Jacob's Ladder

Donald McCaig (June 16, 1940 – December 11, 2018) was an American novelist, essayist, and sheepdog handler whose work moved between Civil War historical fiction and observational nonfiction about working dogs and rural Virginia life. Born in Butte, Montana, and educated at Montana State University, McCaig worked in New York advertising during the 1960s before relocating with his wife Anne in 1971 to a hill farm in Williamsville, Virginia, where he raised Border Collies and trained sheepdogs for the remainder of his life. McCaig's literary reputation rests on three Civil War novels rooted in deep archival research into the western Virginia and Tidewater regions: "Jacob's Ladder" (1998), which traces the parallel lives of a slaveholding family and the people they enslaved across the war; "Canaan" (2007), its Reconstruction-era sequel; and the 1985 horse-cavalry novel "Nop's Trials". "Jacob's Ladder" won the Michael Shaara Prize for Civil War Fiction and was named the best novel of the 20th century about the Civil War by the Library of Virginia. In 2007 the estate of Margaret Mitchell selected McCaig to write the second authorized continuation of "Gone with the Wind". The resulting novel, "Rhett Butler's People", retold the saga from Rhett Butler's point of view and was published simultaneously in eighteen countries. In 2014 the estate again commissioned McCaig for a prequel — "Ruth's Journey", the life story of Mammy, the enslaved nurse who raises Scarlett O'Hara and is referred to in Mitchell's original only by her function. McCaig framed both novels as a deliberate effort to give voice to characters Mitchell had reduced to stereotype or silence. His nonfiction includes "Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men" (1991), an account of sheepdog culture in the Scottish borders, and "Mr. and Mrs. Dog" (2013). McCaig competed at the U.S. National Sheepdog Finals and judged trials internationally. He died at his Williamsville farm in 2018.