PREFACE

Finding Billy Battles is a work of "faction." That is, the story it tells is based partly on fact, but it has been augmented with narrative fiction. Many of the protagonists in the story were actual persons, and some of the incidents actually happened. However, other characters and events in the book are fictional.

In telling the saga of Billy Battles, I have mined my family's history and the stories I heard various family members tell while I was growing up in my native state of Kansas, a place rife with a rich Native American and immigrant history. It is, and was, a place filled with fascinating characters—especially those men and women of the past who worked so hard to transform what people once called the Great American Desert into one of the most productive regions on the planet.

I have also attempted to stay true to the vernacular of the time and place, especially late nineteenth-century Kansas. The reader will notice, therefore, a difference in the tone, mood, and colloquial language that Billy Battles uses to tell his story from the way a contemporary individual might speak. Fortunately, I can recall with reasonable accuracy the way relatives, most now deceased, spoke and behaved as I was reaching adulthood in Kansas.

Finding Billy Battles is not a western in the classic sense of that word. While the story begins in the nineteenth century in my native state of Kansas, and while it tells of Billy's early life in a state known for its violence and lawlessness, it does not remain there. In fact, the narrative traverses a large portion of Asia and Latin America at a time when those areas were still little known to most Americans.

My goal was to tell a compelling story. I hope I have done that and that you will enjoy reading this first book of the Finding Billy Battles trilogy as much as I enjoyed writing it.

PROLOGUE: TED SAYLES

My first meeting with William Fitzroy Raglan Battles was on a warm June afternoon in 1958. We sat on the veranda of a red-brick dormitory building on the grounds of the Wadsworth old soldiers home in Leavenworth, Kansas. Battles was really old, and if the truth be known, he kind of frightened me, though I didn't let on that he did. I was only twelve at the time, and I didn't even want to be there.

Chances are you have never heard of William Fitzroy Raglan Battles, and there is no reason why you should have. I know I hadn't—until that humid afternoon in the waning days of the Eisenhower era. Today, I often wonder how I could not have known about Battles, how a life as full and audacious as his could have gone unnoticed for so many generations. God, how I wish I could have known him better. But his life—as was no doubt the case with that of millions of other anonymous participants in history—was simply lost, crushed underfoot in the unrelenting stride of time.

Of course, there was no way I could know at the time that this meeting would trigger a series of events that would lead me on an extraordinary journey into the past and change my life in ways I could never imagine. When I look back on that first meeting, I wonder why I was so fearful. William Fitzroy Raglan Battles was not a particularly menacing man. But there was a definite hardness to him—the kind of stern, leathery countenance that you get from taking, and perhaps giving, too much punishment over a lifetime. I particularly recall his eyes. They were the color of pale slate, and almost as hard.

Maybe that was what frightened me—those eyes and the way they cut into you.

It was my grandmother who had insisted that I meet the man with those flinty gray eyes and that gristly exterior. One day she simply announced that we were going to drive to Leavenworth, to meet her father—my great-grandfather. That winter, my father had suffered a fatal heart attack, and my mother thought it would be a good idea if I spent the summer with my cousins on their farm near Troy, Kansas. Most of the time, I roamed the hills by myself, riding horses and occasionally helping out with the chores. I wasn't thrilled about spending an hour in the car with my grandmother driving the forty-five miles to Leavenworth. First, she drove really slowly; and second, I didn't even know I had a great-grandfather.

Nobody, including my grandmother, had ever really spoken about him—at least not in my presence. Why this was the case I was to learn much later when I was older and could "understand such things," as my grandmother put it.

The only explanation for this visit that I was able to extract at the time from my grandmother was that she wanted me to go with her because the home was commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, and my great-grandfather and several thousand other Kansans had played a significant role in it.

Big deal. The Spanish-American War. Who cares? I thought as my grandmother maneuvered her pastel-blue 1957 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham south down State Highway 7 through the undulating farmland of northeast Kansas and into Leavenworth. The Spanish-American War was ancient history. And besides, being around so many old people made me nervous. Death had taken on a new meaning for me. It was no longer some abstract event that happened to others. I had seen and felt its uncompromising manifestation when the emergency crew carried my father from our home several months before. And now I would be in the presence of someone who could die at any time.

Those were the kinds of self-indulgent thoughts that pranced through my adolescent brain that day. Today I know a lot more about my great-grandfather. The biggest regret of my life is that I was too young and too obtuse to understand what kind of human history database my great-grandfather was. I would only learn that many years later when, as a journalism student at the University of Kansas, I began to appreciate the value of personal narratives from people who could speak firsthand about events I could only read about.

That's the way it is when we become absorbed with history. We discover that the events and people of antiquity are not ghosts, or simply lifeless words on a page, or fading sepia images. They have an essence we can touch and hear and even speak to if only we have the right medium—someone who has experienced the past with passion and perceptiveness and has the keen senses with which to make it come alive to those who, until that moment, could only fantasize about it.

In this case, that medium was a rare individual who lived during what might have been the most tumultuous years in American history. Luckily, my grandmother, intractable and single-minded as she was, made sure that I would not forget this event or my great-grandfather.