Sandra Dallas

It's 1863 and 10-year-old Emmy Blue Hatchett has been told by her father that soon their family will leave their farm, family, and friends in Illinois, and travel west to a new home in Colorado. It's difficult leaving family and friends behind. They might not see one another ever again. When Emmy's grandmother comes to say goodbye, she gives Emmy a special gift to keep her occupied on the trip. The journey by wagon train is long and full of hardships. But the Hatchetts persevere and reach their destination in Colorado, ready to start their new life.

The New York Times bestselling author of Whiter Than Snow delivers a novel about the secrets and passions of three generations of women who live in a Victorian Colorado house It's 1880, and for Nealie Bent, seventeen, the splendid Victorian house under construction in Georgetown, Colorado, is like a fairy tale come to life. She dreams of living in "the Bride's House," as she calls it, with Will Spaulding, the young entrepreneur sent from the East by his grandfather to learn about the mining business. Will is not the only one who courts Nealie. Charlie Dumas, a miner who lacks Will's polish, wants to marry the hired girl, too, and although Nealie rebuffs him, Charlie refuses to give up. Ultimately, Nealie must deal with lies, secrets, and heartache before choosing the man who will give her the Bride's House. For the motherless Pearl, growing up in the Bride's House is akin to being raised in a mausoleum. Her father, robbed of the life he envisioned with Nealie, has fashioned the house into a shrine to the woman he loved. He keeps his daughter close. When the enterprising young Frank Curry comes along and asks for Pearl's hand in marriage, Pearl's father sabotages the union. But Pearl has inherited her mother's tenacity of heart, and her father underestimates the lengths to which the women in the Bride's House will go for love. Susan is the latest in the line of strong and willful women in the Bride's House. She's proud of the women who came before her. Their legacy and the Bride's House's secrets force Susan to question what she wants and who she loves.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Prayers for Sale comes a powerful novel about the intersection of redemption, forgiveness, and love. . . . On a spring afternoon in 1920, Swandyke--a small town near Colorado's Tenmile Range--is changed forever. Just moments after four o'clock, a large split of snow separates from Jubilee Mountain high above the tiny hamlet and hurtles down the rocky slope, enveloping everything in its path. Meet the residents whose lives this tragedy touches: Lucy and Dolly Patch, two sisters long estranged by a shocking betrayal. Joe Cobb, Swandyke's only black resident, whose love for his daughter forces him to flee Alabama. Then there's Grace Foote, who hides secrets and scandal that belie her genteel fa ade. And Minder Evans, a Civil War veteran who considers cowardice his greatest sin. Finally, there's Essie Snowball, born Esther Schnable to conservative Jewish parents, who now works as a prostitute and hides her child's parentage from the world. Fate, chance, and perhaps divine providence all collide in the everyday lives of these people. And ultimately, no one is without sin, no one's soul is whiter than snow, and no one is without the need for forgiveness. A quintessential American voice and a writer of exquisite historical detail, Sandra Dallas illuminates the resilience of the human spirit in her newest novel.

From the critically acclaimed author of Tallgrass comes a powerful novel about an unlikely friendship between two women and the secrets they've kept in order to survive life in a rugged Colorado mining town. It's 1936 and the Great Depression has taken its toll. Up in the high country of the snow-covered Rocky Mountains, eighty-six-year-old Hennie Comfort has lived in Middle Swan, Colorado, since before it was Colorado. When she first meets seventeen-year-old Nit Spindle, Hennie is drawn to the grieving young girl. Nit and her husband have come to this small mining town in search of work, but the loneliness and loss Nit feels are almost too much to bear. One day she notices an old sign that reads prayers for sale in front of Hennie's house. Hennie doesn't actually take money for her prayers, never has, but she invites the skinny girl in anyway. The harsh conditions of life that each has endured create an instant bond, and a friendship is born, one in which the deepest of hardships are shared and the darkest of secrets are confessed. Sandra Dallas has created an unforgettable tale of a friendship between two women, one with surprising twists and turns, and one that is ultimately a revelation of the finest parts of the human spirit.

During Word War II, a family fnds life turned upside down when the government opens a Japanese internment camp in their small Colorado town. After a young girl is murdered, all eyes (and suspicions) turn to the newcomers, the interlopers, the strangers. This is her town as Rennie Stroud has never seen it before. She has just turned thirteen and, until this time, life has pretty much been what her father told her it should be: predictable and fair. But now the winds of change are coming and, with them, a shift in her perspective. And Rennie will discover secrets that can destroy even the most sacred things. Part thriller, part historical novel, Tallgrass is a riveting exploration of the darkest---and best---parts of the human heart.

Natchez, Mississippi, in 1933 is a place suspended in time. The silver and china is still dented and cracked from Yankee invaders. And the houses have names...and memories. Nora Bondurant is running away--from her husband's death, from his secrets, and from the ghosts that dog her every step. When she receives a telegram informing her that she has an inheritance, Nora suddenly has somewhere to run to: a house named Avoca in Natchez, Mississippi. Now, she's learning that the lure of Natchez runs deep, and that, along with Avoca, she's inherited a mystery. Nora's aunt Amalia Bondurant was killed in a murder/suicide, and the locals are saying nothing more--except in hushed, honeyed tones. As Nora becomes more and more enmeshed in the community and in her family's history, she learns surprising things about the life and death of her aunt: kinship isn't always what it seems, loyalty can be as fierce as blood relations, and every day we are given new mercies to heal the pain of loss and love.

Life may have been hard on Addie French, but when she meets friendless Emma Roby on a train, all her protective instincts emerge. Emma's brother is seeing her off to Nalgitas to marry a man she has never met. And Emma seems like a lost soul to Addie-someone who needs Addie's savvy and wary eye. It isn't often that Addie is drawn to anyone as a friend, but Emma seems different somehow. When Emma's prospective fails to show up at the train depot, Addie breaks all her principles to shelter the girl at her brothel, The Chili Queen. But once Emma enters Addie's life, the secrets that unfold and schemes that are hatched cause both women to question everything they thought they knew. With Sandra Dallas's trademark humor, charm, and pathos, The Chili Queen will satisfy anyone who has ever longed for happiness. The Chili Queen is the winner of the 2003 Spur Award for Best Western Novel.

Mattie agrees to marry the town's eligible bachelor, and soon she and Luke have set off to build a home in Colorado, and as they cross the wilderness she learns the truth about her new husband and finds love at last, in a poignant saga of pioneer life. Reprint. AB. K.

Two miner's daughters from Butte, Montana, Effa Commander and Whippy Bird, now restauranteurs, reveal the truth behind the scandalous Love Triangle murder, a crime that involved their childhood friend, May Ann Kovacks--aka Hollywood star Marion Street

Prospectors lured to the West in hopes of striking rich settled a thousand towns in the Colorado mountains. The cry of ""Gold!"" or ""Silver!"" or a few flecks of color in a tin cup sent them to remote, often inhospitable locations to search for the precious metals.Close on the heels of the miners were the merchant, the gamblers, the prostitutes, the washerwomen, the capitalists, and the con men. Together they turned the mining camps into bustling towns where saloons never closed and the safest place for a man to walk after dark was down the middle of the street with a gun in each hand.Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps is the first new book in more than twenty-five years to document these mountain communities. Most of the early settlers are gone, leaving few persons with any oral tradition to pass on to future generations. For many of the 147 towns and camps listed in this book, not much remains to be preserved beyond what Dallas and photographer Kendal Atchison have recorded.The book is lavishly illustrated with 290 photographs. In addition to those by Atchison and early historical photographs, rare photographs from the 1920s and 1930s are included, many never published before. Some of Atchison's superb photographs evoke nostalgia with views of abandoned buildings deteriorating amid meadow wildflowers. Soon nothing will remain but the Colorado landscape, with the eternal mountains towering close by.The town histories are traced from their beginning in strike-it-rich excitement and glittering boom years, through the declines, to the present day. Some of these hopeful towns, such as Lulu, were deserted as quickly as they were settled, lasting barely more than a season, while a few, including Aspen and Breckenridge, are as lively today as they were a century ago. But most of them, like Animas Forks, flourished until the gold or silver played out and were abandoned, leaving a few lonely cabins or picturesque ruins. Towns such as Aspen, Crested Butte, Cripple Creek, and Breckenridge have lived on to become popular ski resorts, and these places warrant additional vignettes that add color and to the text.Written to inform and entertain the general reader, this book will be a delight for armchair adventurers as well as invaluable for vacationers interested in visiting the sites of these Colorado boomtowns. Most of the places are no longer shown on modern road maps, and special maps of the region have been prepared for this book.

Here is the story of Colorado's old hotels-some lavish, some lascivious, a few just long forgotten. Before the turn of the century, when travel was arduous, not to mention downright dangerous, voyagers to the Rocky Mountains wanted to lower their travel-weary limbs into plush chairs, nibble oysters, and sip champagne. No luxury was denied them when they arrived at most Colorado hotels. At the Hotel de Paris in Georgetown, for example, an unexpected guest might dine on wild game, tiny French peas, crusty French bread, and properly chilled wine after only a few minutes' wait. At the Sheridan in Telluride a heartier traveler could sit down to a plank steak, named after the piece of wood whose size it resembled. At the Teller House in Central City one could order buffalo tongue in aspic. At Gold Hill, where the miners knew good food if not good French, one could select from Casey's "Tabble Dote" a cup of coffee "demy tass" and "floatin' Ireland." To the eastern visitors' happy surprise, the hotels for the most part were opulently Victorian, as proper as they were in Boston or Saratoga, with ladies' entrances, ordinaries, and endless private parlors. Yet there was still enough of the raw frontier in hotels where a miner might sleep an eight-hour shift on someone else's sheets for a mere fifty cents. He would sleep in the cold, clawed by a bedmate's spurs and chewed by bedbugs, but he did have one guarantee of relative comfort-the landlord's posted promise of "No More Than Five in a Bed." "Both entertaining reading and a most useful guide."-Denver Post "Every page makes entertaining reading."-Dallas News "Amusing and informative and a fine way to fill an evening."-Chicago Tribune "The book is light, frothy and pleasant to read."-St. Louis Post Dispatch Sandra Dallas, a reporter for Business Week for twenty-five years, is the author of Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps, Cherry Creek Gothic: Victorian Architecture in Denver (also published by the University of Oklahoma Press), Gaslights and Gingerbread, many other books and articles on Colorado and the West, and several best-selling novels. Marshall Sprague was a well-known Colorado historian and the author of many books.