We are always talking about history and the frontier and courage here on this blog.
So I went to a park in Omaha, that’s one of my favorite places ever, called Pioneer Courage Park.
I take people who visit Omaha to this place and once or twice I have just gone to downtown Omaha and walked around. I’m just in love with this wagon train sulpture.
If you look carefully at the bottom of this picture below it says Pioneer Courage.
There are four wagons. One each pulled by a different team. (well, one is drawn by hand)
One drawn by a team of Oxen. (hint, below, I’m the one on the right)
and mules.
There’s also a hand drawn cart which is mostly how the Mormon pioneers crossed the country. It boggles the mind that they had such small carts. what in the world did they eat?
Amazing desire for religious freedom.
There are also people, women walking, women carrying a baby. They say that everyone who wasn’t driving the wagons walked. It not only took weight off the wagon, and made it easier on the horses/mules/oxen. But it also was more comfortable to walk. the wagons shook and rattled along, no wind could get in past the cover, it was a miserable way to travel. Imagine that. Walking ALL THE WAY ACROSS AMERICA WAS MORE COMFORTABLE THAN RIDING IN A COVERED WAGON!!!
This guy is the wagon master. Think about that job for a minute. Did they pay him? did he go once and stay in the west or did he go back to the beginning and start over every year?
This guy below is leading a horse and there are deer on the pack horse. Sort of blurry, sorry.
He’s bringing in food. but one guy I talked to said it was rare for a hunter to find food. The wild animals learned to run far from the trail. Mostly, any food you were going to eat on the Oregon Trail, you had to bring it with you.
Lots of people leading the teams where the going is rough. One wagon was ‘stuck in the mud’. Very cool. Everyone pushing and urging the animals to pull.
Many pioneers brought a milk cow along, this one is tied to the back of the wagon and being led to Oregon. Long way to go home.
There are several buffalo just here and there on the downtown streets, like a block or two away from the Pioneer Courage Park. So cool to walk down a street and meet up with an iron buffalo.
As part of the Pioneer Courage there was also a small group of Native Americans. A reminder that some people were heading into a new land. And some people were already there.
So many of my characters are trying to tear a living out of wild lands.
In my current series, Wyoming has a total population of 9000. TOTAL. One out of five are women.
Yet somehow this state was the first to give women the right to vote.
There was Pioneer Courage in the west even after it was beyond the age of the pioneer.
To get your name in a drawing for a signed copy of Laws of Attraction, leave a comment about your favorite park.
Where do you like to go and just hang out.
There are several such beautiful places in Omaha. The Henry Doorley Zoo, the Lauritzen Gardens. Bookstores.
But none better than Pioneer Courage Park.
The Laws of Attraction
Can they risk giving in to the attraction between them while their lives are on the line?
If widowed seamstress Nell Armstrong has to make one more pair of boring chaps for the cowboys in her tiny Wyoming town, she might just quit the business altogether! So meeting Brand Nolte, a widower struggling to raise three girls on his own, seems like her dream come true. Brand has no idea how to dress the girls properly, and Nell finally has a chance to create beautiful outfits while also teaching the girls to sew.
But Nell is much more than a seamstress, and the investigative skills and knowledge she picked up alongside her late lawman husband soon become critical when a wounded stagecoach-robbery survivor is brought to town. As danger closes in from all sides, Nell and Brand must discover who has a target trained on them before it’s too late.
“A richly detailed adventure that captivates till the end.”–Publishers Weekly on Forged in Love
Buy on Amazon