The Raven’s Son Origin Story: From Manifest Destiny Lost to a Novel

Raven’s Son did not begin with Sam Rogers.

It began with a question I had been turning over in my mind for years: What if Texas had remained a republic?

I have always loved both Texas history and alternate history, so I began building a world around that idea. But if Texas were to remain independent, history needed a believable place to turn.

My answer was San Jacinto.

What if Sam Houston had died there? What if Texas had remained independent? And what might have happened to the United States if it had not eventually absorbed Texas and, following the Mexican-American War, much of the territory stretching west to the Pacific?

I called the story Manifest Destiny Lost.

And I worked on it for a very long time.

Thirty-Five Years and 60,000 Words

Over roughly thirty-five years of on-again, off-again writing and brainstorming, Manifest Destiny Lost grew to about 60,000 words.

I tried to tell this alternate history almost as though I were documenting something that had actually happened. I wrote it in the style of encyclopedia entries, describing the events, people, politics, and consequences of this other version of American history.

There was just one problem.

It was dreadfully dull.

I had created a history, but I hadn't created much of a story.

After investing that much time and thought in the project, I wasn't ready to abandon it. But if I was going to salvage all that work, something had to change.

Then I encountered the idea that eventually became Raven’s Son.

The Real History Behind Sam Rogers

I came across Lucia St. Clair Robson's historical novel Walk in My Soul, which tells the story of Sam Houston and Tiana Rogers, a Cherokee woman with whom Houston lived in Indian Territory.

Their relationship belonged to a fascinating period of Houston's real life.

After resigning as governor of Tennessee in 1829, Houston returned to live among the Cherokee. He and Tiana were together during the years before he left Indian Territory for Texas.

They had no child together.

And there it was.

What if they had?

What if Sam Houston and Tiana Rogers had had a son?

Suddenly, the alternate history I had spent decades constructing had a person at its center.

Sam Rogers was born.

Giving History a Human Story

That one fictional child changed the entire project.

Instead of simply describing how an independent Texas and a different United States might have developed, I could explore that history through someone whose very existence joined two worlds.

Sam could be the son of one of the most consequential figures in Texas history while being raised within his mother's Cherokee world. The political questions that had occupied Manifest Destiny Lost could become personal ones.

Where did Sam belong?

What did he owe his father's world? What did he owe his mother's?

And what might a man with ties to both try to do as those worlds increasingly came into conflict?

Those questions gave the alternate history something it had been missing for decades: a human being with something at stake.

The old Manifest Destiny Lost didn't disappear. Much of the world I had spent years imagining remained. But now there was someone who could walk through that world, make choices within it, and discover that changing history isn't nearly as simple as deciding how you think events ought to turn out.

That became Raven’s Son.

I've read a great deal of alternate history over the years, but I don't remember encountering another story built around the fictional child of two real historical people. I'm sure that as soon as I say that, someone will point one out to me.

If so, I can only plead ignorance.

But for me, Sam Rogers began with one simple question about two people who really did share part of their lives:

What if they'd had a son?

Thirty-five years after I first began imagining a different future for Texas, I had finally found the story I wanted to tell.