The Inspiration for Cactus Cowboys

I’ve always loved cowboys. I grew up in the age of the western, both movies and television shows. On Saturdays, I watched shows with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, and the Cisco Kid. Adult westerns were on almost every night of the week. Those stories were about good guys and bad guys, wrongs being set right, and the indomitable spirit of the West. I think those tales were one of the reasons I wound up living in Tucson.

In November 2018, Empire Ranch held its annual Cowboy Festival. If you’ve ever seen “Red River” or “The Outlaw Josie Wales,” you’ve seen Empire Ranch. Only about an hour south of Tucson, the working cattle ranch made a perfect location for western movies. Needless to say, for me it was a must-see event.

The area where the ranch resides is rolling grassland with much more water than the land around Tucson. There’s nothing like a lake, but there is Cienega Creek, which flows for a distance of fifty miles and becomes the mostly dry Pantano Wash in Tucson. There’s also groundwater, and the ranchers and miners who lived and worked there dug many wells to get to it.

I was most interested in the history, things like how the ranch house expanded over time to accommodate the increasing number of people. It started as a two-bedroom adobe house, but eventually grew to over twenty rooms, including what they call the Victorian addition, which has a gable roof in sharp contrast to the rest of the house. That section also has a beautiful half-octagon window with a gorgeous view of the mountains.

There were demonstrations of ranch skills, such as blacksmithing and making adobe bricks, as well as displays of riding and shooting. Near the tables where you could eat your lunch was a stage where western music played all day.

The more I learned about Empire Ranch, the Homestead Act, the Total Wreck Mine, and people like Walter Vail and his family, the more fascinated I became with the idea of setting a novel on a ranch like it in the 1870s and 80s. Or, as it turns out, a series.

I originally wrote the draft of The Rancher and the Lady in 2019, then because I was in the midst of writing a very different kind of series that was having some success, put it aside. Every December, as I was planning what I would write for the next year, I thought about that unpolished novel. But I knew it would take a long time to revise it, research many of the details, and turn it into something people would want to read, so put it aside one more time. At the end of 2022, I finally decided it was time to finish it, and so I’ve spent the first half of the year doing just that. As I write this, it’s with a content editor, because I want to make sure this first novel in a new genre fulfills reader expectations. I want readers to love it as much as I do. If you’re reading this, I can only assume I succeeded.