Blog Tour for Delilah by Kaye Lynn Booth

Hello and Welcome Everyone!

I am happy you stopped by my blog. Today I’m the host at Wordcrafter Book Blog Tours and I want to announce the release of Delilah by Kaye Lynn Booth. Kaye has written a guest post today telling us all about Delilah, Book One in her Women in the West Adventure Series. Delilah sounds like a fascinating and entertaining book. 

Thank you Kaye and congratulations on the release of Delilah!

Writing Sarah – strong female characters right out of history

One of the fascinating things about the Women in the West adventure series is the fact that there is a true-life historical female character in a supporting role, along with the strong female protagonist in each book. Life on the American frontier was filled with hardship which many believed did not fit well with the female constitution. Women on the frontier were few, and most of those were included in a family unit. Single and widowed women did exist on the frontier, as did those whose husbands just never came home for whatever reason, went back to the family unit in most cases. Women who chose to go it alone, defying societal expectations were rare. Those who did, chose a hard life and had to have backbone to survive. In Sarah, the supporting character will be Kate Elder (Big Nose Kate), who was the consort of the infamous dentist, gambler, and gunfighter, John (Doc) Henry Holliday. In this case, our character was the woman behind the man, and is little known for her own merit.

Mary Katherine Horony-Cummings a.k.a. Big Nose Kate Elder – the woman behind the man

Mary Katherine Horony was born in Budapest, Hungary on November 7, 1850. It is said that her father was a skilled surgeon, appointed the personal physician for the Mexican emperor, Maximillian I, and they came to the U.S. when the regime fell, and settled in Davenport, Iowa when Kate was ten. It is said that Kate was educated and could speak several languages, and as the daughter of a prominent surgeon this could be true. Perhaps it is what drew her the well-educated Holliday when they crossed paths in Texas.
Both of her parents died within a few months of each other, leaving Kate and her siblings orphaned when she was 15, and they were moved around to different foster homes. She ran away with her sister from foster placement within a year, and they jumped a ship to St. Louis. It took tremendous courage for a girl of that age to set out on her own to take up the often unforgiving life of the American frontier, or perhaps just desperation. I’m not sure what happened to the sister, but Kate was working as a prostitute by 1869.
Kate was a tough cookie of her own accord. In 1887, in Fort Griffith, Kate was almost in a gunfight herself, when she accused another woman of setting her sights on Doc, and the other woman drew a gun, forcing Kate to draw her own. Doc was able to break up the altercation before shots were fired, but Kate was not one to back down from a fight. Certainly, she had a wicked temper and a hard drinker, which might lead us to believe that she was the type of woman who thrived on excitement and enjoyed the wildness of the frontier.

Kate & Doc – True love on the frontier: the real story

In Texas, in 1877, she met John ‘Doc’ Henry Holliday, who worked as a dentist during the day, and spent his evenings in the saloons and gambling houses. In their travels through Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Arizona, Kate worked as a dance hall and saloon girl, as well as a prostitute. Unlike most prostitutes in the old west, Kate paid tribute to no madam or ‘mac’, but instead acted as her own handler. Kate’s occupation may have been a sore spot in her relationship with Doc.
Doc and Kate were known to have a volatile relationship, at times marked with drunken arguments which often turned violent, and the pair parted ways more than once, only to be reunited later. The registered in Dodge City, Kansas as Mr. and Mrs. John H. Holliday, but there is no evidence that the couple were ever actually wed. Despite behaviors brought about by drink and hot tempers, and the ups and downs which made their relationship a rollercoaster ride, Kate always remained loyal to Doc.
Their departure from Fort Griffin, has become one of legend in the history books. With little supporting evidence, the story goes that Doc knifed a man named Ed Bailey, when Bailey pulled a pistol over a poker game. Although it was self-defense, Doc and was placed under arrest, held in a hotel room with sentries posted outside the door until the magistrate showed up to hold court. Magistrates and judges presided over vast territories in those days, and in many towns court was only held once a month, so waiting for trial was not unusual. Kate caught wind of a lynch mob forming, unwilling to wait for Doc to go to trial, so she set a small shed on fire to draw everyone’s attention and then held his guard at gunpoint and aided Doc in his escape, before the mob could hang him.
It is said that Kate was running a bordello when Doc reunited with her in Tombstone, Arizona. Later, Kate implicated Doc in a stagecoach robbery, that he, in all likelihood, had no part in, after Sherriff Johnny Behan and the cowboy faction which opposed the Earps and Holliday, found her drunk after one of she and Doc’s spats, while she was still angry with him. They plied her with liquor until she made the claim against Doc. Once sober and level-headed once more, she recanted her story, but the damage had been done and she and Doc parted ways once more.
But as Doc lay dying in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, sick and destitute, a friend of his contacted her and Kate came to Glenwood Springs to help care for him and pay the bills, so he wouldn’t be turned out into the street. She collected firewood from the rough terrain of Glenwood Canyon and sold it to help to pay Doc’s expenses. And after he passed, she packed up his dentist equipment and the tools of his gambling trade, and shipped them back east, to whatever family he had there. True to the very end.

Kate – the woman in the west

In a time when most women were a part of a family unit and were not allowed to make a living, a time when there were few opportunities for a woman to make a living, Kate was four-leaf clover in a field of green. Acceptable vocations for women were limited to seamstress, laundress, domestic servant, milliner, teacher, wait staff, or prostitute. She was an independent woman, and a survivor, who did what she could and what she had to do with whatever was available to her.

Following Doc’s death, as she reached an age when working as a prostitute was no longer profitable, Big Nose Kate Elder hung up her garters and became Mary Katherine Horony once more. Becoming respectable, she married a blacksmith and worked as a cook and shop operator, until she left him eleven years later. She died as a ward of the state, at the Arizona Pioneers Home, in Prescott, Arizona, in 1940.
In the words of Patrick A. Bowmaster, in his article “A Fresh Look at Big Nose Kate”
“Kate was a survivor. But more than that she was a woman who survived on her own term at a time when few of her gender did likewise.”

Resources
Carla Jean Whitley (3/10/2017) To Doc From Kate – But Who Was Kate? Post Independent. Retrieved from https://www.postindependent.com/news/local/to-doc-from-kate/

Patrick A. Bowmaster. A Fresh Look at “Big Nose Kate”. Tombstone History Archives. Retrieved from http://www.tombstonehistoryarchives.com/a-fresh-look-at-big-nose-kate.html

Maggie Van Ostrand (2017) Katie Elder a.k.a. Big Nose Kate, Her True Story. Goose Flats Graphics & Publishing. Retrieved from Southern Arizona Guide: https://southernarizonaguide.com/katie-elder-her-true-story-by-maggie-van-ostrand/

Joseph A. Williams. The Real Story of Doc Holliday and Big Nose Kate. Old West. Retrieved from https://www.oldwest.org/doc-holliday-big-nose-kate/

Big Nose Kate – Doc Holliday’s Sidekick. Legends of America. Retrieved from https://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-bignosekate/

(2/28/2022). Couples with History: Glewood Springs Loves Stories. Glenwood Springs Blog. Retrieved from https://visitglenwood.com/blog/2022/02/couples-with-history-glenwood-springs-love-stories/
The True Story of Katie Elder. Notes from the Frontier. Retrieved from https://www.notesfromthefrontier.com/post/the-true-story-of-katie-elder

About the author

Kaye Lynne Booth lives, works, and plays in the mountains of Colorado. With a dual emphasis M.F.A. in Creative Writing and an M.A. in Publishing, writing is more than a passion. It’s a way of life. She’s a multi-genre author, who finds inspiration from the nature around her, and her love of the old west, and other odd and quirky things which might surprise you.
Her latest release is the re-release of Delilah, as Book 1 in the Women in the West adventure series. She has short stories featured in the following anthologies: The Collapsar Directive (“If You’re Happy and You Know It”); Relationship Add Vice (“The Devil Made Her Do It”); Nightmareland (“The Haunting in Carol’s Woods”); Whispers of the Past (“The Woman in the Water”); Spirits of the West (“Don’t Eat the Pickled Eggs”); and Where Spirits Linger (“The People Upstairs”). Her paranormal mystery novella, Hidden Secrets, and her short story collection, Last Call and Other Short Fiction, are both available in both digital and print editions at most of your favorite book distributors.
In addition, she keeps up her authors’ blog, Writing to be Read, where she posts reflections on her own writing, author interviews and book reviews, along with writing tips and inspirational posts from fellow writers. Kaye Lynne has also created her own very small publishing house in WordCrafter Press, and WordCrafter Quality Writing & Author Services, where she offers quality author services, such as publishing, editing, and book blog tours. She has served as a judge for the Western Writers of America and sitting on the editorial team for Western State Colorado University and WordFire Press for the Gilded Glass anthology and editing Weird Tales: The Best of the Early Years 1926-27, under Kevin J. Anderson & Jonathan Maberry.
In her spare time, she is bird watching, or gardening, or just soaking up some of that Colorado sunshine.

Link to buy a copy of Delilah.