Making it work in the real world.

The logistics of the story may not be as hard as I thought.

First of all, I have 26 members of a search party who get picked off one by one, either by the Ts'emekwes or the Indians.  My Lost Patrol plot.

(By the way, I never actually use the word Bigfoot, which is a modern invention, and instead use the Indian words Ts'emekwes and Skoocoom.)

To get it clear in my head, I decided to list all 26 members by name and origin and characteristics -- and how and when they get killed.

That took awhile, and some adjusting.

Then I had to figure out the distances between Sutter's Fort (basically present day Sacramento) and the Sierra Nevadas.

The setting of my of much of my story is in a town at the foot of the mountains, with a river in-between, and high tributary to the river up in the mountains.

So I had to work out the distances and travel times, and to orient the geographical locations to the time traveled. As it turns out, the gold fields were wide enough that I could orient the distance by picking a location that matched those described in my books.

Luckily there was a location where I can do all those things.  I picked a town (now a ghost town) called Bidwell's Bar, with the Feather River running by it (which I call by its Indian name, Plumas River) and the North Fork Tributary.  Thompson Peak is where a lot of the action takes place.  I have several scenes where the river is tough to cross and there are ferries, and sure enough, that's exactly what happened in that neck of the woods. 

So those locations all match the traveling distances and times mentioned in the book.  More or less.  I want it to be realistic, if not down to the inch.

The Indian tribes in the area were the Miwok and the Maidu.  I'm using the Miwok, though technically, the Maidu might be slightly more accurate.  But I've already been using the Miwok words all through the story (they are slightly southeast, near Donner Pass...)

Last thing I need to do is work out the timeline.  Where each character was on day 1, then day 2, all the way through to the end of the book, and make sure they match the travel distances and so on.

It's a big game of concentration.  I find that I'm pretty close, because I have a general idea of where everyone is when I'm writing the story, but sometimes I'm off by a half a day or so.

Frankly, you'd have to be pretty obsessed to catch me out -- but then again, there are some people who can do that.

I had to change Sacramento back to Sutter's Fort, because it wasn't founded until that year.

I'm going to do some research on how the towns looked, how gold mining was done, that kind of thing.  Try to lend as much verisimilitude as I can to the story.

I'm trying not to be anachronistic, without being crazy about it.

This story is more made up than the Donner Party, which makes it easier in some ways, and harder in some ways.

Easier because I don't have to conform to a specific historical event.

Harder because I don't have the crutch of conforming to a specific historical event.

Much more of a traditional genre story -- versus Led to the Slaughter which became a more serious story because of the subject matter.