My first post!

I was thrilled when Cowboy Kisses invited me to be a contributing author, but I must confess I've been staring at the blank page of my first post with nearly as much nail biting as when I started blogging ten years ago. 

Perhaps the best thing to do is post a few tidbits about myself, so you can get to know me.

I'm a multi-published author who writes both western historical romance and contemporary paranormal romance (under a different pen name). I like the challenge of tackling new subjects and genres, but western historical romance will always be my favorite to both read and write.

You can find a brief history of my writing and blogging experiences in my 10-Year Blogiversary post. My bio, books, and social media links can be found on my author page, right here on Cowboy Kisses.

I was born and raised in Texas, and currently call Magnolia home. My house sits close enough to the train tracks that I can hear the rumble of the train and its whistle in the distance. That was great inspiration for the newest book in my Forging America series, Fool's Iron.

Fool's Iron is currently up for preorder on Amazon and will be released June 1st.

I'll be posting the second Friday of every month here on Cowboy Kisses. If you'd like to follow this blog, the follow options are on the right, at the bottom. If you use a service such as Feedly or Follow.it, add cowboykisses.blogspot.com to your list.

I'm open to suggestions for post topics. What do you enjoy reading about most? History? Life in the 19th century? Crafts? Fun and interesting places to visit? Author life behind the scenes?  I'd love to know!

An Easy Misunderstanding By Kathleen Lawless @kathleenlawless

Organized religion played a key role during the settling of the West where Churches and synagogues were crucial in forging ‘social boundaries’ needed by the settlers in order to survive.  In many spread-out areas, attending service provided these homesteaders their one chance to occasionally congregate with their neighbors.

The area they served was vast, and clerics handled the challenge by taking to the road to serve their scattered congregations.  Most carried a portable “mass kit” or “communion kit”.  Western clerics, who were usually well-educated, also stepped in wherever needed as counsellors, teachers, and general purveyors of ‘culture’.  Many communities looked to them to help with schooling.

These men of the cloth played the same vital role in setting up systems of health care in various regions.  The Catholic church established numerous hospitals in mining and railroad towns, which were then entirely run by nuns. Thus, my orphaned heroine Lucinda, in A Bride for Riley, finds herself on the train headed West to complete her training to become a nun.

She’s greeted at the train station by a man and two children whom she assumes are from the convent, yet somehow before the day is over, she finds herself married to this total stranger, and helping care for his niece and nephew.

Excerpt from A Bride for Riley  all right reserved

          Riley drew the carriage to a stop outside of the train depot in Butte and turned to his two young charges.  “You two stay here.  Kenny you mind your sister, hear?  Vicky, you’re in charge of your brother.” 

          Both children looked up at him with wide blue eyes that reminded him so much of his sister it hurt.  He knew what they were thinking.  Was he really coming back?  Or would he disappear the same way their father had shortly after their mother died? 

          “I won’t be long.  I promise,” he said as he climbed down.  He felt their eyes boring into his back as he strode into the train station.  He didn’t know a hill of beans about raising youngsters, but he’d promised his sister he’d do his best.  Which, to his mind, meant getting them a new mother as soon as possible.

          The train pulled in minutes later and stopped with a belch of coal smoke and the grinding sound of metal wheels on metal tracks.  Shortly after, the doors opened and the porters stepped off first, followed by the passengers. 

          One by one, he searched the face of each woman traveling alone.  There weren’t many.  That had to be her, the plain one standing by herself and looking around all wide-eyed and nervous.  She wasn’t wearing a single fashionable adornment like most of the other women passengers, but beneath her plain brown bonnet he glimpsed an escaped strand of reddish hair. 

          He frowned.  She’d sounded different in her letters, flirty and not the least bit shy.  He approached her slowly, half expecting her to bolt when he said her name.

          “Lucinda?” 

          She started before a look of relief spread over her features and she gave a jerky nod. 

          “I’m Riley.  Let’s go get your things.”

          “This is all I have.”  She indicated the shabby valise at her feet. 

          “That’s all?”  Funny, he’d been expecting his mail-order bride from Boston to arrive with a fashionable East coast wardrobe.

          “I was told I’d be supplied with whatever I needed.”

          “That a fact?”  He pressed his lips together and reached for her valise.  It felt almost empty.  No doubt that old busybody from the matchmaking agency had told her she was marrying a wealthy man.

          “The carriage is this way.”  As they walked out of the station, he wondered how to introduce the children in such a way that his mail order bride didn’t light out of here first thing.

I loved writing for the Mistaken Identity Bride series.  It was so fun to figure out how the grooom would pick up the wrong mail order bride. 
You can get your copy of Riley here.  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YXZY8CQ 
And check out the entire series here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08YYZSHYQ

Ten Gallons of Myths for One Iconic Cowboy Hat

By Heather Blanton

No one wore a ten-gallon hat like the Duke.

Let’s talk hats. Not just any hat. The fabled ten-gallon cowboy hat. Where did the name come from? What is it exactly? Is it just a big Stetson?

Here’s what we know. Generally speaking, any cowboy hat that has a tall, rounded crown and broad brim fits the description. The phrase was brought into popular culture by Hollywood and famous cowboy actors like Tom Mix and William S. Hart. Probably around 1925. The name, however, existed before then.

So where did it come from? Interestingly, there are two Spanish terms that could be the culprit. First, galón—the word for galloon, or the narrow, braided trim that ran around the crown of a type of vaquero’s hat. Sounds awfully close to gallon, right? And these Spanish hats were tall enough to accommodate ten regular hat bands, like those worn on an American cowboy’s hat.

Early example of a vaquero and his hat.

The crown on an average Stetson was only 4”. Hmmm. Sounds to me like a cowpoke was having a little fun at a vaquero’s expense: “Looky there at that tall hat, Slim.” Texas Pete tags his companion in the shoulder and points at a vaquero moseying through the smoky saloon. “I reckon he’s got room up there for ten galóns.”

Another possibility—and the one I find more likely—is the simple Americanization of the phrase tan galán. Loosely translated, it means gallant, handsome, fine-looking, even expensive. If the Spanish cowboys were going around referring to their hats as tan galán compared to the American cowboys’ simple, flat-brimmed Stetsons—well, with men, everything is a competition. It’s not much of a stretch to see where the nickname could have easily gotten its start. Especially once the U.S. hat manufacturers started turning out fancier styles. Stetson and some others designed some pretty, uh, understated hats. Not.

Tom Mix -- arguably the first to sport the white hat of the good guy.

I can just hear the argument:

“Mine is a tan galán hat, señor.”

“No way, Juan. Mine is a ten-gallon hat.”

Juan blinks. “Uh, si, señor, if you say so.”

Reminds me of Hoss Cartwright's hat.

Now those hats have some tall crowns!

Pretty much no one thinks the term started with a hat that could hold ten gallons of water. True, the early cowboy hats were made from beaver, tightly woven—especially the Stetsons—which made them ideal for wet conditions. It is a fact a man could give his horse some water from his hat without ruining it (long as it was beaver). But even Stetson acknowledged in the early twenties that their largest hat held only a few quarts of water.  

This myth may have come from the fact that during the civil war, a soldier’s hat was often used as a quick feedsack to hold grain for a horse.  

Maybe we'll never know, but it is fun to speculate. What do you think about the theories for the ten-gallon name?

Whiskey, Beer, and a New Series by Paty Jager

I’m ready to start my new historical western romance series. The idea has been brewing since the first of the year. I’ve been researching, asking readers questions, and now I’m am ready to start writing the first book in the series. 

The series is called Ladies of the Silver Dollar Saloon. Guess where a lot of each story will take place? Yep! In the Silver Dollar Saloon in Shady Gulch, Dakota Territory. I wanted the town on a railroad, and I discovered that the Great Northern Railway ran from Duluth to Bismarck in 1873 and continued on in 1881. 

Shady Gulch is a made-up place, but I’m using towns along the railroad route to formulate my own.  I didn’t want to worry about keeping things exact to an already established town. This way I have some leeway. But I’m making sure I have historical facts and figures in the stories along with fun characters. 

The free land act gave a person 21 or older 160 acres of farm ground. They had to prove up 10 acres for 5 years and it was theirs. Many people of different nationalities came to the Dakota Territory to start a new life. Some made it and others left when harsh weather kept them from being able to prove the land. Wheat was the biggest cash crop. It sold for $1 a bushel in the early 1880’s. And with the railroad, they didn’t have to haul it by wagon hundreds of miles away.

My research on the Dakota Territory has given me even more ideas for the stories and heroes the Ladies of the Silver Dollar Saloon will meet and marry. With the cattle ranchers, railroad men, farmers, schools, newspapers, and so many different cultures converging in the area and along the railroad route, the ideas just keep pinging around in my head. 

I’ve also been researching saloons in the time period of my story. They sold whiskey and beer. Whiskey at most saloons would be watered down to make the saloon more money. In some places they sold whisky colored camphine, fusel oil, and oil of turpentine.  This was why many who drank to excess ruined their stomachs and died.  It was also noted they would mix creek water with any or all of these ingredients to make a drink that was hot, acrid, and bitter, giving it the illusion of strength:

Tartaric, citric, and sulfuric acids, fusel oil, ammonia, black bone meal, gunpowder, molasses, oak bark, oatmeal, cayenne pepper, tobacco, snake root, nitre, juniper berries, creosote, and turpentine.

No wonder whisky got the nickname “Rotgut”. 

The Scotch-Irish have been credited with being the creators of whiskey in America. They used rye, corn, barley, and potatoes to make the whiskey.  “Western Whiskey” which originated in the wild untamed west had three varieties: rye, bourbon, and corn whiskey. Corn whiskey, of course, was made from corn with a bit of barley malt to help it ferment.  Whiskey was made in barrels which made it easier and more profitable to transport than the commodities it was made from.  Bourbon has been said to have been accidentally invented by the Reverend Elijah Craig in 1789. He scoured the inside of empty barrels with glowing ashes to clean and ready them for whiskey. He then forgot several barrels that were hid in a dark corner, and when they were found and opened they had aged, mellowed, and had a full-bodied spirit. 

Beer was the other drink sold at saloons.  It appeared early in the West. There was a brewery in California in 1837 when it was still under Mexican rule. The first regular brewery opened in San Francisco in 1850. German Union troops had a “lagerbeer wagon” follow them in the Civil War. By 1880 breweries were in mining camps and larger cities.  

Most saloons sold both beer and whiskey but there were some that sold on beer. A large or “big ‘uns” was 10 cents and a “little ‘uns” was a nickel. 

The Silver Dollar in my series will have both whiskey and beer and because my saloon owner will also be a hero in one of the books and I have him portrayed as a good guy, he’ll sell only real whiskey but will also have a watered down bottle for the drunks who should be home taking care of their families. 

The first book of this series: Savannah and Larkin will be available in August. 

Paty Jager is an award-winning author of 30+ novels, a dozen novellas, and short stories of murder mystery, western romance, and action adventure. She has a RomCon Reader’s Choice Award, EPPIE, Lorie, and RONE Award. All her work has Western or Native American elements in them along with hints of humor and engaging characters. This is what readers have to say about the Letters of Fate series- “...filled with romance, adventure and twists and turns.” “What a refreshing and well written love story of fate and hope!”

 

 Photo source: © Can Stock Photo / surpasspro