Trusting the acceptable wrong man led to the ruin of her life and self-respect. Can trusting the unacceptable right man return to her what was lost? The man who promised to provide and protect left Lorena Mayfield to do the providing and protecting. She went from being the daughter of a respected Little Rock, Arkansas clergyman and widow of a fallen Confederate officer to living […]
Roslyn Welsh is sent by stagecoach to Junction City to marry a man with whom her aunt and guardian, without Roslyn’s knowledge, had been corresponding. His requirements for a wife were that she must be at least twenty-one years of age with a family Bible for proof, and she must have no children. Only, Roslyn is not quite twenty-one, she has a baby, and her […]
At the officers’ dance, she gave him her handkerchief. Knowing he would be assigned to the western forts of Kansas, he told her, “Remember me.” With her blonde hair and blue eyes, Hannah Atwell, a Kansas farmer’s daughter, knows she is pretty—and she enjoys pretty things. She spent her life striving to be the perfect, obedient daughter. She feels she is destined for something more […]
Kendrick Denham left his family farm back east, fought in the war with Mexico, then answered gold’s call after it was discovered in California. In late 1852, when he reached Columbia, known as “The Gem of the Southern Mines,” he realized the easy-to-find placer gold was no longer that easy to find. He decided he would do better providing fresh meat to the townspeople. With […]
With her invalid father’s passing, it is time for Dahlia Greenleaf to move on with her life. Considered an old maid, marriage prospects where she lives are slim and job opportunities non-existent. Her brother suggests applying to the Colorado Bridal Agency, and she agrees—anything to get away from her demanding sister-in-law. Full of hope, she travels by train to marry the miner in Jubilee Springs […]
Annie Flanagan happily moves to Jubilee Springs to work as a maid for Delly Nighy, the daughter of her former New York City employer. Very few know that her next younger sister, Kate, has signed up with the Colorado Bridal Agency and started writing to an Irish miner, Michael O’Hare, in the same town. Both Annie and her mother back in New York grow concerned […]
He never wished to abduct her. Can he help her escape? Ling Loi came from Canton, China; Luke McDaniels from Minnesota. Each of them find themselves trapped in situations from which they desperately wish to escape. As two unscrupulous men deny them their freedom and threaten their lives, they cross paths in the raucous gold mining town of Lundy high in the eastern Sierra Nevada […]
Charlie, it would be easier to stop the flow of the great Missouri and Kansas Rivers than to prevent the Americans from coming to Kansas. It is 1856, and the United States opened Kansas Territory to American settlement two years before. Land belonging to the once-powerful Kansa tribe, known to the whites as the Kaw, was sold by treaty to the Americans a generation earlier. […]
A widow with two small children, Nissa Stillwell is forced out of the mining supervisor’s house she had lived in prior to her husband’s death in the mine disaster in Wildcat Ridge, Utah. She quickly learns he had gone heavily into debt to impress his boss, mine owner Mortimer Crane. In order for her and her children to have a home, she leaves what few […]
In 1868, Otto Atwell has a 160 acre homestead near Abilene, Kansas and a limp as a result of a Cheyenne musket ball hitting his lower back while he marched with the 16th Kansas Cavalry on the Powder River Expedition in 1865. What he doesn’t have is a wife. Then again, what woman would want to marry a cripple? Libby Jones comes to Junction City […]