Even a failed, three-way collaboration and later a manuscript’s rejection didn’t scare this journalist away from storytelling.

Over lunch, Dallas and two friends plotted, divided up and crafted characters for a book later abandoned when their day jobs got in the way.

Later the fledgling novelist resurrected and rewrote a post-college manuscript only to receive the dreaded rejection letter from her agent.

Hooked on fiction, Dallas persevered eventually producing Buster Midnight’s Cafe, an end-of-depression look at the hell-roaring days of coal mining in Butte, Montana.

Steeped in history from an early age, Dallas covered the Rocky Mountain region as a staff writer and the first female bureau chief for Business Week magazine.

Schooled  daily in Virginia’s past by her mother, Dallas and her siblings toured Washington’s Mount Vernon and Arlington House, residence of Robert E. Lee as children.

But a 1945 move to Denver opened up the west for a writer who never ventured  back east again.

Subjects ranging from copper mining in Butte, Montana, and polygamy in Utah, to the role of women in business and sexual harassment provided future background for Dallas’ fiction dominated by female characters.

The Chili Queen

Set in Nalgitas, New Mexico, in the 1860s, The Chili Queen follows the life of Addie French, a con artist turned madam.

Returning by train from Kansas City, Addie befriends a prim and proper lady traveling west as a mail-order bride.  But when Emma, the spinster, is jilted, she seeks refuge in Addie’s ‘boarding house’ and life at the brothel is never the same again.

This psychological thriller cum detective story takes the reader on horseback through the plains of New Mexico and Colorado as the con men/women try to out run the person they swindled.   Through Dallas’ words, one can feel the wide open spaces and sniff the sweet-smelling air of the old west.

Tallgrass

Just after the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an act forcing all of  California’s Japanese Americans into internment camps.

When Dallas’ pen hits paper, this relocation to Tall Grass (Amache) produces an  fearful atmosphere ripe with paranoia in Ellis Colorado,  a small town of sugar beet farmers.

From the viewpoint of Rennie Stroud, 13, the reader watches as the bigoted townspeople heap blame on the nearby Japanese when a crippled girl is found brutally murdered and raped.

Often compared to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Tall Grass highlights the struggle of the dirt-poor farmers in the sparsely populated southeast town of Granada.

Discussion questions can be found here.

The Diary of Mattie Spenser

In the post-civil war era, the stigma of being a spinster compels Mattie to accept an impromptu marriage proposal and accompany her new husband by wagon train to the western territories.

While Luke battles to shape the frontier into a homestead, the lone female endures hardship, frugality, betrayal, infant mortality and drought along with the constant threat of Indian attack.

In Mattie, Dallas gives us a woman of courage and faith in the treeless, inhospitable landscape of Eastern Colorado.

Don’t forget the Persian Pickle Club, another Sandra Dallas favorite.

A list of nonfiction titles can be found here.  Fictional titles here:

But the main character of Letters from Yellowstone puts passion before propriety in this 226-page novel by Diane Smith.

Defying conventional behavior, A. E. Bartram, a Cornell medical student, travels cross country  by herself to catalog the Rocky Mountain flora and fauna of Yellowstone National Park.

The year is 1898 before tourists, the railroad, local entrepreneurs and poachers destroy the picture of pristine nature found in this 3,468 acre park in northern Wyoming.

Not fazed by her less than warm welcome, amateur botanist Alexandria Elisabeth Bartram settles into camp, “with her own tent, bedding and other feminine necessities delivered (without any charge!) by a woman naturalist who considers herself a patron of the sciences”.

In one of his frequent letters home, expedition leader, H. G. Merriam, assures his mother, that Miss Bartram will be allowed to stay since she is, “slight of build so would not eat much”.

Besides sad-eyed Merriam, the field study is composed of a drunken agriculturist teaching his pet raven to talk, and the driver/guide who, “ain’t gonna haul no woman”.

Eccentric entomologist Daniel Peacock rounds out the short-staffed undertaking along with two undergraduates expecting a vacation, Stony and Rocky Cave, plus the mediocre Chinese cook, Kim Li.

Coping with “worn-out tents, ramshackle tables, make-shift equipment”, along with a freak springtime blizzard, Alex and her male cohorts collect and preserve specimens in earnest.

Tensions escalate when Smithsonian representative Philip Aber arrives threatening to close down the project, citing the presence of Alexandria,  Merriam’s dismal leadership skills, the shocking lack of equipment and the Crow Indian family camped nearby.

But Miss Bartram proves her meddle, when she comes to the rescue of Professor Merriam after a 60-foot fall from a rocky ledge.  Finding him bleeding and breathless, the female botanist creates a make-shift tourniquet and builds a crude shelter of tree limbs as the snow continues to fall and darkness quickly closes in around them.

Even though the pursuit of science has left Alexandria, “thin, brown, weary, her hair unkempt and hanging in limp ringlets around her face and down her back”, she refuses to return home with her stiff-necked Cornell mentor, Professor Lester King until the summer’s end.

In letters and telegrams to the outside world, the novel’s rag tag crew of scientists debate the role of science in society, learn from each other, chuckle at the  raven’s antics, and find romance during their two-month stay in Yellowstone.

This bookclubber found the novel engaging, but one sided. Return letters from Professor Merriam’s mother and Alexandria’s parents would have heightened the  conflict as well as filled in gaps in the reader’s knowledge.

As a great fan of another epistolary novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, this bookclubber preferred the give and take as letters passed back and forth between  characters.  (See The Art of Letter Writing, March 14th post)

True, Diane Smith’s choice to tell Alexandria’s story through out-going letters only might not please everyone, but this format allows us to peek into each character’s thoughts in turn.

Drawing from her 15-year stint as a science and environmental writer, Smith sprinkles scientific terms and Latin species names throughout which can become tiresome at times.

Thankfully, the author introduces topics such as wild life management, commercialization/exploitation of national parks and the woman’s place in the world of science with such a light hand that the novel’s flow is uninterrupted most of the time.

Also set in the western states in the late 1800s, Smith’s second novel deals with a paleontological expedition. Told through the main character’s journal, Pictures from an Expedition includes an ongoing feud over the discovery of a Triceratops skeleton and the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Readers who enjoyed Letters from Yellowstone rated Pictures from an Expedition as an even better work.  In a recent interview,  Ms. Smith revealed that her current project, tentatively entitled, Evolution, will also be set in Montana territory in the late 1800s.

Discussion Questions for Letters from Yellowstone can be found at:  www.uspenguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/letters_from_yellowstone