“Strong women made me a writer. It was in the early 1990’s and in our home school we were learning the history of our home state, Nebraska. It’s no secret that the average history textbook doesn’t make for very exciting reading. One day I decided on a more “hands on” approach to the lesson, and we walked up the road and into an abandoned pioneer cemetery near our country home. The children began gathering facts about who was buried there, and during the process I began asking them questions about how those pioneer lives were different from ours. Where did this mother go for help when her child was sick? What did they eat for dinner? How did that family cope with losing all those children (one row of graves were five children from the same family)?

As “history” became real to my children, the lives of the pioneer women of Nebraska began to speak to me. I began to read about the women who crossed the Oregon trail, and the ones who eventually settled in Nebraska, and I met amazing women–many of them nameless. Women who buried five children and carried on. Women who braved prairie fires and blizzards and carried on. Women who wrote of terrible things happening, and yet also wrote, “God knew best.” Women who had a strong faith in a personal God and who found Him sufficient even in the face of trials and difficulty I could never imagine.

I began “playing with an imaginary friend” who would become Jesse King, the heroine in my first novel. Since that day, I’ve had the incredible privilege of being inspired by dozens of mighty women who lived quietly in the past and who have been largely forgotten. Their stories are retold in a fictional way in my books, the latest of which is A Claim of Her Own, about a single woman prospecting for gold in Deadwood, South Dakota. Mattie faces down an ugly past and risks everything to find happiness.

Not long after I began the journey into learning about pioneer women of the west, my husband was diagnosed with an incurable form of cancer. Those pioneer women from the past encouraged me. Their tough times gave me perspective and helped me endure. During that time I began to hand quilt a small unfinished crib quilt left behind by a mother some time around 1870. Why didn’t she finish her quilt? Probably because her baby didn’t survive. As I sat with my husband during chemotherapy sessions, I was again reminded that the women who have gone before me have experienced the same kinds of trials and the same kinds of challenges I. They endured. . . so can I. Their faith was strong. . .and it reached out across the years and reminded me that God walks with us through our valleys and He does give us the strength to endure.

Someday in heaven I hope to meet the mighty women who have inspired my historical fiction and learn their names as we rejoice together at the goodness of the One who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

Thanks for sharing that, Stephanie. Your entrance into writing by identifying with the lives of American women who went before is intriguing as well as uplifting.
Her new book will be released the first week of April. I’m looking forward to it!

Drop by her website: http://www.stephaniewhitson.com/