Research – good, solid, grounding research -is essential for any book, but doubly so for a historical fantasy – and thrice that when you’re using extant and still in-use locations for your setting!

The Devil’s West books are set in the American West, the land that in our timeline was the Louisiana Purchase.  I’d taken a major on American social and political history in college, so the bones of What If were already set: what if our exploration into the West had gone differently?  What if, instead of a Gold Rush and a Land Rush, instead of Manifest Destiny, we’d been forced to slow down, to consider the territory west of the Mississippi a sovereign land, to be wooed and negotiated with rather than colonized?  What if magic resisted “civilization?”

But writing about the Territory brought up a significant problem:  North America is vast.  The continental US alone is nearly…