A Trip to Tucson by A.M.Westerling

Okay, so Tucson doesn’t really have anything to do with Barkerville and the Canadian brides collection other than there was a fair bit of mining in the area about the same time as the Cariboo Gold Rush. Silver and copper mostly and gold later on once Arizona opened up a bit more.


So why Tucson? My sweetie and I head south every March to get away from the Canadian winter. Actually, it’s not that we mind winter so much, it’s that Calgary simply doesn’t have a spring! March is dreary, brown and interminable so although we don’t do the full on snowbird thing, we do spend 5 or 6 weeks touring the southwestern U.S. to get away from it. We don’t plan anything other than we know we’ll hit the I15 which is a straight run south for us. Usually the road is pretty clear but we hit a snow storm this year in Montana. 

Once we reach Las Vegas, we sit and thaw out for a few days then start watching the weather to decide where to go next. It was a cold spring everywhere this year so we drove further south than we usually do and ended up in Oro Valley, on the northern outskirts of Tucson. Tucson is a great spot, with lots of interesting things to see and do plus it’s not a mega city like Phoenix and area which suits us perfectly. 


We tend to visit railroad museums wherever we go and Tucson was no exception. The original train station is right in the heart of the city and has a small museum plus a vintage steam locomotive. 

Why railroad museums? My husband is a model railroad enthusiast and of course I love any kind of history so win win! Anyway, you always discover something new when you’re out and about and imagine my surprise to discover that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday shot and killed a fellow by the name of Frank Stilwell in revenge for the death of Wyatt’s brother Morgan. Where? In Tucson’s train depot! A bronze statue commemorates the event. That worried look on my face? Those fellows have rifles pointed at me!

Of course I’d heard of both Earp and Holliday which is why it surprised me to learn they’d been in Tucson all those years ago. Little tidbits like that really bring history to life for me and as I stood on the railroad platform, I could just imagine the men laying in wait for Stilwell. I could imagine the horrified gasps and whispers of onlookers, the warmth of the sun on my shoulders, the dry smell of dust, and the slowly spreading crimson stains on Stilwell’s clothes. (You can read more about it here: https://www.historynet.com/stilwell-shooting-near-tucson-depot-called-quick-vengeance-murder.htm)


I did the same thing the various occasions I visited Barkerville. I wandered the wooden sidewalks and imagined the town as it might have been 150 years ago. I imagined the streets crowded with wagons, mules and cattle, the smell of wood smoke, the clang clang of the black smith’s hammer, the thump of boots on the walkways, the shouts of joy from miners who struck it bit, and the sobs and groans from those who didn’t.


Anyhow, as a writer of historical romance and fiction, my goal is to bring history to life for my readers. I try and envision life as it might have been for my characters, a kind of time travel if you will. If I can take you back to a different era, then I feel I’ve accomplished my goal.

~~~~~~~~ 

Find Barkerville Beginnings at your favourite online store here:  

https://books2read.com/u/bQB6Mv

If I Could Travel Back in Time by A.M.Westerling

Gosh, that’s a tough one because to tell you the truth, I would love to visit every time period that I’ve written about. And, to a certain extent, I have.

I’ve visited castles in Luxembourg and The Netherlands. I’ve seen a bit of the Cariboo Road and strolled down Barkerville’s Main Street. (Below is St. Saviour's Anglican Church at the end of Main Street and below that is a picture of the original Cariboo Road just outside of Lytton, British Columbia.)

I’ve visited Ribe, a Viking village in Denmark. 

Ribe and Barkerville are living museums and that’s a kind of time travel without the inconvenience of actually having to deal with the not so nice aspects of historical life ie the smells, questionable personal hygiene, lack of sanitation, no modern medicine, no central heating. etc.

Having said that, I’ve never been to England and would love to visit London during the Regency period, roughly 1800-1820. I’d love to attend a proper ball and drive in a fancy carriage through Hyde Park. I’d love to visit a dressmaker and walk out with a fashionable new wardrobe. I’d love to attend the theatre or spend an afternoon at Almack’s in one of my new dresses. I’d love to spend a weekend at a house party in the country and wear an elegant riding habit. (I would ride astride, not side saddle, just to be scandalous!) I’d love to be the lady of the household with a personal maid to dress me and an army of servants at my beck and call. (Okay, okay, so I’m the lady of my own household but I am the maid and I am the servant army and I dress myself. 😊 )

I’d love to ride along Rotten Row and spend an afternoon watching the horse races at Ascot wearing some sort of stunning hat crafted by the best milliner London has to offer. And all of this, of course, accompanied by a dashing Duke or perhaps a Captain of the Royal Navy resplendent in his blue uniform.

And after experiencing all that, I would be quite happy to return to my own time and my own life. 

Would you like to experience a little time travel of your own? How about reading Barkerville Beginnings, or any of the books in the Canadian Historical Brides Collection? You can find it HERE at your favourite online book store. 

The entire Canadian Historical Brides Collection is available HERE.

Here's what readers are saying about Barkerville Beginnings:

"I really enjoyed “Barkerville Beginnings”, from the very first page I was hooked. I found the story very immersing and appreciated how Ms. Westerling wrote so vividly that I felt like I was right there in the story with each of the characters; seeing and experiencing everything that they did.

A few years ago I worked for Barkerville and have a fairly good knowledge of its history and the townsite as it stands today. With this understanding of the townsite I feel like Ms. Westerling did a very good job of portraying the town, the history, and bringing to life some of the more prominent figures who lived in Barkerville, including judge Begbie and Moses, the town barber. I also found it very refreshing that she didn’t just incorporate the European history that is typically covered, instead there was an incorporation of the Chinese history and their contributions to the town included and given as much merit as any of the businesses that were owned and run by the white town folks." Crystal B.

"As someone who has lived my whole life in British Columbia, and has visited ALL of the cities and towns mentioned (with the exception of those in England) in this work of historical fiction, I was satisfied and delighted with the careful attention to factual detail that was expertly woven into the story." Discerning Reader 

 

I really enjoyed “Barkerville Beginnings”, from the very first page I was hooked. I found the story very immersing and appreciated how Ms. Westerling wrote so vividly that I felt like I was right there in the story with each of the characters; seeing and experiencing everything that they did.

A few years ago I worked for Barkerville and have a fairly good knowledge of its history and the townsite as it stands today. With this understanding of the townsite I feel like Ms. Westerling did a very good job of portraying the town, the history, and bringing to life some of the more prominent figures who lived in Barkerville, including judge Begbie and Moses, the town barber. I also found it very refreshing that she didn’t just incorporate the European history that is typically covered, instead there was an incorporation of the Chinese history and their contributions to the town included and given as much merit as any of the businesses that were owned and run by the white town folks.

Total Immersion

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Why write historical fiction? This is a deep question. The 1980’s, when I first started writing, was a low point for the genre. I remember querying ever so many agents and getting replies which said “only a small market for historical fiction.” That was discouraging enough, but not so much that I stopped working on those novels, driven by the writing demons as I was.   

Like everyone else who will reply to this question, I started young reading historical fiction, following the books my mother took out of the library. She was a voracious reader of both history and science fiction, and I became one as well. I began early, and remember writing a short story about the Princes in the Tower back in 8^th grade that got an “A.” (My story successfully creeped-out  the class, too, which was even better.)

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I could say that my love of history happened because I’ve often lived in old houses—several with disturbances of the kind that are often labelled “ghost.” I could talk about the love of my important elders for history, their familiarity with the past, and the way the past was always present in discussions about politics, or about how trips were taken to view gravestones, battlefields, Indian mounds, and museums. 

I could dwell on the lit professor grandpa that I adored. His study fairly breathed of old books, tweed, leather, pipe smoke and things past. A large oil painting of the Canterbury Pilgrims overlooked his desk, a beautiful obsidian spear point that had emerged during the spring plowing at the family farm in upstate NY sat beside his typewriter. All of these objects had stories, and he shared them with his children and grandchildren. At home, that wonderful quote of William Faulkner’s “The Past is never gone. It’s not even past,” was a statement of fact. 

The truth is more that I’ve never felt truly comfortable with the noisy, gasoline era into which I was born. Cars were something to get around in, but not by me beloved. Every time a tree falls in the creation of a road or a new development, I feel a terrible sense of loss.

I’ve often spoken of what I write as a kind of time travel, because for me that’s what it is—a way to be present in another place and time, to smell and taste that world, to deal with the hardships and the inevitable dirt and sweat, the blood and the loss, that is the genuine past.  The “romance” died quite early for me because I read and read and read, ever deeper into my chosen subjects. 

Living inside another time and place, or inside another culture, is truly an immersive experience; I love the scuba sense of diving in and swimming around inside these deep waters of history. Originally, I wrote from my own European-American perspective, and my books were set in 18th Century Europe or England or the colonial US.  The time shift alone caused me to change my perspective. I sometimes get nasty reviews because the 18th Century characters about whom I write do not behave up to the highest standards of the 21st Century. I always want to reply to these folks that I don't write these stories to make them comfortable. I write to show them as much as I can of what I've learned about what was--the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Maybe I'd be richer if I sugar-coated, but taking the trip into the past and taking my readers along with me is always far more important than whatever is currently P.C. If you want to read about the 18th Century people, expect to meet  men who have "patriarchy" firmly entrenched in their heads and women who have no other recourse than to accept or attempt to circumvent whatever their menfolk, their churches and their society dish

out. Englishwomen, as every reader of Jane Austen ought to know, could not inherit property until quite recently.

By Tom Walker~Available at Allposters.com

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In Genesee, and, later, to a far greater extent, in Fly Away Snow Goose, I had another task. here I found I had to shed the Euro-based colonizer culture into which I was born so that I could inhabit (as far as I am able) a life-way with a totally different outlook. The Tlicho tribe in Fly Away Snow Goose were historically a nomadic, communal people, living in small groups that got even smaller in winter--who shared food with one another. They disapproved the kind of willful ignorance of their environment, the braggadocio and "me-first-ism" that is  rampant in the capital-driven European cultures which almost overwhelmed them. 

Instead of "conquerors of nature," the Tlicho strove to always to be in "right relationship" with the earth and her creatures, to eat and/or to make use of every piece of any animal they killed. They saw the spirits in the sky and in the earth and water all across the enormous terrain they traversed every year, following the caribou. Everyone had to pull together, or the group might not survive the long frigid winters where starvation was a very real threat. This experience, this total immersion has changed my outlook on the world in a fundamental way.  

Now, it's as if I've put on an entirely new pair of spectacles.  

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~~Juliet Waldron
www.julietwaldron.com

I Remember When....... by Victoria Chatham

For the month of June, we are repeating a topic that proved very popular this time last year. We all have our memories, but which ones stand out the most for you? Mine revolves around my first formal riding lesson on a pretty, dapple-grey pony called Greybird.  

My parents could never understand where my passion for horses came from. Neither of them was interested in the creatures that decorated the edges of my school notebooks and galloped through my dreams at night. I sat on my first pony when I was about five-years-old. We used to go to Cornwall to spend summers with my aunt and uncle and I was on the beach with the ponies every day. I walked behind the rides with a basket picking up after them, I fed them handfuls of hay and at the end of the day got to ride one back to the stables. There was never any question about where I was or what I was doing, and I loved those summers.  

Moving around as we did meant that we often were living nowhere near any riding stables but when I was eight-years-old we moved to Pembroke Dock, in South Wales. Here, as luck had it, I found a riding stable but, I think in an effort to discourage me, my parents insisted I earned my riding money by doing chores. I cleaned my dad’s army boots and the brass buttons on his uniform. I dusted and swept and dried dishes for my mum. I became an early recycler by collecting empty beer bottles but don’t recall now how much I got paid for the empties, probably one penny per bottle, but it all added up to the five shillings required for an actual riding lesson.

So, on a brilliant Saturday afternoon with the sun shining out of a clear blue sky, the grass in
the paddock beside a Norman church long and very green, and with Pembroke Castle across the river in the background, I was taught how to properly mount a saddled pony (very different to the handfuls of mane required to assist in hoisting myself onto a pony’s bare back) and everything that came after.

That day is as clear now as it ever was and, yes, I am still as passionate about horses as I was then. These days though, my riding is restricted to a gentle trail ride or two every summer. The days of dressage and what show jumping (never my favourite riding activity) I did are in the past but I still think and dream about horses and, because I write historical fiction, include them in every story I write.

http://books2read.com/Brides-of-Banff-Springs

www.victoriachatham.com

How Do I Love Thee Spring? Let Me Count The Ways by A.M.Westerling

 As you can gather from the title, I love spring. I love how the sun is warm yet the breeze is still crisp. I love the return of the songbirds and the rat a tat tat of the flickers pecking the chimneys to attract mates. I love the spring rains that wash away the last of winter. I love the fattening buds on the trees and shrubs and the springtime green of the new leaves when they unfurl. I even love the growl of the street sweepers cleaning the gravel off the streets! 

Nothing says spring like tulips. Nowadays you can buy tulips almost any month so that's like a little bit of spring spread throughout the year.

Spring is all about rebirth, regrowth and renewal and it’s my favorite season because I am a gardener. It means the long snowy sleep of winter is over and a new gardening season is upon us. I love seeing which perennials I planted the year before survived the winter and are poking up their little heads. I love having garden projects to tackle, like laying stones or reworking a perennial bed because it gets me outside in the fresh air, digging in the dirt, and using muscles I didn't even know I had. Until the next day! *wink* 

Every spring there’s something new I want to try, be it bleeding hearts in my backyard or hyacinths in my shade garden.

 

I love the promise of how these newly planted dahlia tubers will turn into this stunning display.

 And the promise that this:

Will turn into this.

But most of all, I love that spring is followed by summer. I live in the Great White North so it means a good stretch of decent weather! 

According to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. And maybe a good historical romance! Barkerville Beginnings is Book 4 of BWL Publishing's Canadian Historical Brides Collection and is available here at your favorite online store.

 

 Find the rest of the books in the collection here.