by Carla Kelly
The truly magisterial work on Yellowstone is The Yellowstone Story, volumes one and two, by Aubrey L. Haines, former park historian. Both are scholarly but highly readable. I recommend them.
For any of my readers who have persisted this far, let me offer my thanks to Kim Allen Scott, archivist of special collections at Montana State University in Bozeman for his assistance. Carrie McKay would be pleased to know how far her humble Montana Agricultural College has come. It’s a fine campus in a lovely town.
I’m equally grateful to Park Service archivists at Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center, Gardiner, Montana, not far from the Roosevelt Arch. I found Wylie Camping Company brochures proclaiming the promise of Wonderland. I looked through many of the Red Books too, which have found their way into the archives. It’s touching somehow to see that the little volumes are still shaped as if only recently removed from a soldier’s hip pocket.
And thank you, Bob Kisthart, ranger/colleague and friend, for giving me a reason every summer—as if I need one—to visit the park, have lunch at Old Faithful Inn, and argue about which of us should be picking up the tab for that summer’s meal. Through the years, you’ve answered many of my questions.
Carla Kelly
2016
About the Author
Photo by Marie Bryner-Bowles, Bryner Photography
There are many things that Carla Kelly enjoys, but few of them are as rewarding as writing. From her short stories about the frontier army in 1977, she’s been on a path that has turned her into a novelist, a ranger in the National Park Service, a newspaper writer, a contract historical researcher, a hospital/hospice PR writer, and an adjunct university professor.
Things might be simpler if she only liked to write one thing, but Carla, trained as a historian, has found historical fiction her way to explain many lives of the past.
An early interest in the Napoleonic Wars sparked the writing of Regency romances, the genre that she is perhaps best known for. “It was always the war, and not the romance, that interested me,” she admits. Her agent suggested she put the two together, and she’s been in demand, writing stories of people during that generation of war ending with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Within the narrow confines of George IV’s Regency, she’s focused on the Royal Navy and the British Army, which fought Napoleon on land and sea. While most Regency romance writers emphasize lords and ladies, Carla prefers ordinary people. In fact, this has become her niche in the Regency world.
In 1983, Carla began her “novel” adventures with a story in the royal colony of New Mexico in 1680. She has recently returned to New Mexico with a series set in the eighteenth century. “I moved ahead a hundred years,” she says. “That’s progress, for a historian.”
She has also found satisfaction in exploring another personal interest: LDS-themed novels, set in diverse times and places, from turn-of-the-century cattle ranching in Wyoming, to Mexico at war in 1912, to a coal camp in Carbon County.
Along the way, Carla has received two RITA Awards from Romance Writers of America for Best Regency of the Year; two Spurs from Western Writers of America for short stories; and three Whitney Awards from LDStorymakers, plus a Lifetime Achievement Award from Romantic Times. She is read in at least fourteen languages and writes for several publishers.
Carla and her husband, Martin, a retired professor of academic theater, live in Idaho Falls and are the parents of five children, plus grandchildren. You may contact her at www.carlakellyauthor.com or [email protected].
