⭐ Re-release Book Spotlight ⭐
A Bargain Struck
by Liz Harris
Publication Date: June 29th, 2023
Publisher: Heywood Press
Pages: 344
Genre: Historical Romantic Fiction
Wyoming, 1887.
Widower Connor Maguire advertises for a wife to raise his young daughter, Bridget, work the homestead and bear him a son.
Ellen O'Sullivan longs for a home, a husband and a family. On paper, she is everything Connor needs in a wife. However, it soon becomes clear that Ellen has not been entirely truthful.
Will Connor be able to overlook Ellen's dishonesty and keep to his side of the bargain? Or will Bridget's resentment, the attentions of the beautiful Miss Quinn, and the arrival of an unwelcome visitor, combine to prevent the couple from finding happiness.
As their personal feelings blur the boundaries of their deal, they begin to wonder if a bargain struck makes a marriage worth keeping.
The story of a man and a woman brought together through need, not love...
Why Wyoming?
General Merchandise store. (c) Liz Harris
A Bargain Struck, the second edition of which has just been published, was the first of the three novels that I set in Wyoming.
I’ve been asked a number of times what inspired me to set several novels in Wyoming.
In order to answer the question, I must wind the clock back to the publication of my debut novel, The Road Back. After The Road Back, my publisher asked for another novel in a similar genre. They wanted a novel set in fairly recent history, which was romantic, which shed light on how ordinary people lived at that time, and which had an emotional element.
I was aghast! I had spent my pre-publication years happily writing novels in different genres, and none of those would do. It meant that I was going to have to come up with an idea for a new story and location, and fast.
Alas, there is nothing more difficult to do than think of an idea for a strong story when you feel the pressure of a deadline on your back.
After approximately six frantic weeks in which I tried out ideas and rejected them, I was close to despair. When in despair, my answer invariably involves food. As I drove along to meet a friend for lunch one day, my brow furrowed in thought, I switched on Radio 4 and found myself in the middle of a talk about Russian mail-order brides.
A bell rang.
During my years in California, I did a course on American Studies at Los Angeles City College. There I learnt that in order to encourage the settlement of land in the mid-west, the US Congress passed The Homestead Act in 1862, which allowed claimants to stake a claim to 160 acres of undeveloped land that lay west of the Mississippi River.
As a result, men started to go west in droves, and when they came upon suitable land, they staked their claim, built a log cabin and settled there. On a farm or ranch, there was a man’s work, and a woman’s work, so unattached men frequently sent back to the east for a mail-order bride.
I felt a huge surge of excitement. I had my historical period and location - Wyoming, the heart of the west!
It was through Wyoming Territory - Wyoming didn’t become the 44th State of the Union until 1890 - that from the 1850s on, pioneers in covered wagons drove along the Overland Trail from the east to the west. Many settled in Wyoming. Others, when they reached the west of the Territory, headed for Oregon, California or Utah.
My hero would be a second generation homesteader in Wyoming, I decided, as first generation homesteaders would have been too focused on survival to have had time to fall in love. And his homestead would be on good agricultural land as he was going to be a farmer, not a rancher.
Thus Connor Maguire was born. A widower with a young daughter, he needed a wife to do the work that a woman would do around the farm, so he advertised for one.
Enter Ellen O’Sullivan from Omaha, Nebraska. Ellen answered Connor’s advertisement, and as she was perfect on paper, Connor sent for her. But alas, Ellen hadn’t been entirely honest in her reply to the advertisement, as Connor was to find out. All I’ll say now is that she wasn’t pregnant and nor did she have a child!
I now needed the year in which to set my story. Early in my research, I discovered that the winter of 1887 was the worst in Wyoming’s history, which is still true today, and that it brought about a complete change in ranching life and the open range, so I chose to start the novel in 1887.
Despite having a wide range of books bought from both the US and UK, and reading the Wyoming newspapers from the years 1886 and 1887, and having recourse to the internet, there were still several questions to which I couldn’t find answers.
I couldn’t find out from my research books, for example, whether the outhouse contained the equivalent of a porta potty, or if there was just a hole in the ground. I couldn’t find out whether or not there would have been running water in the home of a second generation homesteader.
To find the answer to these and other questions, I dragged my husband, who hates the sun, to Wyoming in August. There I was able to answer every question I’d had. And in addition, I found answers to questions that I hadn’t even known to ask!
I began my Wyoming trip on a ranch south of Laramie. It had been built in 1890, and our meals were served in the kitchen built at that time. There would, indeed, have been running water in the kitchen in the late 1800s, I found. In addition to a well that lay a short distance from the house, a narrow, very deep well had been dug outside the house on the other side of the wall from the kitchen sink. Water could be pumped from that well into the sink.
 |
| The rudimentary pump over the kitchen sink, (c) Liz Harris |
I was also able to answer my question about the outhouse – a wrangler on the ranch told me. The outhouse stood above a hole in the ground, over which there was usually a form of a seat. Eventually, the hole would be filled in and the outhouse lifted up and moved to a different location.
 |
| An outhouse. (c) Liz Harris |
The novel opens with Connor’s mail order bride, Ellen, completing her 100-mile journey from the station town of Rawlins to Baggs, where she’s to be met by Connor. We stayed for two nights in Rawlins, from which we drove south to Baggs, following the same route as Ellen as I wanted to see what she saw. She will have seen the same miles and miles of sagebrush, an arid scenery that isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I rather liked it.
 |
| Miles of sagebrush. (c) Liz Harris |
My journey was slightly different from Ellen’s, though, in that I travelled by air-conditioned car. Ellen, of course, didn’t. She went there by stagecoach.
 |
| Cheyenne Deadwood stagecoach. (c) Liz Harris |
It was quite an emotional moment when I stepped out of the car in Baggs, at the very point where the stagecoach used to stop. I’m breathing the same air as Ellen breathed, I thought, and standing on the ground where she stood. I felt really moved.
We then went east from Baggs to the Savery area, which lies in the shadow of the Sierra Madre mountains, and this was where I set the fictional town of Liberty. It was an area with some beautiful scenery, with agricultural land interspersed with rivers large and small, some flanked with lush green grass, some edged with shining white pebbles of various sizes, scenery that I find really attractive.
The museum in Savery was very informative, just as The Homesteaders’ Museum north of Cheyenne had been. We were very sorry to leave the area, but there was still much to see. Heading north-west, we stopped in Lander, which also had an excellent museum, and we passed Wind River. Our destination was Old Trail Town, Cody, but we were making a detour in order to spend three days in Yellowstone Park on the way.
 |
| On the way to Jackson Hole in Yellowstone, with the Grand Tetons in the distance. (c) Liz Harris |
Yellowstone is an area of great beauty, and geysers, but it isn’t a place to walk through unescorted because of the prevalence of bears – grizzly, brown and black. There are ‘Be Bear Aware’ signs everywhere.
After leaving Yellowstone by a north eastern exit, it was a relatively short distance to Cody, which was fascinating. Shops, livery stables, a saloon bar, a schoolhouse and houses, all dating from the 1880s, had been carefully transported to Cody and reassembled to form Old Trail Town. When I described my fictional Liberty, I had much of Cody in mind.
It was a fantastic research trip. I shall never forget the dramatic scenery I saw, the delightful people I met, and the real pleasure of exploring on the spot the history of the time and place which was to form the world of my novel. A Bargain Struck will always live close to my heart.
Liz Harris
Born in London, Liz Harris graduated from university with a Law degree, and then moved to California, where she led a varied life, from waitressing on Sunset Strip to working as secretary to the CEO of a large Japanese trading company.
Six years later, she returned to London and completed a degree in English, after which she taught secondary school pupils, first in Berkshire, then in Cheshire and finally in Oxfordshire.
In addition to the seventeen novels she’s had published since her debut novel The Road Back, Liz has had several short stories in anthologies and magazines.
Liz recently moved to Windsor, in Berkshire. An active member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Historical Novel Society, her interests are travel, the theatre, reading and cryptic crosswords.
To find out more about Liz, visit her website at:
Thank you, Coffee Pot Book Club, for allowing me to talk to your readers about my research for A Bargain Struck, the second edition of which has just been published. I thoroughly enjoyed going back a few years in my mind to my wonderful trip to Wyoming, and I very much hope your readers enjoyed the article I wrote and the few photos I included.
ReplyDeleteYou're very welcome, Liz. Thank you so much for joining us with such a fascinating post.
Delete