It’s so great to be back on our regular blogging schedules here on P&P. I’ve really missed everyone! I hope you enjoyed the guests and maybe won some fabulous prizes.

 

Today, I’m going to talk about the importance of aprons. I’m not so old that I can’t remember when every wife, mother, and grandmother wore them. They were quite handy to have around. The main principle was to protect the dress underneath, especially when cooking. Aprons were a lot easier to wash then a dress. Back before automatic washers and dryers there was usually only one wash day set aside per week. Unlike today when we can pop something in the washer and turn the dial, washing clothes was a major chore.

 

But let’s look at some of the other uses that aprons filled.

 

They were handy for removing hot pans from the oven. Not exactly a good replacement for pot holders, aprons were readily at their fingertips and did the job.

 

Aprons were used for gathering eggs from the chicken coop. Or for carrying fussy chicks. And sometimes for taking half-hatched eggs to be finished in the warming oven. They could also shoo an angry rooster or a lazy dog off the porch in case of need.

 

When company came, those aprons made ideal hiding places for shy children. And those big old aprons were excellent for drying tears or cleaning dirty ears.

 

When the weather turned cold, aprons could be wrapped around grandma’s arms and used as a makeshift shawl. Or she could wipe sweat from a brow and carry kindling and wood chips into the kitchen for the stove.

 

While working in the garden, aprons were really useful to have. A woman could load her apron full of ripe vegetables. And she could use her apron to hold the hulls of peas she shelled. In the fall, aprons could carry apples that had fallen from the trees. Those nifty garments could polish those apples to a shine too.

 

Unexpected company coming to call? No problem. It was surprising how much furniture that apron could dust in a short time. Better and faster than a feather duster and she didn’t have to go looking for it!

 

Aprons were amazingly used in place of cell phones. When dinner was ready, grandma walked out onto the porch and waved her apron to call men in from the fields. It was a sign dinner was ready and they’d better get their rears to the house.

 

The big roomy pockets of aprons would hold plenty of clothes pins when grandma was hanging out wash on the line. Those pockets held a variety of other things the wearer wanted close at hand.

 

In the West, aprons were made from the all-important flour sack and they covered as much of the dress as possible. Cotton material was also used if it was available. The full aprons had a loop or opening that went over the head and held the bib in place. All aprons had fabric ties that went around the waist and tied in back. There were also half aprons that went only from the waist to the knees. Back in Victorian times and earlier, aprons were decorative and worn as actual clothing. In the 50’s and 60’s before they went out of style completely, aprons became merely a fashion statement when entertaining and were very frilly.

 

Whatever the use, aprons were around for a long time. It’s sad that no one wears them anymore. I have fond memories of my grandmother in her worn apron shelling peas on her front porch. And of my mother, standing at the stove preparing a meal. I loved those old aprons.

 

Do you have any memories of aprons that were worn by your grandmother, mother….or grandpa? I’d like to hear from you.

I started and ran into a roadblock.   Then I started thinking .   (Always a dangerous thing).   What happened to my lady rustlers? 

Most received short prison sentences, if any, while men were often hung for the same offence.  I reasoned that the cause was lack of prisons for women.    Wrong.   Women were sent to territorial prisons along with the men.

On to other prisons. San Quentin. I didn’t know it was the oldest prison in the west. The current facility – or at least part of it – was built in 1852.

But by now I’m hooked. How many other prisons? There was the Montana Territorial Prison built in 1871. And Fort Selden, built in 1865 in New Mexico. And finally the Colorado State Prison in 1871. I visited them all via internet.  The latter has a ghost tour. Thus the diversion to ghosts. I just had to find out more about them.

It’s now two a.m.

Okay back to my orginal intent.   I wanted to blog about lady rustlers because they were a colorful lot. There was Cattle Annie and Little Britches, the Rose of Cimarron and Cattle Kate among others. The most fascinating to me was the Rose of Cimarron – Rose Dunn.

Rose was convent educated. Her parents came to Oklahoma during the Run in 1889. She met the Doolin gang through her brothers who were cattle thieves, and she was captivated by Bitter Creek Newcomb who was described as “handsome as a movie star.”  (Now how can you not fall in love with a guy named Bitter Creek.)

When she joined the gang, she became nurse, scout, spy, courier and horse holder for the gang but she was not a loose woman. According to “The Cowgirls” by Joyce Gibson Roach, the entire gang worshipped her. If anyone had ever dared to intimate that she was not all a good woman should be, any one of the crowd would have killed the accuser instantly.”

During one encounter between the law and the gang, she proved herself a true western heroine. The gang was holed up in a hotel when discovered by the law. Rose was upstairs when she looked through the window and saw Bitter Creek fall wounded by the livery stable. She buckled two belts of cartridges around her waist, grabbed a Winchester and bailed out the window holding on to sheets tied together to make a rope. Running into the line of fire, she gave Newcomb the revolvers while she manned the Winchester.” Bitter Creek survived that battle but not the next.

 She eventually married into a substantial Oklahoma family and lived a long and respectable life. There is some debate as to whether she served a term in prison or not. That’s another topic for more research.

Cattle Annie and Little Britches also rode with the Doolin Gang. Seventeen year old Annie McDoulet and sixteen-year-old Jennie Stevens were delinquent teenagers. It is reported they stole cattle and horses and peddled whiskey to the Osage. After the Doolin gang was brought to justice, a marshal was charged with bringing them in Little Britches saw the men coming, leaped out a window to a horse, and galloped off. The marshal, not wanting to shoot a woman though she had emptied her gun on him, shot her horse instead. It’s reported she fought like a wild cat until the marshal spanked her.

Then there was Mrs. Helen Loveless. According to the Texas Livestock Journal, Mrs. Loveless was found guilty of killing cattle belonging to stock raisers in Paradise Valley, Texas. She owned her own ranch but apparently fed her hired hands from beef on the range. The reporter added that although Mrs. Loveless was probably forty-five years old, she married a youth of nineteen who hightailed it with some of her horses. The conviction of a woman was unusual, and the reporter concluded that perhaps the jury might not have found her guilty if she had “been young and loveable” instead of “Loveless.”

These are only a few of the wild, wild women of the west. Most served only short prison terms, if any, although Cattle Kate was hanged. Overall, justice seemed much more lenient with women than with men.

And now from those tidbits of history, I have many other subjects to research, including western ghosts.   That may well be my next topic, unless, of course, I’m diverted again. 

Does anyone else here go through this ritual?   Do you stretch one hour into five, popping from one website to another in a search for another wonderful tidbit.   Are you, too, an internet  addict?

 

 

 

 

Howdy. I’m right proud to be back at the corral in Wildflower Junction. The Old West never grows “old” for me, and today I’ll jaw about a “lady,” Lottie Deno, so-called “Queen of the Pasteboard Flippers.” A gambler who learned the art at her father’s knee, so to speak.

Lottie was christened Carlotta J. Thompkins, but during her travels took many names: Laura Denbo, Faro Nell and Charlotte Thurmond…the latter name when she finally fell in love and married part-Cherokee Frank Thurmond.

Taking the nickname Lottie Deno protected her Episcopalian family in Kentucky from knowing she supported herself by gambling. Money she frequently sent home to support loved ones would have been considered shocking and gained by illicit means. She lied and told her mother she had married a wealthy Texas cattleman. Don’t you wonder, though? Would old Ma have accepted the funds, anyway?

But I get ahead of myself. Lottie’s father was an upper-class farm owner in the areas of Lexington and Louisville, and he served in the Kentucky General Assembly. Slavery was prevalent and Lottie’s nanny was seven-foot-tall Mary Poindexter, the slave who was devoted to Lottie and remained so even after the Civil War.

After Carlotta graduated from an Episcopalian convent, her father often took her along on his business trips to Detroit, New Orleans, and even to Europe. It was in New Orleans, where he raced his horses, that he loved to gamble and taught his daughter every trick he knew about card playing. Lottie was a stunning, vivacious redhead, well-educated and refined in manner. In other words, she could probably have gotten away with murder.

Her life changed dramatically when she was 17 years old, and her father, a Southerner at heart, enlisted in the Confederate army. He died in battle, and shortly thereafter her mother pined away. Relatives sent Lottie to Detroit, and instead of finding a wealthy husband, Lottie fell in love with Johnny Golden, one of her father’s former jockeys, and now a gambler. With Mary always at her mistress’s side, Lottie and Johnny became expert gamblers, working riverboats on the Mississippi River and tidewater towns.

Near War’s end, Lottie traveled west to San Antonio and continued to ply her trade. That’s where she met Frank Thurmond, and worked for him at the University Club. Even though he had murdered a bully in self defense, he left town ahead of bounty hunters, and Lottie soon followed.  

Though every professional gambler was known to cheat, Lottie was much sought after by cowboys with hats in hand, and let’s not forget Doc Holliday. That’s when she crossed paths with a jealous Big Nose Kate.

Legend has it that Kate accused Lottie of trying to steal Doc’s affections. Now remember, Lottie was a well-brought-up lady and pretty as the dickens. I leave it to you to decide if she might have screeched at Kate, “Why you low down slinkin‘ slut! If I should step in soft cow manure, I would not even clean my boot on that bastard! I’ll show you a thing or two!”

She pulled a gun, and Kate also drew her weapon. Legend further says that Doc Holliday stepped between them to defuse the fight. Hmm. From what I hear tell, and if history is to be believed, Holliday had a rather short fuse. Would Lottie have dared call him “that bastard” in his presence?

The lady gambled her way across West Texas. In Fort Concho she was called “Mystic Maude.” She moved on to San Angelo, Denison, Fort Worth and Jacksboro. Eventualy she found Frank again at Fort Griffin, aka The Flat. Johnny Golden, the jockey-gambler came back into her life briefly at Fort Griffin, but he was shot dead the next day. Good-hearted Lottie paid $65 for his casket but didn’t attend the funeral.

After five years in Texas, Lottie and Thurmond pulled up stakes and moved to New Mexico where they married. Lottie became a well-respected pillar of the Deming community. Purportedly, she financed the original 1892 St. Luke’s frontier church with $40,000 she had won off Doc Holliday.

Many a later-day writer has espoused the prostitute or madam with a heart of gold. Miss Kitty of TV “Gunsmoke” fame, played so well by Amanda Blake, was based on Lottie Deno. And my schoolmarm, turned prostitute, turned back to schoolmarm in WALKS IN SHADOW, Lillibeth, was one who could have been patterned after Lottie as well.

My mom, bless her, loved to yodel, Charleston, and generally raise a bit of a ruckus in company. We affectionately called her, Honkytonk Gal. She would have gotten along famously with Lottie.  How do y’all see Soiled Doves, Light Skirts and Madams of yesteryear? With hearts of gold or gold diggers? 

One person will be picked from those who comment, and I’ll send a signed copy of one of my favorites. Now a collector’s item, I guess, since it’s out of print. WALKS IN SHADOW will introduce you to Lillibeth Gentry.

To those who plan to be at RWA National Conference in July in San Francisco, please stop by during the Literacy Signing event and say Howdy.

In a waiting room recently, I took my cell phone in my hand, not to annoy the other patrons but to re-live some fun moments. I checked through my saved pictures — my hubby and me at the Angels/Sox game at Fenway, Charlene Sands and me drooling at a Tim McGraw concert, a bazillion pix of our year old grandson — and I enjoyed everything all over again.

When I got my Kodak Instamatic for a graduation present sometime last century, I thought I was on the top of Everest. With its Magicubes, it was so state-of-the-art. In my wildest dream then, I never imagined a future where I could take pictures with a phone….and email them to a computer! Or use a digi-cam where I can delete all of my faux pas in a flash and where everything’s got a date for instant record keeping. Or scan a horde of old photos for publication on the Internet for you to see.

I wanted to share today some of the gorgeous antique photographs that inspire me. But beforehand, I’m going to make you suffer through a brief history of photography through 1900. After all, I am a retired schoolteacher and lecturing’s a hard habit to break.

Cameras existed long before J.N. Niepce produced the first permanent image, a heliograph, in 1826 - an exposure that took 8 hours with a camera obscrua! This was an image of an outside scene formed by a simple lens and sunlight shining through a small hole into a darkened room. (Camera obscura means “darkened room.”)

In 1837, his partner, Louis Daguerre, began to produce images on silver iodide-coated copper plates that took 30 minutes to develop with warmed mercury. Two years later, Fox Talbot introduced the negative from which many positive images could be produced. But paper negatives didn’t produce the detailed images of the daguerreotype. In 1841, he patented his “calotype” negative/positive process with its 5 minute exposure time.

London sculptor Frederick Scott Archer never patented his 1851 wet plate collodion process, where he spread a mixture of nitrated cotton dissolved in ether and alcohol on sheets of glass. The result: the 10-second exposure “tintype.” Much cheaper than the daguerreotype, the tintype brought photography to everyday people. The name probably comes from the tin shears or scissors needed to cut the small pictures (about 2″ x 3″), rather than the metal plates on which they were reproduced.

In 1861, Scottish physicist James Clerk-Maxwell came up with the color-separation method by using green, red, or blue filters when taking black and white photographs. And during the Civil War, Mathew Brady and his staff exposed 7,000 negatives while covering the war!

British physician Richard Leach Maddox developed the dry plate process in 1871, using an emulsion of gelatin, the protein in animal bones, and silver bromide on dry plates. (Gelatin is still used today.) Exposure time: 1/25th of a second!

When he was 24 in 1880, George Eastman set up his Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, NY. By 1888, the general public had access to a simplified camera, thanks both to his “Kodak Number 1″ model and his mass developing/processing service. A year later, Eastman produced the first transparent roll film. This was a vast improvement over the 20-foot roll of paper in the “Number 1″ that produced 100 two-and-a-half inch circular pictures.

The next year, 1889, Thomas Edison improved the Kodak roll film to 35mm and put the perforations down each side. This became the international standard for motion picture film. Briton Eadweard Muybridge, who had changed his name from the unexciting Edward Muggridge, is credited as the “father of the motion picture” for his 1877 time-stop sequence photos of Leland Stanford’s galloping horse. He didn’t copyright his images, though, and lost a lawsuit against Stanford when he published them. Yes, that’s the same guy who named a university for his son. (Mr. Muybridge and his “flying horse” play a brief but adorable part in a work of mine that likely won’t ever emerge from my hard drive. But oh I had fun writing it!)

In 1880, the first half-tone photo appeared in a newspaper, and ten years later, Eastman introduced the Kodak Brownie box camera.

Okay, now the lesson is over. Last year, my mom moved to a beautiful retirement apartment, leaving my brother Paul and me to shovel out her old house. While the process that he and I have nicknamed The Upheaval has its ups and downs, one “Up” is the treasure trove of antique photos I’ve found. Going through them is like nirvana.

This tintype of my great-grandfather shows him handsome enough to star in his own romance novel. Agreed? Even more interesting is the tintype in the same studio of an unidentified woman. It’s not his only sister. And it definitely isn’t great-grandma. An old girlfriend? No one knows. But Great-Grandpa was happily wed for almost 55 years to my darling great-grandma.

Look at that face. How could he not? One can almost forgive her for weighing only 98 pounds the day she gave birth to her eighth child. (I did not inherit those genes, by the way.)

But, I do think Tintype Woman deserves a story of her own. Especially since I borrowed Great-Grandma’s name for a character in my first book.

The next photo touches me deeply. One of my great-grandparents’ seven sons passed away as an infant, little Paul. In the nineteenth century, it was common to photograph the dead children, but my ancestors fortunately passed on that tradition and only depicted his catafalque. I just can’t help being teary-eyed just looking at it; I think this could evoke a powerful scene in a future book.

Well, their second son was my grandfather, a prim and proper minister. It seems his profession gets short shrift in romance novels because of, ahem, the love scenes. Truth to tell, the hero of my Eadweard Muybridge tale is just such a preacherman. But I think Grandpa’s a dashing hero anyway. I just imagine him on the way to woo his beloved (my grandma), as proud of that buggy and his horse Babe as any fictional hero with his Stetson and stallion.

After seminary in St. Louis, he took a call to Union City, Oklahoma, which evokes every pioneer town I’ve ever dreamed up myself, or read about. How about you?

But now’s when things get interesting and I get to let my imagination run wild. A whole ton of the old photos aren’t labeled with any specific details. Grandpa and Grandma lived in a parsonage, so no one knows who belonged to this homestead. All that’s written on the back is: “A bird’s eye view of the place taken last spring. Oklahoma.” So without a who, exactly where, or when, I can people this homestead with whomever I want.

How about these twins? Boy or girl? Children of both genders in the late 1800’s dressed quite similarly until little boys turned six or so.

Very poignant is the picture of “Raymond and children.” No relatives alive today remember them. No last name. No date. No hometown. Where is Mrs. “Raymond?” Did she die birthing one of the kids? Was he heartbroken? What futures, what loves, what adventures did those little kids have? Did they have a stepmother later on? Was she wicked? Since I don’t know for sure, I’ll just give them a good stepmom in some future tale. I might even let Raymond find love again.

Now, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to help me develop a story about the woman in this photo. All I know about her is the photography studio’s label, “Sedalia, Missouri.” Look into her eyes and tell me the story you see there when you comment today. In three sentences or so, give her a name, a goal. Conflicts and motivations. A future worthy of a romance novel heroine including of course, a hot hero. My family members will pick the “story line” they like best and that writer will receive a copy of my latest release, Midnight Bride, and a pair of sterling-silver cowboy hat earrings.

So get creative. Who is the pretty lady? Where does she live? On what journey would you like her to go? And most important of all, who will be the love of her life?

Though I write historical fiction, I try to make my novels as factually accurate as I can.  There is always a ton of research that goes into any work, even if some things stayed pretty constant for a given time period, because there are exceptions that apply to certain places.

I’ve always loved Wyoming, because to me it holds the heart of the west in an era where minding your own business was shared by all.  That egalitarian independence is fertile ground for heroes wanting to hide from their pasts, and for strong-minded heroines who weren’t content to be a man’s ornament. 

Throughout the world, women by and large were regarded as their husband’s property.  They couldn’t vote, couldn’t hold a government office, and in most places, they couldn’t own or inherit property.  The latter was a problem Esther Hobart Slack faced when she was widowed in 1845 and, under Illinois law, she was unable to inherit her husband’s property.  Though the successful milliner wasn’t depicted as a rabid woman’s suffragette, Esther went on to become a champion for woman worldwide. She married John Morris, and traveled with him to South Pass City, Wyoming where he attempted to make a fortune in the gold mines.  A greater treasure awaited Esther, for when a political office became vacant in the mining town in 1869, then Territorial Secretary Edward Lee appointed her as the Justice of the Peace of South Pass City.  Esther was the first woman in the world to hold such an office.  During her tenure, she never had a case repealed.  

Many credit Secretary Lee with opening the door to women’s rights for he was a prominent suffragist.  At a tea party hosted by Esther Morris and attended by legislators and forward-thinking citizens, the seed was sown to give women equality in the Wyoming Territory. 

Many viewed the proposed bill as a lure for women to settle in Wyoming, for men outnumbered women six to one.  Those winters get mighty long and lonely!  

Later that year, Senator William Bright drafted the final bill titled “An Act to Grant to the Women of Wyoming Territory the Right of Suffrage and to Hold Office.” 

Those some opposed it, nobody fought to stop it.  The equality bill passed and became law, which surprised some in the Wyoming Territory and shocked the world. 

While a national conference was taking place in Washington, DC regarding women’s rights, Wyoming women were already making history. 

Mary Symons became the first woman bailiff in the world in 1870. 

Louisa Swain became the world’s first woman voter under “laws guaranteeing absolute political equality.” 

Eliza Boyd was the first woman selected to serve on a grand jury in 1870. 

In 1894, Estelle Reed Meyer was the first woman statewide elected official when she won the vote for the Superintendent of Public Instruction. 

In 1925, Nellie Tayloe Ross was the first woman governor. 

And the city of Jackson, Wyoming became the first city in the world entirely governed by women in 1920.  

Settings are very important in our novels.  The heroine in my second novel was a woman who’d escaped one man’s oppression and now wanted to run her guest ranch and be afforded respect.  I hope you’ll read One Real Man and agree that Wyoming was the perfect setting for Josie’s and Gil’s road to romance. 

Thanks to the Petticoats and Pistols gals for having me back.  I’ll draw a name from the comments and give away an autographed copy of One Real Man.

Dear Reader, 

Someone asked me how I became so interested in our Native American Indians and this was my reply—“At 12 years-of-age, I fell in love with a dead Jewish actor who played a dead Indian”. 

It was the movie star Jeff Chandler who played the part of the Chiricahua Apache leader, Cochise, in the movie BROKEN ARROW made in the l950’s.  After that every term paper or book report I did in school was about our westward expansion and Apache Indians.   

Many years later, I went to work for the producer of The PTL Club televisions show in North Carolina.  We started doing a series of shows we called Days: Truckers of America Day, Italian American Day, Athletes of America Day, etc..  I asked my boss if we could do something on American Indians and have a Native American Indian Day show for them.  He said to research it because he didn’t know anyone working with American Indians and that if I checked it out and it looked promising, he would see what we could come up with. 

Well, I knew of a work in Farmington, NM, and I’d read a heart-wrenching story of a Cheyenne girl named “Crying Wind,” that had touched my heart. It was the story of a teenage girl who when ran away from home and the reservation to try to make it in the white man’s world.  Trying to fit it, she died her hair blond, dressed older, (she was under 16), and did a lot of things that had bad consequences for her until a Presbyterian Minister came into her life.  He turned her to Jesus, who healed her broken spirit, and made a big difference in her life.  So armed with these two people, the missionary in Farmington and Crying Wind, I went back to my boss and presented them to him. 

In the meantime, someone had found a father and daughter singing team called “Pam and Tom Thumb,” and we did our “Indian Day Program.” Unfortunately, for me and for the show, it did not go over well. But through that program, a missionary working with Apaches in Cibicue, AZ wrote to my boss and said she knew some more things that God was doing with American Indians and if we ever did another an Indian Day Program, would we please contact her for more information. Needless to say, my boss did not want to hear anything more about Native Americans, but I truly felt the letter had come for my benefit anyway, so I took it home and answered it and the missionary and I became friends.   

For the next ten years I spent all my summer vacations with her on the Apache and Navajo Reservations and attend Native American Pastor convocations. I met many wonderful Apache and Navajos, as well as people from many other tribes.  I was grieved and touched by their poor living conditions on the reservations and was appalled that we would let the real First Americans live like that in this day and age.  That started my empathy and love for them as a people. 

One day in l982 while my son and I were getting ready for work and school, a famous romance writer was on GOOD MORNING AMERICA, discussing her latest best seller.  I turned to my son as we passed each other in the living room and I said: “I’ve read her books and I know I could write one every bit as good as hers.”  

And my son said, “If you can, do it,” putting the dare before me to write a historical novel.  So I took him up on it and I wrote the first book in three months.

It is a romantic historical saga about an Eastern Baltimore belle and an Apache warrior caught up in a taboo love that has the power to heal or harm a broken people.  Set in historical SE Arizona of l860-1880, Apache Warrior proves love knows no color, creed or race.  It happens in the heart, when and where you least expect it and if allowed to grow, can conquer differences in culture, hatred and personal loss.  

Kensington has asked for a second book on another tribe and setting, so I have started the second book.  It will feature a Navajo medicine man and a pastor’s daughter from Virginia.  I hope you will look for it in 2009.   

Thanks for taking the time to read my posting.  I hope you will enjoy APACHE WARRIOR. I’m giving away one copy of it to someone who posts a comment or a question. Good luck!

Carol Ann   

One of the most dangerous things about living in the Wild West was how close they came to the edge of physical survival.  Can you imagine giving birth at a time when the number one killer of women was giving birth?  

Fortunately, it’s all fiction for us, so we as writers are free to wreak havoc in our stories.  But our tales are based in reality, and those were some tough men and women.  Adding a medical problem to a story raises the stakes immediately.  Not only are we concerned about how the relationship is going to work, or how the villain will get stopped, but we also wonder:  Who’s going to tend to that stab wound?  And what is that strange disease the neighbor has?

I find it fascinating to write about the medical problems.  I’m sure it’s got something to do with my background as a former R.N. (pediatric ICU).  I enjoy the research, and tend to give every book some unique medical dilemma.

Klondike Fever, out now, is set in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush.  The hero is a Mountie.  One of the secondary characters, an old man, wears a broken set of spectacles.  One of the lenses is smashed.  He’s living in the woods, hundreds of miles from a nearby town.  He either wears the eyeglasses with just one lens, or he’s totally blind.  On the run from their own troubles, the hero and heroine agree to take him along so he can buy a ‘new set of eyes.’

Of course, it’s a love story first and foremost.  It’s about a reversal of fortune, when the richest woman in the Klondike is robbed on a stagecoach headed to Alaska, and chained to the man she used to work for as a servant.

Western Weddings is an anthology I have coming out in May, with fellow authors Charlene Sands and Jillian Hart.  In my novella, “Shotgun Vows,” one of the secondary characters is trampled by a horse and almost doesn’t survive.  It’s a key turning point in the story of two young people forced to marry at gunpoint.

I spend a lot of time researching on the web, and have spent blissful days at my local university in their medical archives.

What surprises me most about the late 1800s is how much the medical community actually knew about diseases, rather than what they didn’t know.  Here’s an example.  I was scouring through actual copies of the British Medical Journal from the 1880s and could not believe the detail of some of their clinical trials.  In the 1880s in London, doctors were studying the increased rate of prostate cancer in chimney sweeps.  And I thought prostate cancer was a fairly modern concern.

Unfortunately, I think many Hollywood movies make it seem like the doctors knew very little.  Definitely, we know tons more now, but not all doctors back then wanted to amputate a leg with a rusty saw, if you know what I mean.  It also makes me wonder how our future generations, two hundred years from now, will view the type of medicine we practice.  Will Hollywood of the future paint us as dimwitted and archaic?  

Here are some other interesting facts. Did you know that Parkinson’s Disease has been treated since ancient times, but its symptoms weren’t categorized until 1817 by an English physician named James Parkinson?  One of the early treatments to stop the tremors was to have the sufferer ride in a horse and buggy very fast.  For some reason, speed calmed the body.  That’s how one of my young characters deals with it in The Surgeon (released 2003).

Before the rabies vaccine was invented by Louis Pasteur in France around 1885, everyone in the world was terrified of catching it.  Packs of rabid dogs were the scourge of North America and Europe.  In fact, it’s been said some of the first tales of vampires grew from the real-life witnessing of a rabid human being attacking the throat of another.

There is something riveting and powerful about overcoming these medical obstacles.  Of neighbors helping neighbors.  And about writing how women were finally allowed to study and enter the field of medicine.

I always love to hear from people about personal details from history.  Tell me…what occupations did some of your grandparents or great-grandparents have back then?

One of my grandfathers was a wagon maker.

If you post a comment or a question on my blog today or tomorrow, we’ll enter your name in a draw to win one of four signed books— Klondike Fever (2) or Western Weddings (2).

Kate

www.katebridges.com

Greetings from Queensland, Australia! 

My novels are set in the late nineteenth century Outback, when the area I write about was still quite newly settled. Imagine riding a hundred miles side-saddle, as my heroine does, through untamed bush with only a dusty track to follow. Then, when she finds that track won’t lead her to her destination, she joins a cattle drive through even more untamed bush. Perhaps it’s just as well the man in charge of the cattle persists in asking impertinent questions about why she’s travelling alone, and generally distracts her from the discomforts of droving life! 

My background is a little different to most authors. I was raised on a large cattle station in central

Queensland and I grew up riding horses, rounding up cattle and playing cowboys on horseback. I’ve always been fascinated by the Wild West as well as

Australia’s own frontier history, which is every bit as wild if less well-known. Some of the incidents my characters experience, such as galloping through thick timber in an attempt to control half-wild cattle, drinking billy tea brewed on the campfire and sleeping beneath the stars in a bedroll (or swag as we call it), are things I have done myself.  As they say, ‘write what you know’, and it certainly helps to have that first-hand knowledge.  To handle cattle, Australian stockmen use different techniques from the American cowboys. One of the big differences is throwing and tying wild cattle rather than roping them. Perhaps this practice originated because roping is impracticable in heavily timbered country. To do this, the stockman will ride his horse up close to a fleeing cow or steer and lean over to grasp its tail. As he gallops past the animal, he pulls the tail and the beast is thrown off its feet. Then he has to dismount in a hurry and be upon the winded beast to tie its legs before it can regain its feet. A second method is to stay with the animal until it tires. The stockman dismounts and grasps the animal’s tail, waiting until it turns to charge him before pulling it off its feet.  

As you can imagine, neither method is for the faint-hearted or the unskilled! In my second novel, A Hidden Legacy, the hero throws a young bull in this manner, with disastrous consequences.  My two books, The Cornstalk and A Hidden Legacy, are available from Wings ePress and Amazon.Heather is giving away an autographed copy of The Cornstalk to one lucky reader who posts here this weekend!

 Think about it.  When was the last time you saw  a romance hero with a beard?  Even in western historicals, set mostly in the late 1800’s when facial hair was in fashion, our heroes tend to be clean shaven.   Hmmm.  It’s got me wondering.

In America, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, beards and moustaches were rare.  Except for frontier types, certain religious groups and a few nonconformists, men shaved away their whiskers to look presentable.  Then, around the time of the Civil War, the fashion changed.  Men all over the country took to a garden variety of moustaches, long sideburns and full beards.  What did the women think of that?  I’m guessing nobody asked them.  

In the late 1800’s heyday of the Old West, the rage was moustaches.  Big ones.  Look at old photos of, say, Wyatt Earp and his cohorts.  They all sported drooping, handlebar moustaches.  Even so, books set in this period, including mine, tend to feature clean shaven heroes.

Facial hair went out of fashion at the beginning of World War I.  Soldiers needed clean shaven faces so their gas masks would seal tightly.  Also, excessive hair on face or head posed a risk for head lice and worse.  Recruits were shaved and shorn, and the style clicked.  With the invention of the safety razor about this time, clean cut remained the style for decades.  Beards didn’t show up again until the 1960’s and 70’s when beatniks and hippies brought them back.  These days a well trimmed beard or moustache is perfectly acceptable.  But when was the last time you saw one on a romance cover?

Long hair—now that’s another thing.  Long haired heroes have their own brand of sizzle.  Remember Fabio with his leonine mane and million dollar face?  But aside from mountain men and Native Americans you don’t see many photos of long-haired men in the Old West—chin length for want of cutting maybe, but not really long.  Wild Bill Hickock and Buffalo Bill were notable exceptions, but for most western men, I’m guessing long hair would have been hot and hard to keep clean, as well as unfashionable.

Which brings us to the other kind of hair.  Body hair was never a fashion issue.  But women tend to love it or hate it.  And I have yet to see a really hairy romance hero (except for Sam here, who inspired this blog). 

 

So what about future heroes?  Speaking for myself, after wiping the drool off my TV screen at the end of “Dancing With the Stars,”  I’m ready for (ta daaa) the Hairless Hero! 

 

What do you think?  Do you like hairy heroes?  Would you buy a book with a bearded hero on the cover?  How about the man in your own life?

I’d wager that an author uses about one to five percent of the research she gathers during the plotting and planning of a story.  Last weekend I did the opening session for the Nebraska Writers Guild’s Spring Conference and I spoke about how to store gathered information and how to integrate it seamlessly into a story.  Writers are fascinated by research, often to the degree that we have to draw a line so we can actually write the book!  When I was planning the book I just finished (a December release titled A Hero’s Embrace) I envisioned “modern” plumbing in my hero’s Montana hotel.  He has traveled with the Army and camped under the stars for years.  When he settles down, he’s ready for some comforts. 

Plumbing is by no means a modern invention.  Ancient plumbing is found in the ruins of rudimentary drains, grandiose palaces and bathhouses, and was used in vast aqueducts and lesser water systems of empires long buried.  Close to 4,000 years ago, the Minoan Palace of Knossos on the isle of Crete featured four separate drainage systems that emptied into great sewers constructed of stone. Terra cotta pipe was laid beneath the palace floor, hidden from view and providing water for fountains and faucets of marble, gold and silver that jetted hot and cold running water. Harbored in the palace latrine was the world’s first flushing “water closet” or toilet, with a wooden seat and a small reservoir of water. The device, however, was lost for thousands of years amid the rubble of flood and decay.  

There was a noble origin to the water closet in its earliest days. Sir John Harrington, godson to Queen Elizabeth, set about making a “necessary” for his godmother and himself in 1596. An accomplished inventor, Harrington ended his career with this invention, for he was ridiculed by his peers for this absurd device. He never built another one, though he and his godmother both used theirs.  

Two hundred years passed before another tinker, Alexander Cummings, reinvented Harrington’s water closet. Cummings invented the Strap, a sliding valve between the bowl and the trap. It was the first of its kind. However, it didn’t take long for others to follow Cummings lead. Two years later in 1777, Samuel Prosser applied for and received a patent for a plunger closet.  One year later, Joseph Bramah’s closet had a valve at the bottom of the bowl that worked on a hinge, a predecessor to the modern ballcock. A sailor himself, Bramah’s closet was used extensively on ships and boats of the era. 

In the 16th Century Sir John Harington invented a “washout” closet, similar in principle. Another Englishman, Alexander Cumming, patented the forerunner of the toilet used today. The luminous names of Doulton, Wedgwood, Shanks, and Twyford followed. But it’s to the plumbing engineers of the Old Roman Empire that the Western world owes its allegiance. The glory of the Roman legions lay not only in the roads they built and the system of law and order they provided. It was their engineering genius and the skill of their craftsmen that enabled them to erect great baths and recreation centers.  Amazingly, aqueducts from sources miles away supplied water.  

Waste management took a turn for the worse following the fall of the Roman Empire. In the 15th and 16th centuries, English castles had small rooms featuring a wooden or stone seat placed over a vertical shaft that leading to a moat, a barrel, or a pit.  Poorer people simply threw their wastes into the gutter. Indeed, people have not always treated their bodily wastes with the ritualistic sophistication of saying, “Excuse me, I must go powder my nose.”  Quite the contrary, in England and much of Europe during the industrial revolution, when so many people moved to the cities and into crowded and unsanitary living conditions, politeness dictated that people tossing waste out of their windows onto the street below were to shout, “Gardez L’eau” (literally “watch out for the water”). This saying remains a part of British vocabulary today in the use of the word “loo”, slang for toilet.  

Things got so bad in England that in 1848 a Public Health Act was passed mandating some kind of arrangement for every house whether it be a flush toilet, a privy or an ash pit. The Act did little to solve the problem for soon after the streets were cleaned up, the rivers started to reek. The Thames quickly gained a reputation as a “cesspool” and in the hot summer of 1859, the smell from the river was so pungent that Parliament had to be suspended. Disease, and cholera in particular, was a problem.  

Things weren’t any better in the colonies.  Cholera spread through the immigrants from infected European countries. Irishmen, fleeing the poverty of the potato famine and able to scrape together three pounds for passage, carried chamber pots on their journey to North America. The crowded conditions created by greedy ship owners who forced as many as 500 passengers in space intended for 150 resulted in dangerous conditions.  Passengers shared slop buckets and rancid water.  

At Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate, visitors can still see his indoor privy with a system of pulleys for servants to empty the pots from his earth closet. In another display of American ingenuity, William Campbell and James T. Henry received the first American patent for a toilet called a plunger closet, granted in 1857.  Largely unsuccessful improvements continued to be made in the 1870s to 1890s in the search for sanitary water closet.  American designs were generally inferior to English ones and most water closets of this period were imported.  A wide variety of products was offered including those with decorative bowls, glazed underneath with artistic designs, some even stamped with the names of well known pottery manufacturers. Engineer Julius W. Adams provided the framework upon which modem sewerage is based.

In 1857, Adams was commissioned to sewer the city of Brooklyn, which then covered 20 square miles. There was no data available in proportioning sewers for the needs of the people. Yet, working from scratch, Adams developed guidelines and designs that made modern sanitary engineering possible. More importantly, he published the results. By the end of the century, his how to textbooks would be available for towns and cities across the country.  

The pieces to the puzzle of good plumbing had finally come together: Proper venting, waterworks and sewers brought the closet indoors to stay.  American potters duplicated the successes of their English predecessors, and then some.  Finally, the mass production line brought down the cost of production of fixtures, fittings and valves, making them affordable and available from the rich on down.  With the final correlation between disease and water borne bacteria the impetus to plumbing was complete. 

Chicago is credited with having the first comprehensive sewerage project in the country, designed by E. S. Chesbrough in 1885, but it was the city of New York that provided the model for the development of water supply and sewage disposal systems across the country.  

Thomas Twyford revolutionized the water closet when he built the first trapless toilet in a one-piece, all china design. A preeminent potter, Twyford competed against other notable business including Wedgwood and Moulton. Twyford’s design was unique in that it was of china, rather than the more common metal and wood contraptions. The internal workings of his water closet were the work of one the first pioneers of the sanitary science.  It was a design the Twyford would refine and promote for the rest of the decade. 

Archaeological evidence shows most 19th century dwellings did not have indoor plumbing, though occasionally a property for which no outdoor privy can be located is discovered.  Beginning around the mid-1850s, a few finer homes had built in bathrooms. 

Around the turn of the century brought flushers, outdoor toilets with clay or iron drain pipes leading into an underground vault, an underground brick structure plastered on the inside and having a exit drain tile near the top.  Sometimes flushers were built right on top of older holes, the older hole serving as the septic tank. 

Our language is full of euphemisms to describe waste management.  Look at the silly things we teach our kids. Potty?  We have the restroom, the washroom and the bathroom as though we were going for a rest or a bath when we excuse ourselves.  Everyone knows what we’re doing.  The word toilet, which is less acceptable than any of the above, is derived from a French word meaning shaving cloth.  

Our ancestors had euphemisms for the “necessaries” as they called them: The outhouse, or the privy.  When no plumbing was available, they used containers which they labeled chamber pots, thunder pots or, less often, thunder mug.  No Victorian bedroom would have been complete without the necessaries either tucked under the bed or beside it in the commode.  A commode was a low cabinet sometimes fitted with top with a hole in it.