Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

My cowgirl heroines Libby Brown, Charlie Banks, and Jodi Brand are three very different women, but they all have one thing in common: they're part of a long tradition of women moving west to build new lives. The West is the best possible setting for a girl-power fish-out-of-water story, because throughout history this rough open country has inspired women to escape society's constraints and accomplish things that would have been impossible elsewhere. I've collected three of my favorite wild Western women here - women who met the challenges of the frontier and did much more than merely survive. Wild West entrepreneur Nellie Cashman traveled west seeking her fortune as a prospector and worked as a cook at various mining camps in Nevada until she saved enough gold dust to open the Miner's Boarding House in Panaca Flats in 1872. Described as "pretty as a cameo and tougher than a two-penny nail," Nellie ofen fed and housed down=-on-their-luck miners for free. Late...

Reminders of the hardscrabble pioneer past are everywhere in the West. Drive a few miles in any direction and you'll find abandoned homesteads where Willa Cather characters tried and failed to scrape a living out of our stubborn, scrubby ground, and the mountains are filled with abandoned cabins where Gabby Hayes look-alikes tried to pick-axe their way to riches. When a mine failed or a drought killed cattle and crops, whole towns could end up abandoned. While many of these ghost towns have been preserved--the lawns mowed, the houses labeled, the residents remembered in plaques and museum displays--there are some that have been utterly forgotten, and those are my favorites. In a town that's truly gone to the ghosts, there's nothing between you and history. You can stll sense the presence of the living town in the decaying grandeur of the buildings, and the hopelessness of its decline in the blank stares of the empty windows. My favorite of these is Castle, Montana. It'...