Cora Stanfield grew up in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, where the actual ruts of the Oregon Trail run through the county and the wagon tracks are still pressed into the rock above town. She spent her childhood on field trips to Chimney Rock and her adulthood unable to stop wondering about the women whose names appear once in the emigrant journals and never again.

She spent twenty-four years as a county-museum archivist and local-history librarian along the North Platte, cataloguing emigrant diaries, quilt records, and the thin paper trail of women who crossed a continent and were noted, if at all, as ‘wife of’ and ‘two children.’ Her fiction is her argument with that archive. She researches obsessively — trail dates, river depths, the price of oxen, the real progression of a cholera camp — and then hands the facts to the women the record left blank.

Her Overland Women saga follows a single wagon company west in 1846, one woman’s season per book, bound together by a ledger of names that passes from keeper to keeper. Readers can expect meticulous history, a found family worth two thousand miles, real loss, and the particular hope that comes from surviving what should not have been survivable. It is the Oregon Trail as the women actually crossed it.

Cora still lives in western Nebraska with her husband, Tom, a retired county extension agent, a quilting frame that is always mid-project, and a stubborn vegetable garden she calls her homestead. She keeps a shelf of photocopied emigrant diaries she refers to, without irony, as ‘the girls.’