Appropriately, the road to writer Chris Enss’ home on the outskirts of Grass Valley takes a visitor along the Overland Emigrant Trail, past Ponderosa Pines Way and Lone Star Road, and on two streets named after rattlesnakes.
Parked in the three-car garage of the 3,000-square-foot-plus house is her ride – a Ford pickup truck. Enss is a screenwriter and author of 27 nonfiction Westerns about the unheralded folks who lived, loved and died in the Old West – mail-order brides, prospectors, nurses, entertainers, soldiers. She writes mostly about pioneering women, both the innocent (“Frontier Teachers,” “The Doctor Wore Petticoats”) and the not-so-much (“Bedside Book of Bad Girls,” “Pistol Packin’ Madams”).
She also has written books about some of the Old West’s folk heroes – William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Annie Oakley, Gen. George Custer – and less genuine but more recent Western-centric icons – Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, John Wayne. “I’m an observer of history who retells what is there,” she said modestly.
