I come from Wyoming, where my family has lived since the 1870s. They were and are a colorful bunch. My great uncle, Roy Montgomery, ran a bar and bordello in Gillette, Wyoming, called the "Buffalo Hump." He was the Democratic favorite for the governorship of Wyoming when the Republican faction levied charges against him for violating the White Slave Traffic Act. He spent a year in Leavenworth and no time as Governor, then returned to his Fortification Ranch and to his more lucrative affairs in Gillette.

Another great uncle, Spike Haigler, was a rancher on the Powder River, who loved to tell stories about the time he was shot from a cannon, and the year the pumpkins "grew so fast they drug themselves to death," and about his favorite characters at the ranch like "Tongue Tied",a ranch hand with a stutter.

One of my sons is named after my great grandfather, Frederick Caspar who, when he was a young cowboy, went on a spree, rode his horse into the bar in the town of Kaycee, where the sheriff shot him and then left him for dead on the edge of town.

My great grandmother Kassios came to Wyoming from Italy. She knew no English, but came out to marry a man she met through the mail. She didn't like him, persuaded a friend to take her place at the altar, and went on to run booze during Prohibition.

I grew up in Casper and at the ranch in the Black Hills which my parents still own. I've been a schoolteacher (children bring cow testicles to school for show and tell in Wyoming), raised pigs, killed rattlesnakes, hunted and fished. In the years I moved toward writing, I was a short order cook, sold worms and maple bars to camping spots, taught swimming lessons in the shadow of Devil's Tower. I lived in a trailer where I washed clothes in a wringer washer and dried them by the heat of the wood stove. Small snowdrifts collected inside through cracks around windows.

I am now married to Louis Warren, a historian of the American West. I first had an inkling of the interest people had in the West in general, and specifically, in the stories I could tell, while Louis was working on his Ph.D. at Yale. Other graduate students were intrigued by my exotic upbringing. I went to a potluck dinner with a jar of chokecherry jelly and Spike's poem

Carnation Milk, the best in the land,
Here I sit with a can in my hand.
No tits to pull, no hay to pitch,
Just poke a hole in the son of a bitch.

It was a hit.

We continue the western story. We;ve been shot at outside Elko, tracked Buffalo Bill's cowboys and Indians through Britain, Belgium, and France, camped out for months on archeological digs in the Mojave Desert, lived for weeks in what's now Glacier National Park, and sat in a sweat lodge then jumped into a glacier fed lake. My children (one of whom was born in a tiny understaffed hospital just so he could be a Wyoming native rather than a South Dakotan) are named after Uncle Roy and Frederick Caspar. They still sojourn to Wyoming with us, and hear the stories of rattlesnakes in baby Ruth's crib, or Grandpa Streeter born so small they kept him in a box in the coal stove for a week, or how Granny caught influenza in 1918, and lost every bit of hair.

Stories of long-ago Wyoming and the stories that I've lived in the contemporary West are mirrors to the abiding questions we yet wonder over. They inform every word I write.