WIP: historical fiction novel

In my novel, To and Fro Upon the Earth, there was a scene that took place at a café in a little desert town. The place is not fictional, though it is now deserted for the most part. 

A reader asked me the story behind the little town, and though I had done research on its location and the café, I really didn’t know. Not one to pass up an opportunity for research, I began looking into it. It was founded in 1921 as a stop between Phoenix and Los Angeles in the middle of the desert, when the road was no more than ruts in the sand. That was interesting enough, but the man who founded it turns out to be quite a character. His adventures, his ownership of the town, and many of the events that happened during his lifetime caught my imagination.  If I could find enough information about him, his life, and the town, it would make for a delightful historical fiction novel.

I don’t have a working title yet, referring to it as simply as Desert Steve. I am finding a good amount of information about the town itself, its history, but not an awful lot about the man’s early life. There’s not enough for a novel yet, but I think I’m getting close. I’ll be doing some on-site research soon. Once I have enough for a novel, I’ll start looking for themes to explore and that will suggest a title, as is usually the case with my books.

I’ll be posting more as I get farther along in the project.

Desert. Sun. Sand. No roads or human settlements within fifty miles in any direction. The perfect place to found a town?

That’s what Steve Ragsdale believed. So he and his wife bundled up their four kids in their 1915 Ford Model T, bought a local prospector’s shack and well, and built a fuel station (50-gallon drum), a repair garage, and café. He advertised “Free food on days the sun doesn’t shine” and “No drunks, no dogs—we prefer dogs.” He was the owner, sheriff, rockhound, author, naturalist, desert guide, and Santa Claus at Christmas.

He became one of the local “desert rats” and earned the moniker “Desert Steve.” Along the way, he became part of history: the Colorado Aqueduct, the construction of the first State and National highways, the invention of prepaid healthcare, General Patton and World War II, the largest iron mine in the United States, flying saucer sightings, murder, and much more.

Based on a true story, this is the tale of a quirky, clever, and bold man who pursued a dream, wrote bad poetry, and found ways to survive when many would have perished or packed it in.

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