10 Things You Might Not Know From the Blake's Folly Romance Trilogy by J. Arlene Culiner

By2023, the silver boomtown of Blake’s Folly, once notorious for saloons,brothels, speakeasies, and divorce ranches, has become a semi-ghost town ofabandoned shacks and weedy dirt roads. But unusual settings attract unusualpeople, those forced to adapt to new circumstances in order to survive, andthose 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, whenBlake’s Folly boasted silver mines, saloons, and brothels, the adventurer,Westley Cranston, fell in love with Sookie Lacey a former prostitute. Theirromance was doomed but never forgotten, and these six stories tell the tale.

All About Charming Alice

Alice Treemontcooks vegetarian meals, rescues unwanted dogs, and protects the most unlovedcreatures on earth: snakes. What man would share those interests? Jace Constantis in Nevada, doing research, but he won’t be staying long. He hates desertdust, dog hair and snakes terrify him. Even if the air sizzles each time Aliceand Jace meet, any romance seems doomed.

Desert Rose

Rose Badger isthe local flirt, and settling down is the last thing she intends to do.Geologist Jonah Livingstone is intriguing, but with his complicated life, he’soff limits for anything other than friendship. The sparkling and lovely Rose Badger fascinates Jonah Livingstone, but she doesn’t seem inclined tochoose a favorite, so why fret? Jonah’s secret life keeps him busy.

10 Things YouMight Not Know from the Blake's Folly Romance Trilogy

Blake’s Folly, Nevada, oncea silver boomtown, is now a backwoods community of clapboard shacks andscraggly vegetation. The local saloon is a leftover from another century and,inside country music whines, while eccentrics dish up tall tales, andsuspicion. But living in an unusual setting does have advantages. It makes ussit up and take notice of our environment and gives us a good knowledge ofunusual local history. For example…

1) Nevada was once covered by a warm shallow seafilled with reefs, mollusks, and ammonites. There were also ichthyosaurs —large marine lizards — and they appeared around 250 million years ago, evolvingfrom a group of unidentified land reptiles that returned to the sea, like theancestors of modern-day dolphins and whales.

2) In the first half of the 1800s, women werescarce in the West, and husband-hunters, whether ugly or good-looking,mean-tempered, sharp-tongued, or sugar sweet easily found partners. By the1880s, things had changed. Women fleeing domestic service, poor farms,millwork, or factory toil, were arriving in abundance and men could take theirpick.

3) Like all Western boomtowns where the malepopulation outnumbered the female, there were many brothels. Being out in thewasteland, panning for gold, trudging over empty space hoping to find silver,working hard in the mines, or ranching on poor soil and barely surviving, allmade for a pretty lonely life, so brothels and saloons were oases. What couldbe more appealing than an oasis where scantily clad women served alcohol andpleasure?

4) Although their silks, gaudy jewels, andperfumes set them apart from “decent” town women, brothel madams made certaintheir “girls” were well behaved and lady-like in public. In reality, they hadno reason to be otherwise: although a few were tough, gritty women, most werethose who, through bad luck, circumstance, betrayal, or personal choice, hadcome 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. Butthese less respectable “ladies” were welcomed by local shopkeepers, for theyspent their hard-earned cash on fans, furs, clothes, all manner of fluffy andshining gewgaws.

6) Despite all the lovely stories we hear aboutwestern romances, the reality was less romantic. Men looking for wives in theFar West usually went for young, fresh, strong women who would raise children,attend to harvests, garden work, laundry, scrounge for firewood, and cook. Manyof the men were looking for women to replace their previous wives who had diedduring childbirth or from sheer exhaustion.

7) Without experience in the working world, olderwomen who were widows, or who had been abandoned, or divorced hoped their grownchildren would take them in. However, not every couple wanted a mother, ormother-in-law in residence unless she was still strong enough to help out withthe drudgery. The very many who found no home with their children were oftenreduced to begging in the towns.

8) Although prohibition effectively cut offNevada’s much-needed tax revenue, it didn’t reduce social drinking. In one yearalone, 90,000 Nevada residents managed to wangle 10,000 prescriptions formedicinal alcohol.

9) The names of the old railway companies stillsound familiar to us — the Philadelphia and Reading, the Erie, the NorthernPacific, the Union Pacific, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. However, allthose companies failed during the depression of 1893.Even back then the politicians lied, claiming the economy was prospering as 500banks closed and 16,000 businesses declared bankruptcy.

10) And for those who want to know about me, theauthor J. Arlene Culiner, I’ve spent my life shifting from one country to theother, and I’ve often done it in an original way: on foot. I also travel onslow trains, get off in out-of-the-way places where I can’t speak the languageand where I don’t know a soul. I now live in a small, sleepyvillage in France where there’s nothing going on. There are no shops.Occasionally a tractor passes through. There is a main square with a 13thcentury church and houses that date from the 16th and 18thcenturies. There are many wonderful bats, quirky pigeons, and other lovelybirds that I delight in.

 

Writer, photographer, social criticalartist, and storyteller, J. Arlene Culiner, was born in New York and raised inToronto. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, has lived in a Hungarian mudhouse, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, and in ahaunted house on the English moors. She now resides in a 400-year-old formerinn in a French village of no interest and, much to local dismay, protects allcreatures, especially spiders and snakes. She particularly enjoys incorporatinginto short stories, mysteries, narrative non-fiction, and romances, herexperiences in out-of-the-way communities, and her conversations with strangecharacters.

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