Settlers Hope by Kathleen Bailey

Blurb:

After years of wandering, Pace Williams expects to find a home in the Oregon Country. He doesn't expect is to fall in love with a fiery Irishwoman bent on returning home to avenge her people.

Oona Moriarty expects one thing: to exact revenge on the English overlords who took her home. She doesn't expect to fall in love with a man who looks like he's been carved from this Western landscape.

Together they vow to trust the unexpected and settle into a life, but when Pace's ancient enemies threaten to destroy the life they're building, Oona must choose between helping the man she loves and seeking the revenge she craves.

Amazon US https://www.amazon.com/Settlers-Hope-Historical-Romance-Western-ebook/dp/B08CMN9K13

Amazon UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/Settlers-Hope-Historical-Romance-Western-ebook/dp/B08CMN9K13

FOR CLARE REVELL: MY OREGON TRAIL OBSESSION

It couldn’t have happened anywhere else, or in any other time.

            What would possess people to sell everything they couldn’t cram into a wooden wagon, say goodbye to their family and friends, and head off on a journey through prairie, desert and mountains to a place they’d never seen? What would possess them to leave a country less than a century old, and for which some of their ancestors had fought their way free from England?

            The Great Migration. The Westward Journey. The Oregon Trail. Beginning in the early 1840s, thousands of people set out from the “jumping off” towns of St. Joseph and Independence, Mo., to travel the land only known by missionaries, the military and mountain men. Some of them were adventurers from other lands. But most were ordinary Americans who couldn’t resist the lure of “seeing the elephant,” a popular phrase coined to encompass the wonders of the journey.

            They didn’t see an elephant, but they saw most everything else: virgin forest, mighty rivers, strange rock formations rising out of the desert. Many saw Native Americans for the first time, and in the early years these were mostly peaceful and curious encounters. They saw buffalo and pronghorn antelopes.

            The farmers among them usually had the skills to deal with broken axles and skittish oxen. The city-dwellers or greenhorns usually didn’t, but everyone helped each other out. They were all they had.

            Passions boiled over. At their worst, wagon trains were like a small town on wheels, and they showed the best and worst of small towns. There would be gossip, petty rivalries, and attempts at lynching where the weary wagon master had to step in. And they often buried their dead beside the trail.

            Some were running away from something. Some were running toward something. And everyone had a story.

            Nearly 20 years ago, I knew I was going to write about the Oregon Trail. My characters took shape: a gently-bred, Eastern-bred schoolteacher, now a widow, who had no other choice but to work her way west; and a silver-tongued Irishman fleeing from something even darker than famine and oppression.  I colored in the background with secondary and minor characters, and then the Trail and my characters took over.

            It proved to be the perfect blend. Take two strong-willed characters and pit them against the elements. Lots of elements. Two thousand miles of elements, battering away at them until their spirits are broken and the Spirit takes over. The Trail took over, acting almost as a third character.

            And really isn’t that what we want in fiction, reading or writing it? To see real people like us, throwing themselves up against impossible situations, fighting the battles outside and within.

            “Westward Hope” was published in September 2019. The west continued to fascinate me, and I wrote a sequel, “Settler’s Hope,“ set in a pioneer village in the Oregon Country. “Settler’s” was published in e-book July 17 and will come out in paper some time this fall. I’m working on a third book, “Redemption’s Hope,” exploring a different part of the New World, from Taos to San Antonio to New Orleans and back.

            But my heart keeps tugging me back to the Oregon Trail. To one of the biggest undertakings in our history, but undertaken by frail and flawed human beings. Whose story is waiting to be told? A young man and women whose parents don’t want them to wed, in a Capulet and Montague tale? An older couple, each traveling with their respective adult children, who find love again over a campfire? Just about anyone who’s running from their past?

            It’s a world of possibilities, for them and for a writer.

Kathleen Bailey is a journalist and novelist with 40 years’ experience in the nonfiction, newspaper and inspirational fields. Born in 1951, she was a child in the 50s, a teen in the 60s, a young adult in the 70s and a young mom in the 80s. It’s been a turbulent, colorful time to grow up, and she’s enjoyed every minute of it and written about most of it.

            Bailey’s work includes both historical and contemporary fiction, with an underlying thread of men and women finding their way home, to Christ and each other. Her first Pelican book, ‘Westward Hope,” was published in September 2019. This was followed by a novella, “The Logger’s Chrsitmas Bride,” in December 2019. Her second full-length novel, “Settler’s Hope,” was released July 17, 2020.

She lives in New Hampshire with her husband David. They have two grown daughters.

            For more information, contact her at ampie86@comcast.net; @piechick1 on Twitter; Kathleen D. Bailey on Facebook and LinkedIn; or at www.kathleendbailey.weebly.com.

Kathleen will be giving away the following to randomly chosen commenters.

My gift will be two e-copies of the book, to anyone, and one paper copy to a US reader. I will send a small New England gift pack to a third reader, also in the US.