By
2023, the silver boomtown of Blake’s Folly, once notorious for saloons,
brothels, speakeasies, and divorce ranches, has become a semi-ghost town of
abandoned shacks and weedy dirt roads. But unusual settings attract unusual
people, those forced to adapt to new circumstances in order to survive, and
those who have never really fit into mainstream society. But none are humdrum.
All have dreams and a chance to fall in love.
A Room In Blake’s Folly
In 1889, when
Blake’s Folly boasted silver mines, saloons, and brothels, the adventurer,
Westley Cranston, fell in love with Sookie Lacey a former prostitute. Their
romance was doomed but never forgotten, and these six stories tell the tale.
All About Charming Alice
Alice Treemont
cooks vegetarian meals, rescues unwanted dogs, and protects the most unloved
creatures on earth: snakes. What man would share those interests? Jace Constant
is in Nevada, doing research, but he won’t be staying long. He hates desert
dust, dog hair and snakes terrify him. Even if the air sizzles each time Alice
and Jace meet, any romance seems doomed.
Desert Rose
Rose Badger is
the local flirt, and settling down is the last thing she intends to do.
Geologist Jonah Livingstone is intriguing, but with his complicated life, he’s
off limits for anything other than friendship. The sparkling and lovely Rose Badger fascinates Jonah Livingstone, but she doesn’t seem inclined to
choose a favorite, so why fret? Jonah’s secret life keeps him busy.
10 Things You
Might Not Know from the Blake’s Folly Romance Trilogy
Blake’s Folly, Nevada, once
a silver boomtown, is now a backwoods community of clapboard shacks and
scraggly vegetation. The local saloon is a leftover from another century and,
inside country music whines, while eccentrics dish up tall tales, and
suspicion. But living in an unusual setting does have advantages. It makes us
sit up and take notice of our environment and gives us a good knowledge of
unusual local history. For example…
1) Nevada was once covered by a warm shallow sea
filled with reefs, mollusks, and ammonites. There were also ichthyosaurs —
large marine lizards — and they appeared around 250 million years ago, evolving
from a group of unidentified land reptiles that returned to the sea, like the
ancestors of modern-day dolphins and whales.
2) In the first half of the 1800s, women were
scarce in the West, and husband-hunters, whether ugly or good-looking,
mean-tempered, sharp-tongued, or sugar sweet easily found partners. By the
1880s, things had changed. Women fleeing domestic service, poor farms,
millwork, or factory toil, were arriving in abundance and men could take their
pick.
3) Like all Western boomtowns where the male
population outnumbered the female, there were many brothels. Being out in the
wasteland, panning for gold, trudging over empty space hoping to find silver,
working hard in the mines, or ranching on poor soil and barely surviving, all
made for a pretty lonely life, so brothels and saloons were oases. What could
be more appealing than an oasis where scantily clad women served alcohol and
pleasure?
4) Although their silks, gaudy jewels, and
perfumes set them apart from “decent” town women, brothel madams made certain
their “girls” were well behaved and lady-like in public. In reality, they had
no reason to be otherwise: although a few were tough, gritty women, most were
those who, through bad luck, circumstance, betrayal, or personal choice, had
come to work in the sex trade. They were as sentimental and vital as any woman,
crying each Christmas over the memory of faraway homes, inaccessible families,
and a way of life no longer open to them.
5) Local wives detested the ladies of pleasure,
and their disapproval condemned them to the last row at social events,
theatrical performances in the local community hall, and church services. But
these less respectable “ladies” were welcomed by local shopkeepers, for they
spent their hard-earned cash on fans, furs, clothes, all manner of fluffy and
shining gewgaws.
6) Despite all the lovely stories we hear about
western romances, the reality was less romantic. Men looking for wives in the
Far West usually went for young, fresh, strong women who would raise children,
attend to harvests, garden work, laundry, scrounge for firewood, and cook. Many
of the men were looking for women to replace their previous wives who had died
during childbirth or from sheer exhaustion.
7) Without experience in the working world, older
women who were widows, or who had been abandoned, or divorced hoped their grown
children would take them in. However, not every couple wanted a mother, or
mother-in-law in residence unless she was still strong enough to help out with
the drudgery. The very many who found no home with their children were often
reduced to begging in the towns.
8) Although prohibition effectively cut off
Nevada’s much-needed tax revenue, it didn’t reduce social drinking. In one year
alone, 90,000 Nevada residents managed to wangle 10,000 prescriptions for
medicinal alcohol.
9) The names of the old railway companies still
sound familiar to us — the Philadelphia and Reading, the Erie, the Northern
Pacific, the Union Pacific, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. However, all
those companies failed during the depression of 1893.
Even back then the politicians lied, claiming the economy was prospering as 500
banks closed and 16,000 businesses declared bankruptcy.
10) And for those who want to know about me, the
author J. Arlene Culiner, I’ve spent my life shifting from one country to the
other, and I’ve often done it in an original way: on foot. I also travel on
slow trains, get off in out-of-the-way places where I can’t speak the language
and where I don’t know a soul. I now live in a small, sleepy
village in France where there’s nothing going on. There are no shops.
Occasionally a tractor passes through. There is a main square with a 13th
century church and houses that date from the 16th and 18th
centuries. There are many wonderful bats, quirky pigeons, and other lovely
birds that I delight in.
Writer, photographer, social critical
artist, and storyteller, J. Arlene Culiner, was born in New York and raised in
Toronto. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, has lived in a Hungarian mud
house, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, and in a
haunted house on the English moors. She now resides in a 400-year-old former
inn in a French village of no interest and, much to local dismay, protects all
creatures, especially spiders and snakes. She particularly enjoys incorporating
into short stories, mysteries, narrative non-fiction, and romances, her
experiences in out-of-the-way communities, and her conversations with strange
characters.
Website: http://www.j-arleneculiner.com
Blog: http://j-arleneculiner.over-blog.com
All
sites: https://linktr.ee/j.arleneculiner
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jarlene.culiner/
Storytelling
Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/j-arlene-culiner