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When I was signing copies of my Finding Billy Battles trilogy at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books recently, I was asked several times how I conduct research when writing historical fiction.

I explained that researching the first book in the Finding Billy Battles trilogy began with my memories. I grew up in Kansas listening to the way my great-grandparents, my grandparents, and my parents spoke. Everybody in my family grew up in Kansas, so it is no stretch to say that I was immersed in “Kansas-speak” from an early age.

Nevertheless, even though I grew up in Kansas and I know the places where my characters live and work very well, I didn’t know what those places were like between 1878 and 1894–the time span in which the first book in the Finding Billy Battles trilogy takes place. So, I had to do significant research, and I am glad I did. It helped me write a book that I believe is historically accurate.

Luckily, I was able to do a lot of research online. I spent a lot of time mining the website of the Kansas Historical Society as well as the Ford County and Douglas County Historical Societies. There were many other places I found useful information of the period, including the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad.

I followed the same procedure while writing The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles (Book 2 in the series). In that book, Billy Battles travels to the Orient of the 1890s. It was a time when much of Asia was under the thumb of mostly European powers who saw the region as one vast colony. The British were in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The Dutch were in Indonesia and assorted islands. The French were Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—French Indochina. And the Americans were about to colonize the Philippines.

The fact that I lived and worked in Asia for some 17 years as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune was a great help in describing the countries to which Billy travels. Of course, I was not there in the 1890s, so that meant I had to do a lot of digging.

However, I am a relentless researcher. That comes from my years as a journalist. I learned how important accuracy is to the credibility of a journalist and the news organization for which he or she works. Your stories MUST be accurate in every detail, otherwise the story, you and the company that employs you lose credibility.

Similarly, I believe authors who write historical fiction owe it to their readers to be accurate about the time and place into which they have put their characters. That means you MUST do proper research. You cannot rely on watching a movie about Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s and 1860s and then write a book based on how that film depicted the time, the places, and the events.

As I mentioned, you can do a lot of that research on line, but NOT all of it. Libraries are still the best places to find the kind of books that will tell you what a place looked and sounded like in the 1890s. Luckily for me, I have amassed an extensive library of books during the past couple of decades about 19th Century America, Asia and Latin America-the main locales for my characters in the Finding Billy Battles trilogy. I have old maps of countries, cities, and territories that have proved invaluable in creating accurate settings in the book.

Another challenge was getting the patois or the dialect of the time and place right. People spoke differently in 19th Century Kansas than they do today. They dressed differently. They interacted with one another differently. It was a time of face-to-face communication. Telephones were a rarity and of course social media back then meant meeting at church, at a barn dance–or, in the case of some people–in a saloon.

Transportation was an adventure. Trains were the fastest way to get from point A to point B—IF there were tracks. Horses were still the most common means of travel. I had to get all of that right down to the sounds, the smells, etc.

Historical fiction demands accuracy. Otherwise, your readers will not believe your story. We all suspend belief when we read fiction, but even when we do, we want the story to have a truthful ring to it. You cannot achieve that if you aren’t accurate with the construction of your setting, the behavior of your characters and the vernacular of the era. Those were all challenges I faced, but I enjoyed meeting them—just as I enjoyed facing the long line of curious readers who came to have their Finding Billy Battles books signed at the L.A. Times Festival of Books.

In The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles, I faced even more challenges. Billy finds himself in places like French Indochina, The Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan, Hawaii, and Singapore of the 1890s—and those places were utopias for cheats, reprobates, spies, and people running away from something, just as Billy Battles is.

Let me end by emphasizing again how important accuracy is in developing the historical novel. Readers need to trust you when you describe a place, a city, an event, of the past.

In fact, they almost want you to have been there so you can present them with an accurate picture of the place and time. For me, recreating 19th Century Kansas, Denver, Chicago, Saigon, Manila, New Mexico, etc. was part of the fun of writing. I want my readers to “see” what I am seeing and what my characters are seeing, hearing, and feeling.

As I said in Part One of this blog topic, I like to call my writing “Faction.” It is a blend of the journalist’s capacity to gather accurate, factual information about places and events, and the fiction writer’s flair for creating compelling characters and stories that fit into those times and venues.

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Those of us who write historical fiction are faced with a plethora of unique challenges. In fact, there are so many that it would be difficult to deal with all of them in one post.

I will break the challenges down into several parts which I will share with you over the next several blog posts.

This first post deals with one the greatest challenges when it comes to writing historical fiction: How to balance historical accuracy with artistic license.

I spent 27 years of my life as a journalist with the Chicago Tribune. Working for a newspaper taught me some basic skills regarding reporting, which is the reporter’s word for research. Journalism is an empirical discipline. That means, like science, it is a search for truth and, like science, you use trial and error, observation, and analysis to uncover that truth.

For the scientist or scholar or historian, empiricism means arriving at a truth via observation and experimentation. For the journalist, the empirical tools are Observation and Interviewing. I believe any successful journalist, author or scholar must master both of those skills–along with the ability to respect the language and to write evocatively.

If you are using the empirical tools of observation and interviewing correctly and skillfully, you will find that the information you are gathering is mostly accurate.

Accuracy when writing historical fiction is critical. That may sound like a paradox. It is not. A critical element in historical fiction is the way people communicate with one another. You want to make sure your characters if they are in the 19th Century (as mine are when the Finding Billy Battles trilogy begins) are using the correct lingua franca.

You don’t want your protagonists and antagonists using 21st Century colloquial speech or slang in 1880s Kansas. For one thing that destroys the sense of time and place and for another, it reveals to the reader that the author has not researched the era enough or is too lazy to learn and employ the vernacular of the time. I see this mistake all the time especially in American films that are set in earlier periods.

When a character in a book or film set in the 19th Century says something like: “This sucks” or “Are you nuts?” or “Give me a break!” I am immediately turned off to the story. It happens all the time–maybe not as obviously as those examples, but you get what I mean. I am sure you have heard or read similar out of time and place comments.

In the new Ben-Hur film, for example, during the climactic chariot race, Messala shouts at Judah Ben-Hur, “Are we having fun yet, brother?” I wager that phrase was never uttered by an ancient Roman. That kind of out of place comment is a distraction, an intrusion and it demonstrates either a lack of knowledge of the time the story is set in or even worse, no regard for the ear of the audience.

So that is a big issue for me. Another is in making sure places are accurately described. For example, in writing the first book of my Finding Billy Battles trilogy I had to describe, the Kansas towns of Lawrence and Dodge City as well as Denver, Colorado as they looked in the 1880a and 1890s. I used the Kansas Historical Society to find old maps of Lawrence and Dodge City. I did the same with a historical group in describing Denver. I also had to describe the Wadsworth Old Soldiers Home in Leavenworth, Kansas where Billy Battles first meets his great-grandson. In the book, the two sit on the veranda talking. In reality, as a student intern at the Kansas City Star in 1968 I actually interviewed a 98-year-old Spanish-American War veteran on the same veranda.

In The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles (Book 2 of the trilogy), I had to describe what Honolulu, Yokohama, Hong Kong, Manila, and Saigon looked like between 1894 and 1899. Because I lived and worked in these locations during my time as a foreign correspondent, I already knew what they looked like from the 1970s to now. During the years I worked in Asia and Latin America, I made it a point to collect old maps and books about places like Saigon and Manila. I was always fascinated by what Asian cities looked like during their colonial periods, and I also knew that someday I would write a novel or two about them that was set in the 19th Century.

I think it is essential to establish historical credibility with readers. Once that is done, then you can allow fiction to run rampant in your story. I believe readers are willing to suspend belief in things that a character does IF the author has nailed the time and place of an event accurately.

Haute Couture, ca. 1898: People, for the most part, behaved differently in the 1880s and 1890s. Having them do and say things that people do and say in 2016 is to ignore accuracy and precision. Relationships between men and women were very different (at least in public) in 1895 than they are today. Men–at least most men–demonstrated a particular deference toward women. It was simply the gentlemanly thing to do. Those who didn’t observe such conventions were regarded as cads, brutes or beasts–to use the patois of the time.

Women did not wear pants in 1895–at least not on the streets of places like Denver, Lawrence, Kansas, or Manila. They did not carry handguns and shoot villains onsight–at least not frequently. In fact, most women who wanted to dispatch an abusive man did so with poison–at least that is what my research of 19th Century crime records found–the legend of Lizzie Borden notwithstanding.

If you want your heroine or female antagonist to blow the brains out of a brutish man or to give him 40 whacks with an ax, you can certainly write it that way IF you have established historical accuracy and trust with your reader.

In my mind, that is how you balance accuracy and artistic license in historical fiction. The reader must believe that the time, the place, and the conduct of your characters are consistent with the era about which you are writing. Can your protagonist or antagonist act out of character within the epoch in which your book is set? Absolutely. But if they, do it is seen as an anomaly and not something the reader (or people alive at that time) would expect.

That is not a bad thing. It can give your story tension, even texture. But you must use it sparingly because you don’t want it to become commonplace throughout the story.

Another area that is critical to good historical fiction is the way things smelled, the way things felt and the way things sounded in the period about which you are writing. For example, in describing Dodge City, Kansas when Billy Battles arrives there as an 18-year-old newspaper apprentice, I wanted to make sure the reader knew how the place smelled because of the thousands of Texas cattle in pens on the outskirts of town waiting to be loaded into boxcars for Kansas City and Chicago. Then there were the stinking buffalo hides that were piled 30- and 40-feet high south of the Arkansas River. Streets in those days were not paved and were usually littered with horse apples, garbage, stagnant water and road kill.

Dodge City, Ca 1879: Not a very pleasant sight–or smell.

Clothing in the 19th Century, especially women’s clothing, was often uncomfortable. Cloth was abrasive, irritating and heavy; buildings were often unpainted and built from coarse wood, and the food was not always fresh or prepared with

the greatest attention to sanitation and safety. In Book 1 of my trilogy, Nellie Cashman (a real Irish woman who operated the Rus House Restaurant in Tombstone, Arizona) runs an ad in the Tombstone Epitaph that proclaims to her potential customers: “My kitchen is clean and free of cockroaches.” I found that ad while looking through old copies of the Epitaph.

All of these things, and I am sure I haven’t included everything here, need to be considered when balancing accuracy with artistic license. For me, this is second nature. Paying attention to accuracy is what I did for a quarter century as a journalist. The artistic license didn’t come into play until recently when I began writing fiction–or what I like to call “FACTION.”

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All authors are emotionally engaged with their protagonists. I am no exception. I want readers to love my characters as much as I do. That means creating a flawed, three-dimensional protagonist who still has “things to work out.” The Finding Billy Battles series follows Billy from his roots in Kansas, through his career as a journalist, to his final years. Along the way, Billy makes both good and bad choices–just as we all do. He does some extraordinary things–things that some might call “heroic.” But is Billy a hero? 

This article is meant to introduce the topic of “heroes”–and heroines–and get us all thinking about what kinds of heroes and heroines readers will love.

What Is a Hero?

The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission defines a hero as “Someone who voluntarily leaves a point of safety to risk his or her life to save or attempt to save the life of another.”

Does that describe William Fitzroy Raglan Battles, the protagonist in my Finding Billy Battles Trilogy?

Yes and no. There are definitely times in the three books when Billy risks his life for others. So, I guess Billy might fit the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission’s definition of a hero. But I don’t think Billy would think of himself that way. Does Billy display courage? Yes, but in most cases, those displays are in response to an attack on him, his family, or a friend.

In Book One of the trilogy (Finding Billy Battles), Billy learns at an early age that there is a thin line between courage and survival. He is just nineteen when he confronts the murderous Bledsoe clan on his old homestead in Western Kansas. During that confrontation, he accidentally kills the malicious matriarch of the clan. It’s an act that will follow and haunt him for the rest of his life. The Bledsoe gang, he soon learns, has long memories, and this single violent act will make him a marked man for decades.

As the story evolves, a young Billy interacts with several legendary people who will shape his view of the world and how a man should behave in it. From Wyatt Earp, he learns about nerve and understated courage. From Bat Masterson, he learns about unswerving responsibility and steadfastness. Even the infamous and misunderstood Doc Holliday unwittingly schools Billy about loyalty to one’s friends and comrades. Then, there is his semi-outlaw cousin Charley Higgins, from whom Billy acquires the traits of mental toughness and strength.

Last, but not least, Billy learns a lot about dependability and rectitude from his mother, who was widowed on the wild Kansas plains less than five years after her marriage. Of course, Billy doesn’t recognize or appreciate these life lessons from his mother until much later, when he approaches middle age. In that respect, I think he’s like a lot of us. We take our parents for granted, and then they are gone.

These are the attributes and qualities that Billy is fortunate to have absorbed early in life and that shape his character until his dying day. All rolled into one, they provide Billy with the means to survive and persevere on the wild American frontier and later in places like French Indochina, the Philippines, Mexico, and Germany.

Is Billy an “Everyman” Hero?

Does that make Billy an “Everyman” hero? Once again, he would contest that description. Billy describes himself best in his introduction to Book One:

“Let me begin by owning up to some pretty terrible things I did during my life. That way, you can make up your mind right now if you want to read further.

“I have killed people. And I am sad to say the first person I killed was a woman. It was entirely unintentional, and to this day, the incident haunts me. The next person I killed was that woman’s grown son, and that was intentional. If you decide to read on, you will learn more about these two people and how they came to die at my hands.

“You will also learn about other things I did—some of which I am not proud of, some of which I am. Throughout my life, I have been in many brawls, where I have had to defend myself and others in various ways. I did so without regret because, in each case, someone was trying to harm me or someone else.

“Now I know the Christian Bible says it is a sin to kill, and in some of these imbroglios, I probably could have walked away and avoided the ensuing violence. I chose not to because I learned early in my life that walking away from a scrap is too often seen as a sign of weakness or cowardice and merely incites bullies and thugs to molest you later on. There were a few individuals who tried their damnedest to put an end to me, but fortunately, I was able to dispatch or incapacitate those malefactors before they could apply the coup de grâce.

“So there you have it—a forewarning about me and my sometimes-turbulent life. As the Romans used to say, “Caveat emptor,” if you decide to continue reading.”

The violence of frontier Kansas, Arizona, and New Mexico was the crucible that transformed a naïve nineteen-year-old into a man. Without a doubt, the young men and women today who are serving in war-ravaged Afghanistan, the Middle East, and elsewhere are learning the same lessons Billy did.

Courage, however, is not just a physical manifestation. There is another kind of courage: the unspoken resolve deep within us that enables us to handle tragedy and heartbreak. That’s the kind of courage that Billy lacks early on and that he doesn’t find until later in life.

As Book One ends and Book Two (The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles) begins, Billy, who is now a successful journalist, is struggling with a profound personal loss. His response is to leave those he loves behind and journey to French Indochina. This is not the behavior of a courageous man. In fact, as Billy himself acknowledges, it’s the action of a selfish absconder. Yet, off he goes.

Cowardice and Heroism

As we soon learn in Book Two, Billy is not a physical coward. In fact, he becomes embroiled in the native uprising against the French in Indochina and later is roped into the war in the Philippines—first against the Spanish during the Spanish-American War and afterward against the native Filipinos who wage war against thousands of American troops who refuse to leave after defeating the Spanish.

In French Indochina, Billy is quite possibly the first American combatant in a country that will eventually become Vietnam. While there, he reunites with a Vietnamese man he once met in the New Mexico desert, of all places. This man, Giang Văn Ba, is now one of the rebel commanders leading the insurgency against the French. Billy recognizes the struggle is hopeless against a more powerful enemy with a trained military and superior weapons, but he respects Ba’s doggedness. This man, Billy, comes to believe, is a hero, if a doomed one.

Later in the Philippines, Billy is persuaded to take a temporary commission in the Army. His job is to serve as a liaison officer between the commander of U.S. forces and the Twentieth Kansas Volunteer Infantry Regiment led by a fiery colonel named Frederick Funston—a fellow Kansan.

For the next year, Captain Battles finds himself fighting an enemy that he secretly respects and sympathizes with. The contradiction of that situation is painful for Billy to abide. Nevertheless, he performs with courage while feeling like the unwelcome invader he and the other American troops are.

Billy’s courage inspires the men around him. But once again, if you were to attribute the “hero” label to him, Billy would undoubtedly object because he performed his duties as a liaison officer while swallowing a generous portion of guilt.

The Third Book Brings New Challenges

At the beginning of Book Three (The Lost Years of Billy Battles), Billy is fifty-four years old and content with his somewhat sedentary life as a newspaper editor in Chicago. He and his wife, Katharina, have just celebrated 15 years of married life, and then the bottom falls out. They are persuaded by the Army colonel they had befriended in the Philippines to take on a secret espionage assignment. That officer, Frederick Funston (now a general), sends them to the Mexican city of Veracruz.

Veracruz, Mexico Ca 1900

That assignment triggers a series of other dangerous missions that Billy undertakes. Once again, even at the half-century point of his existence, Billy’s life is charged with danger. If I were to interview Billy and ask why he decided to embark on such perilous assignments at his age, he would no doubt answer: “Because I felt it was the right thing to do.”

A Reporter in Real Life

There is an undeniable similarity between Billy’s later life and mine. For example, I decided to stop covering war when I hit fifty. Of course, unlike Billy, I never participated in any of the wars and revolutions I covered. I remained, as much as possible, strictly an observer.

Ron Yates in Bangkok, 1985

That said, in El Salvador, I did carry a 9 mm automatic pistol on those occasions when I was in a dodgy area. El Salvador was maybe the most dangerous revolution I ever covered, and I was determined to go down fighting rather than allow myself to be helplessly executed by some revolutionary guerrilla band or a government death squad.

I genuinely enjoyed writing about this time in Billy’s life because it mirrors my current stage of life, and I could identify with him much more than I could with a thirty-year-old man. Does that mean that after his adventures in Mexico, I allowed Billy to retire to a rocking chair in Chicago? Not on your life. In the wake of another personal tragedy, he once again flees to the country and back to Asia, where twenty more years of adventure and peril await.

At this time, Billy is living in the Philippines, attempting to ease back into a conventional, non-violent life. And he does, up to a point. But after a few adventures in the Philippines, he finds himself once again in French Indochina, helping an old friend and risking his life. That’s Billy, through and through. He is always there for his friends—even if it means putting his life on the line.

During this time, Billy often thinks about those from his past who had an impact on his character—Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday, Bill Tilghman, his cousin, Charley Higgins, and, of course, his mother. By now, Billy is a man well into his sixties, extremely comfortable in his own skin. He knows how he will react in a crisis or when his life, or that of others, is on the line.

He is, shall we say, “battle-tested.” There is a scene in Book Three, when Billy is about ninety, in which he is forced to respond to a minor threat. His “past self” kicks in, and the men he’s facing back down, mumbling that even at his advanced age, Billy has “eyes that would chill a side of beef.”

The more I wrote the trilogy, the more I began to feel that Billy and I have a unique bond. After all, we lived together almost every day for six years as I told his story. I have no doubt that he knows me just as well as I know him.

Heroism and Flaws

As with most human beings, Billy made mistakes during his life—some pretty big ones. I did too, maybe not quite as big as Billy’s, but like his mistakes, mine had an impact on my life. As for Billy, at a couple of points, he looks back on his life and decides that, despite some significant regrets, he lived his life as he wanted—with courage and integrity.

Of those two words, I think Billy and I both find integrity the most important. Courage is a quality that can be summoned from somewhere inside us when it is required. Integrity, however, is an attribute that dwells closer to the surface of our being; a quintessence that guides our everyday conduct and actions, helping us live righteous and honorable lives. Billy and I are undeniably in agreement on that point.

Funny. Now that the trilogy is finished, I find myself having “conversations” with Billy. In a way, I wish I could resurrect him, but that’s impossible. Instead, I find myself sometimes wondering, “I wonder what Billy would do in this situation?”

Sometimes he answers.

That’s when I decide to retreat to the patio and drink a cold beer.

Here’s where you can order the Finding Billy Battle Trilogy:

https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001KHDVZI/-/e/B00KQAYMA8

Ronald E. Yates
Author, Journalist, Professor/Dean Emeritus

“If you don’t want to “be forgotten” as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing about.”– Benjamin Franklin

Contact Information:
(E-mail): jhawker69@gmail.com
My Website: http://www.ronaldyatesbooks.com/
Ron Yates Blog: http://www.ronaldyatesbooks.com/category/foreign-correspondent/
Authors Guild Website: http://www.ronaldyates.com/index.htm
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/ronaldyates
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Article Submitted 05/07/2026