Hitting the Location Lottery with Rulo, Nebraska for the Ten Pound Bag story.
Who woulda thunk it?
I simply got lucky.
This newspaper article led me to Rulo back in November of 2020:
Ioway Tribe creates 444-acre Tribal National Park on Nebraska-Kansas border
I read that article and was fascinated by the idea of an old-growth hardwood forest on the edge of the prairie/plains. My Sweet Editor and I actually started looking at farmsteads in the area available for purchase before ultimately deciding that the pandemic real estate boom would be a very bad time to make an acquisition.
However when I decided to write a story Rulo seemed like a great place locate it, after all it gave my character a location with three important resources readily at hand. He would have water, hardwood for building and lush prairie for farming; a magnificent location and within my home state. This wasn't supposed to be a complicated story, it was just a little thing to get me going on writing.
Everyone knows that just like anywhere else in the world 'you can take the person out of the place but you can never take the place out of the person'; we all love our childhood homes and my childhood home was Nebraska. (Yeah I know, exceptions to every rule but the rule is pretty damn accurate overall.)
Great spot I decided, let's make it work right there in Rulo as he nears the end of his trip to his new home up in north-west Wyoming. Mileage and hours driven between stops were calculated and it all worked out perfectly. Another bonus is that the historical weather pattern was very close to the climate that I live in, makes it easier to write when you aren't relying on memory or second hand observations.
So there we go - my story would occur in Rulo, Nebraska for a lot of reasons that made good sense to me as a beginning writer. As a beginner it's good sense and it's common advice to keep it simple and close to home and that's what I did, but boy did I ever get lucky.
Rulo is in Richardson County, Nebraska; it is the furthest southeast county in the state, being hemmed in by Kansas to the south and the Missouri river to the east. It is also home to small but very usable coal veins, oil fields and hard rock quarries. All of that on top of the fertile fields and hardwood forest and all of this within a fairly small area. A literal paradise for a bold and intrepid settler.
On top of that our Lewis and Clark map showed me that the spot I chose was in the "Half-Breed Territory"; my protagonist wasn't encroaching on any tribal lands and the US Government had absolutely no say over the area in 1822. He landed in "No Man's Land".
I didn't know any of this when I decided on Rulo, I just got lucky.
It's really all about location.
And Luck.
-Emmeran
Published data for natural resources in Richardson Co., NE is available on my Patreon for my typical charge of a cup of coffee per month. In other words a buck a month.