Behind the Research with Sandra Dallas / WHERE COYOTES HOWL (1/17/23)

Bestselling author Sandra Dallas writes beautifully rendered love letters to the early 20th-century American West. And we are thrilled that Sandra Dallas has provided a deeper look into her own story behind WHERE COYOTES HOWL and the research that went into this addictive and poignant love story.

“Dallas’ (WESTERING WOMEN, 2020) blunt, brutal latest explores the mythic soul of the American West and the endless flatlands of early-twentieth-century Wyoming through a female lens.” Booklist, starred review

WHERE COYOTES HOWL by Sandra Dallas | 9781250277909 | 4/18/23 | LibraryReads votes due by March 1st | Download on Edelweiss know more

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Many years ago, I wrote a Denver Post review of an autobiography written in the early 1900s by an old cowboy. The book told about the man’s work on the range, and his marriage and acquisition of a small ranch. Following his wife’s death, he returned to cowboying, then just sort of drifted off. After the review ran, I sent the book to a reader in Wyoming who’d written me about it.

Although I no longer had the book, the story never left me. What struck me was how ordinary the cowboy’s life was. It was typical of so many people who settled the West. Their lives were filled with hardship and sorrow, but there was also joy as they built homes on the brutal western prairie. Many of them never made it, and the High Plains are filled with the relics of houses and outbuildings.

About ten years ago, I began thinking about that cowboy’s book and wondering if the man’s story could be turned into a novel. I contacted western bookstores in hopes of finding a copy. No luck. That wasn’t surprising since I couldn’t recall the title of the book or the author’s name. I didn’t know if the setting was Wyoming or Montana. Booksellers scoffed, and even librarians at the Western History Department of the Denver Public Library, who work miracles when it comes to tracking down resources, shook their heads.

Three years ago, I stopped looking and decided it was up to me to write the story. The result is WHERE COYOTES HOWL. The book is about an Iowa woman, Ellen Webster, who travels to Wyoming on a whim to teach school, marries Charlie Bacon, a cowboy, and goes to ranching with him. It tells of the hardships they face together, and the joys and sorrows they endure because of their deep love for each other.

That wasn’t an opportune time to do research. COVID had closed down the libraries. I couldn’t go to Wyoming to research the book or visit the setting because of the pandemic. Besides, my husband was recovering from an illness, and I had to be at home to take care of him. I had to depend on my own library of western books that I’ve collected over the years as well volumes from online booksellers.

My beginning source for almost any of my books is the WPA state guide. When I began writing more than 50 years ago, a librarian at the Colorado Historical Society started me out with COLORADO: A Guide to the Highest State. Back then, I was writing nonfiction books about Colorado architecture and ghost towns. When I turned to fiction, I realized the guides with their history, folklore, and scenic tours were also a wonderful source for a novelist. Those guides, as you probably know, were researched and written during the Great Depression under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project. Researchers in each state wrote and published a guide, then branched out into auxiliary subjects. Montana produced COPPER CAMP, a boisterous history of Butte; Colorado, one on ghost towns. I have a couple dozen of these guides, including WYOMING: A Guide to Its History, Highways and People. I think I read that the woman who wrote THE MAN WHO LOVED CAT DANCING used the Wyoming guide as background material for her book. So that’s where I began, reading about Wyoming’s history, its agriculture, and its landscape.

It takes more than one guidebook to provide the background for a novel, of course. So I went down to the basement and my collection of books about pioneer women. I had written before about the problems faced by settlers in the early West, primarily in THE DIARY OF MATTIE SPENSER. I knew something about the challenges women faced — challenges that broke the strongest of them — and about their love for their men and the beauty they see in the gold prairie grasses in early morning sunlight. Life was tough, and I admired them, knowing there was no way I could have been a pioneer.

Still, I didn’t know much about school teachers.

I hadn’t wanted my heroine, Ellen, to be a teacher. School teachers have been the heroines of hundreds of western novels and movies going back to THE VIRGINIAN. But I couldn’t come up with any other occupation for a woman going west on her own in the 1910s. She couldn’t have been a shopkeeper, and despite the novels today about pioneer women who were lawyers and newspaper editors, in reality, they weren’t typical. I didn’t want her to be a prostitute either. Thus she became a teacher. Unfortunately, for my research, I had disposed of my collection of books about teachers. when I moved a few years ago, thinking I’d never write a book about one.

Still, there were books that I could use for background on women’s life in the early 20th century West. A couple dozen of them, in fact. The ones I consulted most were A LADY’S RANCH LIFE IN MONTANA by Isabel F. Randall, SOD AND STUBBLE by John Ise, and WE SAGEBRUSH FOLKS by Annie Pike Greenwood. I also found THE COWBOY AT WORK by Fay E. Ward and the Federal Writers’ Project’s WYOMING FOLKLORE to be enormously helpful.

(My favorite bit of research didn’t come from a book. It dropped into my lap. My daughter came home from a visit to a friend in Wyoming with the story of a woman who’d met a rancher somewhere in the Midwest. He’d proposed, then gone home and never come back. When she found she was pregnant, she went to him, only to have his wife open the door. Instead of slinking off, the woman stayed in Wyoming, gave birth to her child, and became a successful rancher on her own. I turned her into Miss Ferguson in my novel.)

None of those books I read was the cowboy autobiography that inspired WHERE COYOTES HOWL, however. That meant writing the book depended on my imagination, which was when the real work started. But that’s what novel writing is all about. You absorb the research, and then you sit it down and write, combining fact with fiction. As a result, my novel isn’t that cowboy’s story at all. I wrote my own book, creating characters and scenes as I went along. It turned out to be a love story set against a background of Wyoming history, lore, and landscape.

I don’t have any illusions that WHERE COYOTES HOWL will be a book for the ages. Still, maybe in another hundred years, some writer will come across a yellowed copy of it and wonder about the author and how she researched the story.

Sandra Dallas