Reading historical fiction transports us to the times and places our ancestors lived, helping us understand their world beyond the basic facts found in records. Author Paulette Jiles has mastered this genre, as shown in her novels News of the World (2016) and Enemy Women (2002). Her books are set in areas where my ancestors lived in the 1800s – Missouri, Arkansas, Indian Territory, and Texas. This fascinating region saw turmoil and unrest throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction. Jiles’ latest novel, Chenneville: A Novel of Murder, Loss, and Vengeance, continues the theme of following wanderers seeking peace and redemption found in these earlier novels.
We’re reading Chenneville for the 2025 Family Locket Book Club winter selection on Goodreads. As family historians, we seek to place our ancestors in their historical setting, but it can be difficult to translate our modern worldview to theirs. Excellent historical fiction transports us and teaches us. Those of us researching families in the Missouri-Arkansas-Texas borderlands during this period often struggle to interpret the complex loyalties and shifting alliances that characterized the region. While military records, court documents, and newspaper accounts provide factual frameworks, well-researched historical fiction can illuminate the daily realities our ancestors faced.
Chenneville is the story of a Union soldier, John Chenneville, seeking to put his life back together after a terrible head wound caused memory loss for several months. We follow his actions of late 1865 to 1867. His ancestry is part of the early French settlers who established communities along the Mississippi River in the mid-1700s. Returning to his plantation, he finds that nothing is the same after the ravages of war have touched all he loved. John struggles to regain his reasoning ability and physical strength, then sets out on an odyssey to find A.J. Dodd, the man who killed his sister and her family.
Historians have written much about the upheaval in the Ozarks during the Civil War and Reconstruction, but following John Chenneville’s journey through Missouri and Arkansas, then into Indian Territory and Texas, gives us a deeper understanding of the lawlessness our ancestors lived under. We meet good and bad people as John follows Dodd’s trail. Paulette Jiles creates fascinating characters, and Chenneville includes a U.S. marshall, a female telegraphist, Union soldiers stationed in Texas, and members of the Five Civilized Tribes navigating the complex political landscape of Indian Territory. Each character represents a different facet of society that researchers might encounter in their family histories.
Jiles paints pictures with her words that help us imagine the geography and culture. Her website describes her as a “poet and memoirist,” and her gift for words is evident throughout her books. The author’s lyrical descriptions of the landscape and culture reflect her deep understanding of the region’s geography and peoples. Consider this scene where John encounters a Native American family in Indian Territory, likely in present-day eastern Oklahoma:
He saw a longhouse in a small clearing. It was capped by a thatched roof that hung down in a fringe. The longhouse was made of upright posts with a blanket-hung opening for a door where firelight streamed out through the overhanging thatch in stripes of shadow and flame. He heard poeple talking and smelled coffee and some kind of bread baking.
These people were either Caddo or perhaps Choctaw, maybe Chickasaw. The longhouse was like the one he had stayed in in the San Bois. John speculated that they had slipped away from the arbitrary boundaries of their appointed reservation in Indian Territory to return to theses piney woods, this increasingly swampy country, which was, he had been told, their ancestral homeland.
For family historians researching ancestors in the Missouri-Arkansas-Texas borderlands in this era, Chenneville provides valuable insights into their daily lives. The novel can help us interpret the sparse official records we often find: the terse entries in military pension files, the brief mentions in newspaper accounts, or the cryptic notations in court records. By understanding the social and cultural context of this transitional period, we can better piece together our ancestors’ stories and understand the challenges they faced.
Best of luck in all your genealogical endeavors.
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