Home on the Range

As I set out to put Doctor Higley on the big screen, one must understand my interest in this project. I grew up in Smith County, Kansas. My mother's country school teacher was the author of the book, Home on the Range. Margaret A. Nelson listened to stories she heard growing up in Smith County about Higley and the founding of the county. My mother, Beulah Black, told me that in the first chapter, Asma Walters was our relation. I read the book when I was in high school. How many people my age have read the book? I guess not many. Maybe it was that fact of mom, dad, and I going past the cabin to visit my aunt and uncle almost up to the Nebraska state line. We would come home about dusk, and never did we see a deer then, and this was in the 60s and 70s. Sometimes to me, the land was so sad, and other times it was happy. Winter in Kansas can look pretty dismal, and I guess winter made it worse. Somehow I felt the land was crying out to me for something. After high school, I attend junior college and college and dabble in drama and theater, and other subjects. I read a lot of plays, saw a lot of plays, and then comes along disco and the movie Star Wars. I just had a feeling after seeing one of those movies that in me was a movie or book. I had often wished I had majored in English, creative writing and the whole package in college, but I always thought my grammar wasn't good enough, so I rejected it. Big mistake. Moving back to Smith Center was a big mistake and also a good move. I began writing... something I had always wanted to do. I entered contests for the historical society in Topeka about true events. So I interviewed my parents and they had nothing, just bits of things that happened. Now I think that I could have written about Margaret Nelson's teaching. Never entered my mind. I begin to delve into old things, and go to historical museums. I started on my first novel. I researched diligently for it. I won a local poetry contest, and have my first short story published. I had lots of inspiration from writers in the area like a minister that wrote two books, and he asked me about punctuation. Me! I was only in sixth grade. Willa Cather had lived up north in Nebraska in the 1800s and on into the 1900s. All this was swimming around in my mind, and I still took visits to the cabin where Doc Higley lived. I was in a western style dress and had my picture taken in the cabin's door. I guess I was a little intriqued with it, and I couldn't understand why he went off and left all his belongings there. But now I know they were placed there by an organization in the 1950-60 years. Jump forward a few years, after reading through Home on the Range, it occurred to me, this would make a good movie. I concentrated on the song, and its creation. I wrote a short screenplay, then rewrote and rewrote. I just wrote frommy imagination, then got more information about the minor characters of the story. I found sites on the internet that let you submit a screenplay and producers would read the logline and synopsis. I found out more true information, talked to relatives of these characters, and began on more of the true story, or facts. The fact that Home on the Range is the state song of Kansas and that I was hearing it in movies, etc., was one motive that I decided it needed to be put on the big screen. I had just tipped the iceberg on the story. The owner of the cabin had passed away, and then relatives took over the cabin site. More publicity came out of it. It was time to save the cabin, and it was in need of repair. A campaign for money came, and more news was in the papers and media. This was my chance to get my foot in the door. Fundraisers were planned and I was there. I offered to help and finally told El Dean Holthus, I had written a screenplay of Home on the Range. Here I was this housekeeper in a hospital in Smith Center, and I have this screenplay that I was shopping to movie companies. Musicians get involved. The Praire Rose Rangers in Benton, Kansas; Michael Martin Murphey holds a concert to raise funds for it; and the project snowballs. There was a concert in Smith Center by the Freestaters from Wichta. They had played music for a film company, Lone Chimney. I looked them up. I don't remember if I emailed them or not. El Dean is introduced to this company somehow, and asks me if I had ever heard of them. No, and I sent them the screenplay anyway. Time goes on, and I forget about that. It seems that I would work on the screenplay every year for a little while, send it out, and nothing. El Dean tells me that they are interested in the story, and we meet. Ken Spurgeon likes my screenplay, but the direction El Dean suggests for the documentary is different. So, a new outline comes... the hours I have spent in the library in the genealogy section, and time spent on the microfiche machine reading the old newspapers, and time on ancestry.com produces a factual account of the story. I found out things that no one knows. So maybe my life was designed to be the one to do this project.