In other words, I have no use for an obvious story idea as laid out in Popular Mechanics or Forensic Medicine. I want one slim, forgotten fact. From there a man can go anywhere and the story is very likely to prove unusual.
In one old volume, for instance, I discovered that there was such a thing as a schoolmaster aboard Nelson’s ships of the line. That was a weird one. Why should Nelson want a schoolmaster?
Answer: Midshipmen.
When did this occur?
Answer: The Napoleonic Wars.
Ah, now we’ll find out how those old ships looked. We’ll discover how they fought, what they did.
And there was the schoolmaster during battle. Where?
In the “cockpit” helping hack off arms and legs.
Next lead indicated: Surgery during the Napoleonic Wars.
Wild guess in another allied field: Gunnery.
Again: Nelson.
A battle: On the Nile.
A ship or something strange about this battle: L’Orient, monster French flagship which mysteriously caught fire and blew up throwing the weight of guns to Nelson.
Incidental discovery: “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck” was written about the son of L’Orient’s skipper.
Back to midshipmen, the King’s Letter Boys: They were hell on wheels, arrogant, ghastly urchins being trained as officers.
And with all this under my mental belt I girded up my mental loins. Complete after a few days of search I had “Mr. Tidwell, Gunner,” which appeared in Adventure.
All that because I chanced to find there was a schoolmaster aboard Nelson’s ships of the line.
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This is now happening right along because I haven’t let the idea slide as my laziness dictated I should.
The final coup d’état arrived last winter.
Boredom had settled heavily upon me and I sat one evening staring vacantly at a shelf of books. They were most monotonous. Whole sets stretched out along the shelves with very little change in color or size. This annoyed me and I bent forward and took one out just to relieve the regularity.
It proved to be Washington Irving’s Astoria, his famous epic of the fur trading days.
It had never been brought home to me that Irving had written such a book and to find out why, I promptly started to read it. The result was, of course, a fur trading story. But the method of arriving at this story was so indirect that it merits a glance.
Irving only served to call to my attention that I was out in the fur trading Northwest and that I had certainly better take advantage of the history of the place.
I roved around, found very little because I had no direct starting point. I went to the Encyclopaedia Britannica to discover a bibliography of such source books and started out again to ferret them out.
All these books were contemporary with fur trading days, all of them written, of course, by white men. But everywhere I kept tripping across the phrases, “The Warlike Blackfeet.” “The Bloodthirsty Blackfeet.”
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