Ranch Wife

When Jo Jeffers was a young girl suffering from asthma, she promised herself, "When I grow up, if I ever do, I shall go to Arizona and be a cowboy." She did both, and Ranch Wife tells the story of her life as wife and partner of a rancher in the high country of northeastern Arizona. Here she describes the routines of ranch life and vividly recalls the dust storms, plagues, and other hazards that challenged the young city-bred woman. It offers readers not only an insider's view of a working ranch but also an appreciation of how ranchers' wives help sustain such a rugged enterprise.

Continue on the adventure with The Rancher Takes a Wife, the conclusion to Richmond Hobson's western frontier trilogy! The interior of British Columbia in the early 20th century is a jungle of swamps, rivers, and grasslands. It's a vast and still barely explored wilderness, whose principal citizens are timber wolves, moose, giant grizzly bears, and the odd human being. Into this forbidding land, Rich Hobson, Pioneer cattle rancher, brings Gloria, his city-raised bride. Her adjustment to life in the wilderness is sure to be difficult, as is her relationship with Rich and his backwoods cronies. Will Gloria find that she belongs in this strange, harsh land? Told with wit and wisdom, Hobson recounts a wild true adventure story in the last book of his collection of survival tales. These dramatic tales are described with the humor and vivid detail that have made Hobson's books perennial favorites.

The history of Faraway Ranch and the Erickson-Riggs family is a rich and complex story. However, if viewed simplistically as we often have, the Faraway Ranch story is one more tale of Western settlement. Two Swedidh immigrants, one a soldier and the other an officer's family servant, meet at a frontier military post, fall in love and decide to homestead along the banks of Bonita Creek in the Chiricahua Mountains.... (from the introduction).

When Jo Jeffers was a young girl suffering from asthma, she promised herself, "When I grow up, if I ever do, I shall go to Arizona and be a cowboy." She did both, and Ranch Wife tells the story of her life as wife and partner of a rancher in the high country of northeastern Arizona. Here she describes the routines of ranch life and vividly recalls the dust storms, plagues, and other hazards that challenged the young city-bred woman. It offers readers not only an insider's view of a working ranch but also an appreciation of how ranchers' wives help sustain such a rugged enterprise.

Cowboy goes a-courtin' Jeremiah Blake is a true man of the West: a hardworking, straight-talking rancher. He's got his priorities all figured out—and marriage isn't one of them. He likes women, no mistake about it, but not on what you'd call a permanent basis. Cilla Prescott's arrival in Glory provides him with a brand-new challenge. But Cilla has her priorities figured out, too. She says she's not interested in romance—or in him. She's just opened a preschool; she doesn't have time for men. Jeremiah aims to change her mind. He's decided to take dating and courtship more seriously, decided that maybe he should get married, as everyone's been telling him for years. Now he had to convince Cilla that she's the wife for him! EVen it if takes a bachelor auction and some conniving by a old friend to do it…

Reluctant Husband It wasn't easy for a man as proud as Day Kincaid to admit he had trouble he couldn't handle alone. But if he wanted to keep the daughter he loved, he had to find himself a wife—fast. And that meant marriage to a stranger—a woman who awakened longings that had no place in his solitary life…. Wife in Name Only The Red Arrow Ranch seemed the perfect place for Angelique Summer to hide. And her new role as a rancher's wife seemed the perfect cover—until a surprising passion for her hard, embittered "husband" made her wish she was playing the part for real….

Viewers of films and television shows might imagine the dude ranch as something not quite legitimate, a place where city dwellers pretend to be cowboys in amusingly inauthentic fashion. But the tradition of the dude ranch, America’s original western vacation, is much more interesting and deeply connected with the culture and history of the American West. In American Dude Ranch, Lynn Downey opens new perspectives on this buckaroo getaway, with all its implications for deciphering the American imagination. Dude ranching began in the 1880s when cattle ranches ruled the West. Men, and a few women, left the comforts of their eastern lives to experience the world of the cowboy. But by the end of the century, the cattleman’s West was fading, and many ranchers turned to wrangling dudes instead of livestock. What began as a way for ranching to survive became a new industry, and as the twentieth century progressed, the dude ranch wove its way into American life and culture. Wyoming dude ranches hosted silent picture shoots, superstars such as Gene Autry were featured in dude film plots, fashion designers and companies like Levi Strauss & Co. replicated the films’ western styles, and novelists Zane Grey and Mary Roberts Rinehart moved dude ranching into popular literature. Downey follows dude ranching across the years, tracing its influence on everything from clothing to cooking and showing how ranchers adapted to changing times and vacation trends. Her book also offers a rare look at women’s place in this story, as they found personal and professional satisfaction in running their own dude ranches. However contested and complicated, western history is one of America’s national origin stories that we turn to in times of cultural upheaval. Dude ranches provide a tangible link from the real to the imagined past, and their persistence and popularity demonstrate how significant this link remains. This book tells their story—in all its familiar, eccentric, and often surprising detail.

Told with wit and wisdom, this is Hobson's tale of bringing his city-bred interior-decorator bride to the harsh life of the British Columbia Interior.