On Dangerous Latitudes by Jack Woodville London
by Leslie Barrett
I’m Leslie Barrett and this is a Radio Readers BookByte from High Plains Public Radio. I’ve just read Dangerous Latitudes, a historical spy novel by Jack Woodville London, a historian and award-winning author from Groom, located in the Texas panhandle.
In school, we learned American History and the history of states. It’s important to read about the history of one’s country, region, state or city because some, who might be considered leaders, are trying to erase and disqualify parts of our country’s history, by banning books, removing historical landmarks and denying the heritage of many of our ancestors.
Almost none of us were taught that between 1836 and 1850 the Republic of Texas claimed that its boundaries extended all the way up the Rio Grande, over an enormous swath of land that included half of present-day New Mexico, parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and the panhandle of Oklahoma. Seemingly, no one knew exactly where the boundaries that Texas claimed were. As for Mexico, it claimed that Texas had no boundaries because it didn’t even exist.
Historical novels like Dangerous Latitudes can pique our curiosity and perhaps help us to dig a little deeper into our country’s past.
Here’s the story…
Six years after the fall of the Alamo, Mexican armies freely invade across the Rio Grande into Texas, a beleaguered republic that could lose its hard-won independence in just one skirmish.
Naïve New Orleans surveyor Alexandre LaBranche is at a crossroads: kicked off the family plantation by his abusive father, he struggles with what to do next, until his uncle introduces him to Mirabeau Lamar, Texas’ outgoing president. Lamar offers Alexandre a dubious commission to map the Rio Grande boundary, without mentioning that Texas has abandoned not only the river but the entire frontier to the Mexican army. Alexandre, desperate to prove his worth, immediately accepts.
Just after Alexandre arrives in Texas, he is ambushed and robbed of everything, including his horse and wagon, his precious surveying equipment and a promissory letter of $10,000 payment from Lamar. After hiding and fleeing from local authorities who are looking for a murderer who was on the same ferry from Louisiana, Alexandre finds himself trapped in and dangling from briars over a deep riverbed (but out of sight of the lawmen). Luckily, he’s found and rescued by an enigmatic Black woman who might also be Native American.
He soon finds himself out of his depth and at the mercy of Texas’ new president, a vindictive Sam Houston, who bullies Alexandre into becoming his unwilling spy. Houston saddles him with two bumbling horse thieves (yes, the same two who attacked him just after crossing into Texas) and sends him to spy on the Mexican army, led by Houston’s enemy, Colonel Canales. Alexandre soon learns how inept a spy he is: he whiles away his time in San Antonio, socializing and sending obviously fake dispatches back to Houston, oblivious that the Mexican army has arrived on San Antonio’s doorstep.
Canales, believing Alexandre is a surveyor for English banks that hold Mexican debt, demands that Alexandre continue to the frontier and report on how suitable the land is for a major invasion. Now trapped between Houston and Canales, Alexandre also is troubled by unsettling feelings he has developed for Noeme, the mysterious Black woman who seems to know more about Alexandre’s business than he does. He proceeds to go into hiding from all of them. Months later, he discovers the Mexican army moving stealthily through the Hill Country to capture San Antonio for a second time.
Based on London’s rich historical research and laced with exuberant, Texas-sized characters, Dangerous Latitudes is a quest across a war-torn frontier that becomes a race to save two hundred captured Texans marked for death. It is that rarest of historical fictions – an incredible and well-told story based on events that actually happened, but events that we didn’t learn in history class.
I’m Leslie Barrett and this has been a Radio Reader BookByte on High Plains Public Radio.
Jack Woodville London is a historian, author, speaker and seasoned writing teacher, who participates in speaking opportunities with historical and writing groups, including Sons of the Republic of Texas, the Writers League of Texas, SouthWest Writers, Historical Novel Society, and Historical Writers of America. Jack is also the Director Emeritus of Writing Education for the Military Writers Society of America (MWSA). Jack has written five novels, including the multi-award-winning French Letters trilogy, about the American generation that came of age in World War II and their children; Shades of the Deep Blue Sea; and Dangerous Latitudes. His nonfiction book is A Novel Approach (the accepted text used by the MWSA to introduce veterans to the basics of writing). He lives in Austin, Texas.
