From Backwoods to Mail-Order Brides

This month’s Women Honoring the West guest hails from the Pacific Northwest and is one of the best storytellers. She’s a go-getter, kind, and inspiring. Let’s meet Kit Morgan!

Hi, Kit Morgan here! I don’t have a ranching background. But I did grow up in a little log cabin in the woods. I guess you could say I have more of a pioneering background. Makes sense as I live not a half hour from the end of the Oregon Trail.

My cousins were the ranchers though. We used to spend part of our summers at their ranch during the harvest. Yes, they had cattle, horses, and all of that, but their main income came from wheat. Thousands and thousands of acres of it. My aunt and uncle had 12 children, and everybody worked. They still own and operate their ranch, and now there are several generations working it.

I live in the West and love it. It’s all around me. We grew up watching Westerns on TV. There were plenty of horsemen and cattlemen around. Like most boys in our neck of the woods, my brother got a car to drive around in. My sister and I each got a horse. It was just part of the culture we grew up in.

I’m a horseless horse lover. My sister is a professional horsewoman and a retired racehorse jockey. I’ve been around horses most of my life and will be around them for years to come.

My upbringing is what led me to write Westerns.

I just finished writing a mail-order bride book, (Miss Lystra, The Brides of Fiddler’s Gap, Book 8) and have started another one. I write a lot of mail-order bride stories as people love reading about a bride’s adventure of marrying a stranger and wondering how they will find love. I write very light-hearted books, (my books are described as Green Acres meets Gunsmoke) so I tend to stay away from the hardness of those times. Which in reality, was a lot.

Most women became mail-order brides because they didn’t have a lot of options.

Carmen asked me which of my characters were my favorite. After 170 books, I’d have to say one of everyone’s favorite characters is Mrs. Irene Dunnigan. (She’s also my narrator’s favorite character to perform.)

She comes across as cranky and mean but really has a heart of gold. Her weapon of choice is a cast iron ladle she always has at the ready, and Irene has a mean swing! She’s clobbered many a bad guy over the years and first appeared in my very first Western, His Prairie Princess, which released in March of 2013.

Irene and some of her friends make an appearance in Miss Lystra, the book I just finished. So they’ve been around a long time!

I’m currently working on Mail-Order Millie. It’s for a historical box collection by various authors and will be released in October. The short blurb for the book is: Imagine mail-order bride Millie’s surprise when she finds out her so-called husband is really a spy working for the president.

And she’s part of his cover…

About Kit

USA Today bestselling author Kit Morgan has written for fun all of her life and penned over 170 books! Whether she’s writing contemporary or historical romance, her whimsical stories are fun, inspirational, sweet and clean, and depict a strong sense of family and community. Raised by a homicide detective, one would think she’d write suspense, (and yes, she plans to get around to those eventually, cozy mysteries too.) but Kit likes fun and romantic westerns. She resides in the beautiful Pacific Northwest in a little log cabin on Clear Creek, after which her fictional town that appears in many of her books is named.