Guest Blogger

Hello Everyone!  Thank you, ladies of Petticoats and Pistols for letting authors of western romance be guest bloggers.  I’ve been scarce making comments this week because my two daughters and their combined four children – all under the age of four – have been at my house since last Saturday. While it’s fun having them- it puts a crimp in my usual daily activities. Such as blogging and writing.  

My newest release is a contemporary western set on a cattle ranch in SE Oregon. This book was the easiest to write because I didn’t have to do as much research as I do with a historical. My husband and I raise cattle, so the day-to-day worries and work were easy to write. Our little “hobby ranch” is nothing like the one in my story.

Perfectly Good Nanny is set in a remote area of sagebrush, rabbit brush, and bunch grass. It is harsh land that requires diligence on the part of the rancher during calving season.  It is a part of the country where the cattle had to scrounge to find feed all year round until the invention of irrigation pipes.  The hero and heroine are thrown together by a 12-year-old girl, tired of taking care of her 2 year-old brother, and a meddling Klamath Indian neighbor. The two hire a nanny without the father knowing. When the woman shows up knowing everything about his family, Brock Hughes is not the least bit hospitable. But between the nanny and the girl they manage to get him to agree to the one month the neighbor paid for. Sparks fly and two people who’d given up on love learn to love again.   

My story depicts the daily lives of remote ranchers. To some extent though they have the newer equipment a lot of the day-to-day chores are the same as a hundred years ago.  Before haying and equipment, herds were moved to the higher range in the summer to eat the grass, saving the lower, taller grass in the meadows to feed the cattle during the winter. They also hayed, but would not reap as much feed from their hard work as they can now with the modern equipment.   

Grass was cut, usually from a meadow that was watered from a creek or a spring. A hand-held scythe was used to cut the grass. And later on in the 20^th century a ground driven sickle was pulled behind a horse to cut the hay. By the late 1800’s they used a dump rake pulled by a horse to “rake” the hay into piles.  Those piles were then forked onto wagons or sleds.  The hay was then either forked into a barn or loft or a large outside pile. In the winter, this pile was pulled onto low sleds and dragged by a team of horses. These piles were then towed to the pasture where the cattle were wintering and forked off to feed. 

In the 1800’s just feeding the cattle could take half a day or longer if they were scattered among several fields. Of course, if it was a large enough operation, they would have several feeding sleds.  Being from a ranching family, I find the historical aspects of ranch living more interesting than the day-to-day lives of people living in the cities in the 1800’s  

What is something you have always wondered about? What kind of bathroom facilities people living in apartments in large cities in the 1800’s had? How long did it take to make soap or actually weave enough cloth to make a garment, or even how long did it take to sew by hand a dress or shirt?  That is what I find so fascinating about writing historical stories, the research that answers these questions. Why do you write or read historical romance?  

Thank you for participating today.  Leave your comments and I’ll pick one person to win an autographed copy or their choice of either my current contemporary western “Perfectly Good Nanny” or one of my previously published historical westerns.  

Also check out my website www.patyjager.com to enter my November contest and read my reviews.  

An unwritten code of the west was that any cowboy caught on the trail at dusk could pretty much count on finding a hot meal and a bunk at any ranch.  Being a research junkie and nosy to boot, I decided to look into this open-door policy a bit deeper.  I wasn’t surprised to learn that some ranchers welcomed American and European sportsman to use their ranch as a base while they hunted big game.  In fact, they courted these guests to come to the West.  The reasons were varied and yet practical. Even with the railroad going coast-to-coast soon after the Civil War, news tended to travel slow.  Having “big city” or foreign guests was especially welcome in an area where newsworthy items were, for the most part, spread by word of mouth. 

Of course, there was another benefit to these visiting sportsmen, or “dudes,” and was that they could help control the wild game that preyed on their herds, thus saving ranchers time and resources.  I suppose that constituted just another way to “pay one’s way.” 

It’s said that paying guest ranches came about in the early 1880s when a visitor at the Custer Trail Ranch in the Dakota Territory was enjoying himself so that he offered to pay the Eatons to extend his stay there and also grant him the use of a horse.  Word of such an arrangement spread, and other ranchers began providing guest quarters. 

By the 1890s, more visitors ventured west to partake of the western hospitality and thrill of the hunt on the ranches that welcomed guests.    

Being raised on a farm, I know full well that some years farmers barely eek out a living.  Running a guest ranch quickly became more lucrative than raising cattle, especially in light of the devastating winter of 1885-86 when hundreds of thousands of cattle died in the blizzards and ranchers were facing bankruptcy.  For years after that devastation, many ranchers held on to their land simply by opening up their ranch to paying strangers.   The guest ranches were fairly split on what they offered visitors.  Some, like the Gros Ventre Lodge in the late 1890s, was noted for their big game hunts that attracted sportsmen from the U.S. and abroad.  Others, like the Custer Trail Ranch, maintained a working ranch so visitors could get a taste of authentic ranch life, from the mundane activities of ranching to the cowboy exhibitions held on ranches, which were the forerunner of the rodeo before it was an organized and recognized sport.   

By the turn of the century, the railroad and ranchers teamed up to advertise guest ranches.  It was a lucrative deal for both parties, and today dude ranches are going strong all over the U.S. The Eaton brothers knew a good thing when they saw it back in the 1890s when the started the first guest ranch.  They moved their operation from North Dakota to Wolf, Wyoming in 1904, and soon provided extensive guided trails into the Yellowstone region for men – and women.  It’s the latter that snared my attention.  

After seeing a picture that included lady “dudes” sitting before their tents knitting in the wild, I knew I had to include this bit of history in a novel.  Of course, I took free license and made my guest ranch exclusively for woman – a surprise that my cowboy hero Gil Yancy was none to happy to be involved in.   I choose Wyoming as the setting for One Real Man, my April 08 release, partly because I love Wyoming, and partly because it offered women far more freedoms in the 1890s, starting with being the first state where women could vote. 

My heroine Josie desperately needed freedom, and Gil had his mind set on taking control of her ranch – and her.  Ah, both had a lot to learn and a lot to give up in order to have a happily ever after.  But oh, the rewards.    

To get the comments going, have you stayed on a guest ranch before?  If you had your preference, would you rather stay at a working ranch, or a resort ranch?  Me?  I’ll take the real cowboy any day.   

I’ll give away an autographed copy of my March debut, One Real Cowboy to one of the commenters.  You’re welcome to stop by my website (www.jankenny.com) to read more about my books, and me.