Author pens second book on region

Morley Swingle's new book, "Bootheel Man," won't be available to the public until Nov. 8, but its backstory is as old as his 2002 breakthrough book as an author, "The Gold of Cape Girardeau."

Swingle began writing "The Gold of Cape Girardeau" back in the early 1980s, back when he was an assistant prosecuting attorney in Cape Girardeau County. (He's now the county's head prosecutor.) At that time, "Bootheel Man" was just another part of the story. Only one problem -- the manuscript was an unwieldy 1,600 pages by its first draft in 1987, too much for publishing companies to take a chance on an unknown author.

"When I wrote the original manuscript for 'The Gold of Cape Girardeau,' I wanted to write a James Michener-type novel that would tell the history of Southeast Missouri in one novel," Swingle said. But Swingle said publishers quickly informed him he was not James Michener.

So instead, Swingle cut the story and found a publisher in the Southeast Missouri State University Press. "The Gold of Cape Girardeau" -- a novel that uses a modern-day court battle to tell local history -- became the press' first book, and its most successful to date, selling about 7,000 copies so far, according to press director Dr. Susan Swartwout.

For a small university press, that number is phenomenal, she said.

"Bootheel Man" follows in its predecessor's footsteps. The heroine is the same -- the young prosecutor Allison Culbertson. But the story delves even further into the past, into Southeast Missouri's prehistory as the domain of mound-building American Indian cultures. Part of "Bootheel Man" is set in the modern day, part of it in 1050.

Culbertson is tasked with prosecuting a case against a young Osage Indian man who breaks into a local museum dedicated to the mound builder culture, steals artifacts from the museum's Bootheel Man -- the skeleton of a mound builder -- and throws them off the Mississippi River Bridge, claiming the museum has no right to his ancestor's remains.

Swingle said he did hours and hours of research of the hot topic of lawsuits by American Indian groups against archaeologists and museums for removing bones and artifacts from sacred burial places. He used real-life controversies like that over Washington state's Kennewick Man as his inspiration.

His research even took him to an Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma. At their height, the Osage lived on more than 1.5 million acres including Southeast Missouri, Swingle said, making them the closest descendants to the mound builders. There he found Gina Gray, a respected American Indian artist, who consulted him on the book. Gray will speak along with Swingle on Nov. 8 at the university's multicultural speakers series at 4:30 p.m. at Glenn Auditorium. Swingle will also have a book signing at 3 p.m. Nov. 11 at Barnes and Noble.

During his research, Swingle said his views on the legal controversy over artifacts and bones changed.

"It was a huge discovery for me, and really made me much more sensitive to the abuses that the United States government has done to the Indians over the years," Swingle said. "When I started my research I was completely on the side of the archaeologists ... and after reading so much information on both sides of the issue, I pretty well switched my opinion."

Swingle also thinks he's grown as a writer since his first book.

Swartwout said she agrees.

msanders@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182