"Fried Chicken Castañeda," the first in the series "Couriers" is now available at Barnes & Noble as an e-book and also in print, and as an ebook on Amazon. Print version coming on Amazon as soon as they finish their interminable review of the updates. Despite promising a 72-hour review, it's been a week, or something like 168 hours.
This historical mystery begins in January, 1929, when Prudence Bates, a librarian at the Cleveland Public Library, attends a public meeting promoting the Fred Harvey Southwestern Indian Detours. She is utterly entranced with the romance of the West. She determines to join the next training course for Couriers, or guides, at the La Fonda in Santa Fe in June. Six months later, she leaves for Santa Fe aboard the California Limited from Chicago, stopping in Las Vegas, New Mexico for a week to soak up local culture. On the train, she meets a charming Navajo school teacher, Jerry Begay, a product of the Indian Boarding school system. They feel an instant rapport, but he’s going on to Gallup, so it’s a brief encounter between two strangers on a train. In Las Vegas, she is befriended by Martha, a Harvey Girl at the Hotel Castañeda, her brother Tom, a local bootlegger, Clara, the desk clerk at the hotel and her boyfriend John, Anne, another Harvey Girl, and her boyfriend, Mike, Gene, and Liz, the daughter of the richest man in the area. Shortly afterward, Tom is found murdered. Is it because of his bootlegging activities? And was that really Jerry Begay whom Prudence saw meeting with Tom in secret the day before he was murdered?
The volume ends with an authentic Fred Harvey Company recipe for Fried Chicken Castañeda, updated for modern cooks.
The Fred Harvey Company really did offer Southwestern Indian Detours from 1926-1941, when World War II put an end to them. There was a brief revival from 1947 to around 1968, when Grey Lines bought the rights to the name and the routes, but the heyday had ended. While there is plenty of information to be found online about the Detours, the definitive work is D. H. Thomas' Southwestern Indian Detours : The Story of the Fred Harvey/Santa Fe Railway Experiment in "Detourism" (Hunter Publishing, 1978). Additional information about the Fred Harvey Company and the Harvey Houses can also be found online (in particular https://fredharvey.info/ and their Fred Harvey History Weekend) and in Stephen Fried, Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time (Bantam, 2011) (see also his blog at https://www.stephenfried.com/blog/), Lesley Poling-Kempes The Harvey Girls : Women Who Opened the West (Da Capo Press, 1994), and George H. Foster & Peter C. Weiglin, The Harvey House Cookbook: Memories of Dining Along the Santa Fe Railroad (Taylor Trade Pub., 2006).
The Castañeda Hotel (https://castanedahotel.org/) was restored and reopened to guests in April 2019. There is an Amtrak station just south of the Hotel where the Southwest Chief stops twice a day, once eastbound from Los Angeles and once westbound from Chicago.
The Meadows Hotel now operates as the Historic El Fidel Hotel https://www.facebook.com/elfidelhotel/
The Montezuma Hotel aka Montezuma Castle is still in existence but is the home of the Armand Hammer United World College and open for tours only on specific dates. https://www.uwc-usa.org/
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