Giving voice to someone whom history nearly erased
I’d like to share with you more about my biographical/historical novels on the life Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix, who lived throughout the 19th Century.
I first discovered Sarah at a historical society meeting in a Southeast Texas town where I was living, not far from where she is buried. As a free-lance writer, I was curious—why did this Cherokee woman have a Texas historical marker?
That question changed the course of my life.
On January 8, 1991, standing in a misty haze beside Sarah's grave at the site of her former ranch near Galveston Bay, I made a promise to tell her story. It would take me over thirty years of researching and false starts—and the past eight years of writing—to bring her voice to life in a two-book series titled A Woman of Marked Character: The Imagined Portrait of Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix, 1812–1891. Eight years of determined passion!
I wrote the novel as one massive tome over that time. When I realized I'd written as many pages as Gone With the Wind, I decided to publish it in two volumes. The story I tell of Sarah's life is fiction woven from facts, and, primarily, it is the story of her love for her family.
This is her state historical marker that commemorates Sarah's existence in this world. It stands on a county road in Chambers County near her cemetery, placed in the 1970s. As well-documented as the marker was by her family, with my intense research I found that some of these dates differ. So many of her life-treasures I found as I pursued her story.
Sarah was born into privilege—some wealthy Cherokees farmed plantations and were slave owners. She was educated, fluent in multiple languages. But she was also born into peril in her Cherokee Nation. Sarah's life would be a saga of survival, reinvention, and strength in the face of unimaginable loss.
Over the years I researched 19th-century Cherokee culture, Texas coastal life, legal history, and Sarah's letters and others' diaries and memoirs. I visited archives and museums, and walked the land where Sarah walked. I traced her route from Georgia to Arkansas to Texas.
I show her story though narration, but I also wanted to capture Sarah's interior life—her voice, her grief, her grit. For this I show her inner thoughts through occasional first-person chapters titled "Sarah Speaks", where she speaks to us from her grave beside which I stood that day decades ago.
This is not a biography—it’s historical fiction. But it is deeply anchored in fact. I wanted to give voice to someone whom history nearly erased.
Marker at Sarah Ridge’s former ranch, Smith’s Point, Texas
Marker photo credit: Courtesy of the McNeir Family Collection, digitized by Paul Ridenour