Westerns. The plot revolves around the murder of an Arapaho in Hollywood in 1923—totally fictitious, the murder, that is—and the connection to the murder of young Arapaho on the rez in the present—also fictitious.

But the rest is based on history. The first movie that the Shoraps (the two tribes on the rez call themselves that) appeared in was The Covered Wagon. Filmed in the Nevada desert in 1922, the movie was the first Western epic with distant and panoramic scenes and literally a cast of thousands. After the movie was finished, thirty Shoraps went to Hollywood in the spring of 1923 to promote the film by putting on an “Indian show” every night at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater before the film itself was shown. They camped in their tipis on Cahuenga Pass and rode their ponies down into Hollywood about a mile away to go to work.

Researching the novel was the best fun I’ve had in years. I bought and read so many books on old Hollywood that I now have dedicated Hollywood shelves in my bookcases, and Amazon keeps sending me e-mails about the latest Hollywood offerings. They think that’s all I read. Even more fun was going to all the places where the Arapahos were — Cahuenga Pass and imagining them riding their ponies down what is now a freeway; Hollywood Boulevard and Grauman’s Egyptian Theater, and Chinese Theater, too, and placing my hands in the very small prints of old movie stars in the concrete slabs outside the theater (those old stars were tiny people), and lunching at Musso and Frank’s Grill with Charlie Chaplin’s private booth by the door. When Vicky goes to lunch there, she gets to sit in that special booth.

That’s the background for The Silent Spirit. More about the book itself later.

Posted by Margaret