Where All Your Attempts Cease follows a wagon train leaving St. Louis for Portland in the 1840s, and like everything I write, it comes back to one question: the distance between who we are and who we're becoming, and what closes that gap. Researching it meant months with the letters, diaries, and reminiscences real settlers left behind — including a family named Burton, who crossed the plains in 1844 and settled in the Willamette Valley. Three things from that research reshaped the book more than anything else, and I want to walk through them.
The first was how ordinary loss was.
I'd assumed, going in, that death on the trail would read in the sources as catastrophe — the kind of set-piece tragedy a novel reaches for because it needs a crisis. It doesn't read that way. It reads as logistics.
The clearest example I found belongs to Jesse Applegate, who led part of the 1843 “Great Migration” — the first large wagon train to attempt the crossing, a year ahead of the Burtons. Near the end of the journey, families had to abandon their wagons and take to boats down the Columbia River, because no wagon road yet existed through the gorge. One boat capsized. Applegate's nine-year-old son and his brother's nine-year-old nephew both drowned.
He wrote about this decades later, in an essay called “A Day with the Cow Column in 1843” — genuinely one of the great pieces of firsthand writing to survive from the entire pioneer movement. And what struck me wasn't that he wrote about the drowning. It's that he wrote about it in the same register as everything else: the corral formation, the night-guard rotation, the buffalo-chip fires. Loss sat in the text at the same pitch as weather. Not because it didn't matter — because it had been priced in before they left Missouri. Everyone knew someone might not make it. The diaries of women collected in Kenneth Holmes's anthology Covered Wagon Women carry the same flatness — Rachel Fisher records burying her husband and then her daughter with the same forward-moving cadence she uses to record a river crossing or a spoiled batch of flour.
This changed a scene I'd already drafted. I'd written a death on the trail as rupture — the plot stopping to observe it. The record suggested something harder to write and truer to the period: grief that doesn't get to stop the wagons. Grief that keeps walking. That's closer to what I mean when I talk about what it costs to transform yourself. The cost isn't a single dramatic payment. It's compound interest, paid in installments you don't get to schedule, while the wagons keep moving because they have to.
The second was what leadership actually looked like under that kind of pressure.
Applegate's essay is the best document I found for this, and it's worth reading on its own terms, not just as material for a novel. The 1843 train swelled to roughly a thousand people before it even left Missouri — too many wagons, too many cattle, too many opinions — and it split in two: a faster “light column” and Applegate's slower “cow column,” burdened with livestock. He organized his section into squads of fifteen wagons, appointed a twenty-three-year-old as orderly sergeant to run the night watch, and ran something close to a functioning small government, moving at oxen-speed, for months, with no precedent to follow. Nobody had done this before. There was no guidebook. He was inventing the job of “wagon train captain” while doing it.
What I hadn't appreciated, before I read this closely, is how much of frontier leadership was really just the invention of temporary institutions — corral formations, guard rotations, informal courts to settle disputes — built and dismantled every single day, for months, by people with no formal authority beyond what the group agreed to grant them. That's not the John Wayne version of trail leadership. It's closer to municipal government improvised nightly by exhausted volunteers. It's a version of enduring the unendurable that has nothing to do with grit as a personality trait and everything to do with logistics as a form of care — the orderly sergeant's rotation schedule was, in its way, an act of love for people he'd known for three months and would be responsible for keeping alive for six more.
That reframed a character I'd built around a kind of quiet, unglamorous competence — someone who keeps the group functioning not through charisma but through the unsexy work of assigning watches and rationing water. I'd worried that character read as flat on the page. The record says he'd have been the most essential person in the whole company.
The third was what happened after — and this is the one that surprised me most.
Applegate's story doesn't end at the river. The drowning of his son didn't break him into stillness; it turned him into a road-builder. In 1846, he got legislative authorization to survey a southern route into the Willamette Valley that would let future emigrants avoid the exact stretch of the Columbia that had killed his boy — the Applegate Trail. He went on to help write the Provisional Government's oath of citizenship, to get dueling banned in the territory, to sit as a delegate to Oregon's constitutional convention. The crossing didn't just relocate him. It manufactured, out of the worst thing that happened to him, the specific civic person he became.
And there's a second, colder kind of transformation running underneath all of this, which I don't think a novel about this era can responsibly leave out. In 1850, Congress passed the Donation Land Claim Act — the law that let anyone who'd arrived in Oregon before December of that year claim 320 acres as a single man, or 640 as a married couple, provided they worked it for four years. It's a genuinely strange piece of legislation: one of the first American laws to let a married woman hold property in her own name, splitting the couple's claim so she legally owned half. It's also, unambiguously, the mechanism by which arrival became legal title to land that had belonged to someone else for thousands of years before any wagon reached it. Within five years, 30,000 settlers had entered the territory and 7,000 had claimed 2.5 million acres. The Burtons, arriving in 1844, would have qualified the moment the law passed.
I don't want to write a novel that treats that transformation — emigrant into landowner, landowner into citizen — as pure triumph, because the ledger it was drawn from wasn't clean. But I also don't want to pretend the transformation wasn't real, wasn't total, wasn't the exact hinge my characters are standing on when the book ends. Trading the safety of city life for open plains was never just a change of scenery. It was a change of legal status, moral position, and self — sometimes all three at once, sometimes with a bill attached that got sent to somebody else.
Where that leaves the book
Three things now form the spine of Where All Your Attempts Cease: loss that doesn't stop the wagons, leadership built out of unglamorous daily invention, and transformation that's never just personal — it's always also legal, civic, and, in this particular American story, taken from someone else.
That's what the book is built on now. Not “here is what a settler wrote in a letter home,” but what the shape of the record actually offers: what it costs to transform yourself, what it takes to endure the unendurable, how love survives when everything else is uncertain. The Burtons who crossed in 1844 don't appear in the novel by name, but the shape of their journey — one crossing, still being written into a family's story generations later — is the model the book keeps coming back to.
