A special welcome to fellow Choc Lit author Liz Harris!
Liz's new release is a historical set in Wyoming in 1887, but this story is not your usual story, please read on to find out more about Liz and her wonderful story.
HELLO, THE
HOUSE!
What’s so special
about Wyoming, I’ve been asked on a number of occasions.
It’s a fair question
– I’ve set three historical novels in Wyoming. A BARGAIN STRUCK, set in
1887, tells the story of a second generation homesteader who lives on
agricultural land south of the railroad. My novella, A WESTERN HEART, set in
1880, is located in ranching country north of the railroad. My latest novel,
THE LOST GIRL, is set in the 1870s and 1880s, and is located in SW Wyoming, an
arid, non-agricultural region, but one that is rich in coal.
The answer is easy – I fell in love with Wyoming, its openness, its
endless wide blue sky, its history and its people when I visited the State a
few years ago. Not to mention the wrangler on the ranch where I started my trip,
who filled me in on many historical details. A rugged, good-looking man he was, tanned from days on the range. Not
that I noticed any of that - I was there for a greater purpose; namely, to research
Wyoming
in the 1880s.
Photo: Me at the border between Colorado and Wyoming
So what did I learn that I hadn’t been able to find in any of my
research books?
I’ll start with the title I gave this guest blog. I learned that anyone approaching a homestead should
holler, ‘Hello, the House!’ if they valued their life. The westward-bound pioneers of the mid 19th century often settled
on land which had once been the home of native peoples, thus giving rise to potential
strife. Also, there was growing tension at that time between the large cattle ranches
and the small homesteads. A quaint desire to avoid being shot on sight would
encourage a person to identify himself thus.
Did
isolated homesteads have any form of running water, for example, or did all
water have to be brought in from an external well outside the house? The
answer, to my surprise, was yes, there was
a rudimentary form of running water.
In
addition to the main well on the pre-1890 ranch where I started my trip, there
was a 28 foot deep, stone-lined well sunk right next to the kitchen wall. A
pipe attached to a pump next to the kitchen sink ran down to the well. Bingo! They
could pump water into the kitchen. PS. On winter mornings, they had to wait for
the ice to melt on the pump arm before using it or they’d break it.
Photo: The pump beside the sink
Call
me trivial, but I was curious about the sanitary arrangements. I knew there’d
be an outhouse, but did it have a can inside – a sort of porta-potty de luxe -
or what? No book answered this, but the friendly wrangler did. The hole in the
ground was filled in when full, and the outhouse structure lifted up and moved
to a different place.
Photo. An outhouse
Interested
in getting the feel of how it was to ride between the outlying towns, farms and
around their ranches, I emulated the
women of the American West and vaulted
into the saddle.
Having been brought up on Hollywood
westerns, I had always assumed that women at that period rode astride, but apparently
not so. A museum curator told me that women had only ridden side-saddle until
late in the 1880s. The change to riding astride hadn’t come about until there
was a relaxation in the restrictive nature of women’s clothing.
As you can see, I’m not sitting
side-saddle, my skirts and petticoats tucked under me. Rather, I’m wearing trousers and sitting
astride my bucking bronco. Yes, bucking bronco. Minutes before the photo was
taken, the horse had been rearing and snorting, desperately trying to unseat
me. It had been all I could do to hang on. Yes, indeed!
The reason why women’s clothing became
more relaxed in the late 1880s is an interesting one. Basically, Esther Morris,
the first female justice of the peace in the US, appointed
in 1870, wanted Wyoming Territory to
become a State. A certain number of votes was required for this to happen, and
because the population was so small, she needed women to go out and vote.
Esther Morris, therefore, subtly let it be known that women could relax their style of
clothing. Goodbye, tight, restrictive
corsets; hello, divided skirts and trousers. Effectively,
she bribed women to vote, and it worked. In 1890, Wyoming Territory became the
44th State of the Union.
But women didn’t have the vote as early
as 1890, I can hear you cry.
Oh, yes, they did. In 1869, Governor John Campbell
extended the franchise to women. Wyoming Territory was the first in the US to
give the vote to women. And it was the first for other women-related things,
too: the first women jurors, 1870; the first female court bailiff, 1870; the
first US State to elect a female governor, 1924. Wyoming is known as the
Equality State with good reason.
But there was no such equality for the
Chinese migrants, who started arriving in San Francisco from the Canton
province of China in the 1850s. Until well into the
twentieth century, the law ensured that the Chinese
were very much second class citizens, with restrictions on their movement and
with a ban on them becoming US citizens.
Ironically, the very State that was the
first State in the US to promote the rights of women, albeit for pragmatic
reasons, vigorously denied basic rights to the Chinese who lived and worked in
that State. The history of Chinese and Americans in Wyoming is one of growing
tensions between the two races, and it is against this background that I’ve set
my love story, THE LOST GIRL.
Blurb for the novel:
Life is tough in 1870s Wyoming. But
it’s tougher still when you’re a girl who looks Chinese but speaks like an
American.
Orphaned as a baby and taken in by an
American family, Charity Walker knows this only too well. The mounting tensions
between the new Chinese immigrants and the locals in the mining town of Carter
see her shunned by both communities.
When Charity’s one friend, Joe,
leaves town, she finds herself isolated. However, in his absence, a new friendship
with the only other Chinese girl in Carter makes her feel as if she finally
belongs somewhere.
But for a girl like Charity, finding
a place to call home was never going to be easy.
To read more about all of Liz's novels, please visit her author page on Amazon:
Amazon USA: http://www.amazon.com/Liz-Harris/e/B009V1G8UA/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1445096258&sr=1-1
1 comment:
Thank you so much for allowing me to talk to you about my interest in Wyoming, Anne Marie, and about the novels I've set there. I've thoroughly enjoyed being your guest today.
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