The Story Behind -- OUTLAW BRIDE #7 Trail Blazer

OUTLAW BRIDE

Releases May 7, 2020

This western historical romance began with a premise, a ‘what would happen if…’ question. I wondered what could make a law-abiding citizen so desperate she would break a complete stranger out of jail the day before he hanged.

The idea was very intriguing to me. I thought about it a lot. I imagined a scene where a woman lifts the sheriff’s keys and breaks the condemned man out. But why? I decided she needed him to save her family but where could they be that no one else could or would help her and what talents did my hero have that made him so indispensable?

The reason she needed him and much of his backstory came to me all at once. She wanted him to rescue her family stranded by snow in the mountains. This gave me my setting—California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. I’m fascinated with the Donner Party. It seemed obvious to have my hero be a surviving member of that doomed wagon train. Only a very few men survived that misadventure and some of them were the ones who walked out to get help. That would give him the experience he needed to be indispensable to my heroine and if I made his initial rescue attempt to save his family an unsuccessful one, then he’d have a lot of interesting baggage to work through. But there was that tricky cannibalism question. I was tempted to have him wracked by guilt over having partaken of human flesh, but worried that readers might not forgive him that. So I made a compromise. You’ll have to read the story to find out what that might be.

I needed to change many facts about the Donner Party to make my story work and because I did not want to mix my fiction with fact, I created the fictional Broadner Party, which is based on the Donner’s tragic journey. I used much of the actual events, including things like the oxbows that the party used to devise makeshift snowshoes. The party who departed the main group for Sutter’s Mill did, call themselves ‘The Forlorn Hope’ and were largely composed of desperate mothers trying to gain help for their children left behind and servants who had no supplies or wagons of their own. The name was too tragic and wonderful not to use.

The initial envisioning of the opening scene changed when I did my research and discovered my heroine could not lift the keys to the jail from the sheriff because, there was no real jail in Sacramento and the area had just got around to electing a sheriff the year my story begins, but he was shot and killed in the Squatter’s Riots. More distressing was learning that a major character in my story, the mayor of Sacramento, was also shot and killed. That made his re-election concerns rather anticlimactic. But I decided to ignore this historical detail. 

So how did Sacramento keep their prisoners, if not in a jail? They used prison brigs. The Gold Rush brought so many people to California so quickly (half a million in only five years) that the new municipality could not keep up. Some ship crews even abandoned their vessels upon arriving in San Francisco, lured away by the promise of the goldfields. At least two of these rotting ships were commissioned into use as floating jails. The prison brig, Strafford, was moored on the Sacramento River in 1849. The ships’ owners rented the vessel to the county as a prison. I changed the Strafford to the Stafford, but otherwise used what details I could find. I’m so glad my research wanderings brought me to the prison brigs because I consider that old ship to be a very important character in this story.

Finally, I’d just like to mention this story’s ending. With this one I really painted myself into a corner and had no idea how to orchestrate a happy ending. After spending three-quarters of the book creating insurmountable difficulties, I just didn’t know how to fix things. I had considered having the heroine break the hero out of jail again, but that seemed too easy and the notion of my hero and heroine spending the rest of their lives on the run was unacceptable to me. 

I pondered and pondered what could work and hope you find the ending as satisfying as I do.

Outlaw Bride, 2nd edition is available May 7, 2020.