A tale of adventure in antebellum America

On his 20th birthday, Jacob Hart packs a few belongings and begins the grueling several-week journey to an uncertain future. He leaves behind his family, friends and a girlfriend who refuses to accompany him on his journey. He knows when he waves goodbye to them, it’s likely the last time he will see them.

East Lansing author William Murphy weaves an exciting story of adventure and pluckiness in his new book, “Jacob’s Journey,” as Hart heads west from his family’s hardscrabble Vermont farm to Michigan to carve out a new life.

Murphy said the book is historical fiction, but it represents a typical story of the western migration that occurred in the U.S. in the early 19th century. All Hart knows is that he can’t make a living from the rocky Vermont soil, and the reports of fertile soil in the west — which at the time was Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio — fuel his dreams.

As he begins his journey, he soon learns that he has to be flexible. Little goes as planned.

“On his journey west, there are no support services. If you break a leg, you could die,” Murphy said.

In choosing the final setting, Murphy picked the small Michigan village of Barry in Jackson County, which today is nothing more than a ghost town with one original building still standing.

“I wanted it to be representative of the new frontier,” he said.

The book is peppered with accurate depictions of the nature and geology of Michigan in the early 19th century. Writing about that part of the journey was easy for Murphy, who worked for more than 40 years in conservation and environmental protection with the state of Michigan.

On the other hand, Murphy said the hardest thing about writing the book was the dialogue.

“I had to work real hard to write dialogue and to create the banter back and forth. I found it a challenge,” he said.

To help him visualize the major characters, he created background biographies for each.

“I think this is an important step for writing fiction in order to keep the story straight and to form the individuals in every sense of the word,” he said. “I had to figure out how tall Jacob would be and how he would look, among other details, and be consistent.”

Murphy also thought it was important to make Hart’s love interest in his newfound homeland not only believable but also a strong woman. His new friend of the frontier is a schoolteacher, and the relationship between the two develops slowly. When Murphy decided his book should be appropriate for both the adult and young adult markets, he eliminated or toned down some scenes between the young couple.

Murphy said his mother taught in a one-room schoolhouse, which may have served as an inspiration for the character.

Another important task was keeping everything in the book historically accurate. For instance, when Jacob arrives at his destination, he discovers surface coal and begins mining it to supplement his income from farming.

“There were large deposits of coal just below the surface, along with valuable sandstone quarries across Michigan,” Murphy said.

The author also integrated a massive fire into the book, which would not have been unusual in the cleared forests of the era.

Murphy has written 10 books, several of them travel guides for motorcyclists, which are chock-full of historical information. He has also written two well-received books on his experiences as a Marine in the Vietnam War that provide accurate and chilling descriptions of battle scenes and the impact of war on individuals.

His goal for “Jacob’s Journey” was to “create an adventure novel within a history book,” he said. He noted that he left the ending vague to leave room for a sequel.

“I’m interested in making it the story of a generational family,” he said.