Onalaska, WA — Former Sanpete Valley resident Rebecca Bartholomew has published her fifth book and first novel, “A House for Maren,” the fictional history of a pioneer cottage she and her husband renovated in North Sanpete in 1991-92.

Rebecca tells her motivation in writing House.

“In 1991 we both lost our jobs. We decided to lease out our suburban home and move into an adobe cabin were using as a weekend retreat in Fountain Green. It had no bathroom, no hot water, and only an ancient cookstove for heat. We set about updating and enlarging it.”

Their neighbors, she says, were friendly and generous to a fault. They lent tools and labor and told stories about the town and nearby canyons. One lifelong resident said legend was the cottage had been built for a widow on order of Brigham Young.

In previous decades Rebecca had been a researcher for LDS historian Leonard Arrington. She applied her research skills to tracing the cottage’s history. Since President Young visited the Sanpete Valley annually in the decade before his 1877 death, and since construction in the valley all but ceased during the Black Hawk War of 1864-1872, she determined the house might reasonably be dated to 1875-76.

“I discovered its subsequent owners, notably the Holman family, but I never found that original widow. So for this book I had to ‘extrapolate’ my heroine’s experience from that of other Danish women who helped to settle the valley. Maren Aalbers is a composite.”

Among those other women are Rebecca’s ancestresses. She descends from three Sanpete families, the Johnsons, Seeleys, and Stakers. Her Johnson great-grandparents resettled in Emery County and after the 1900 Scofield Mine disaster moved to Idaho, but Hettie Staker Johnson’s parents lived out their lives in Mt. Pleasant.

Other characters in the book derive from both research and imagination. “From 1974 to 1982 I spent thousands of hours in Utah’s public and private archives, poring through diaries and local histories.” Much of that research was used in her previous books, which include Rescue of the 1856 Handcart Pioneers (BYU Redd Center for Western History, 2nd ed. 1993) and Audacious Women (Signature Books, 1996) as well as articles for historical journals.

“But many fascinating tidbits in the historical records have never made it into print. I wove some into Maren’s story to give it more color and (I hope) a sense of you-are-there.”

Did she encounter any surprises while writing House?

“I suppose the biggest eye opener was how central their interactions with the Indians were in pioneer Utahns’ lives. Not just the first five or ten years but for 25 years and probably much longer in their consciousness. I had underestimated that. I think Utah history generally has underestimated it, at least 20th century history.” More than half of her novel– much more than Rebecca had planned– involves the leadup to and fallout from Black Hawk’s War of 1865-1872. This was “the result of extrapolating or fictionalizing what Maren’s daily, weekly, seasonal concerns had to have been.”

Would Rebecca and her husband relive their two years in Sanpete County?

“No. It was too scary for us financially– and physically. For instance, it was our bad luck that August of our first year brought rain nearly every day. We were sleeping in the new basement under a tarpaper roof and one night rain fell all around our bed. That’s when we decided to build up.”

“Also,” Rebecca laughs, “it turned out our Realtor had exaggerated the availability of irrigation shares.”

Still, she recalls, “In hindsight, those were two of the best years of our life. Kindly neighbors and a gentler, more tolerant outlook than you tend find in the city made it a healing time. I’ve really tried to show that quality of Sanpete culture in Maren’s story.”

“A House for Maren” (564 pages) can be purchased from Amazon.

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