The Beginning of The Longhorn Affair

I love diaries. My first book The Longhorn Affair was inspired by a diary I read when I was fifteen. Back in 1962, my dad was a member of the Texas Historical Society. They designate historic properties in Texas as well as maintain archives of historically relevant documents.

At one point my dad was going to view a private library that some generous person wished to donate. I went with him that time because I didn’t have school that day and even then I loved old books.

One of the books that drew me that day was a diary written in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It detailed a woman’s life in a farming community, her activities and a great deal os local gossip. One of local stories that she followed for months concerned a woman in her late twenties who inherited a cattle ranch. The general consensus was that she would shortly marry, because a woman simply wasn’t capable of running a cattle ranch, and why would she want to? You can understand why this tale appealed to a very self reliant fifteen year old girl.

As you can imagine, things went along like a soap opera. The woman had no shortage of suiters being a land-rich potential bride. The hitch in the community’s plan to marry her off was that she thought she could manage her ranch just fine, thank you very much.

After a month, she decided to hire a ranch manager, or at least a cattleman. Her idea was to run ads in the big cattle cities, Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso, Amarillo, and Wichita Falls.

So she went down to the telegraph office and gave the telegraph operator the text of her ad. Now, that telegraph operator was one of the several would be grooms in town, and he thought it would serve her right if he tweaked the ad a little. Instead of “ranch manager wanted,” he sent an ad that read “husband wanted.”

I had read that far when my dad finished his appraisal of the library. I thought taking the diary with me would be a fine idea. My dad disagreed, so the book was left, and I never got to find out how the story ended.

That story stuck with me until I finally wrote The Longhorn Affair. It is set in today’s Texas, and the ad is not distributed by telegraph, and it modified because of jealousy, but otherwise the situation is the same. To get a copy click here.

There isn’t a diary in The Longhorn Affair, but there is in the epilogue novella, A Longhorn Christmas, which you can get for free by signing up for my newsletter here.