“I think she made my job a lot easier” – An interview with Natalie Appleton

All Lit Up: The protagonist of I Want to Die in My Boots, Belle Jane, was a real, if little known, American-Canadian horse and cattle thief. How did you discover Belle Jane? What about her compelled you to write this novel about her life?

Natalie Appleton: Over the Christmas holidays a few years ago, I was editing a manuscript and fact-checking in a pioneer history book wherein families had shared memories and photographs of the early days of their time near Ravenscrag, Saskatchewan. When I first discovered that book, I found the accounts so fascinating and heart-wrenching that in the course of writing a different novel, I’d nearly committed the entire 500 pages to memory—but had somehow overlooked the entry about ‘Mrs. B.J Dale.’ Then, there I was on a snowy December morning, reading about Mrs. Dale, a woman recounted as charming, intelligent and generally ‘the most colourful person to pass this way.’ Also, that she was the brains behind a gang of horse and cattle thieves for which she put in time.

I felt heart-struck, and so curious. Who was this woman? How did she come to be a notorious cattle rustler in 1920’s Saskatchewan, and how did she meet her end with it all?

I began researching that day, and as I uncovered one trail of her story and then another, I only had more questions and more enchantment for her. That she led this gang was one incredible strand of her story, but she also had this marvelous capacity to pick herself up, start over and reinvent herself time and again. I think that strand of her story intrigued me just as much. Early on I thought, if I am having this grand of a time discovering Belle Jane, perhaps others would too.

So many books about this era are written by men and prioritize the male perspective. I wondered, if Belle Jane were here to tell her story, what would she say? I wanted to explore that world more deeply from a woman’s perspective, and give it a voice that seemed to want to be raw and earthy and dark and darkly funny.

All Lit Up: Not only is I Want to Die in My Boots true to the facts of Belle Jane’s life, but it’s also to the time period and to the particularities of her vocations: lace-making, ranching, and cattle rustling to name just a few. What did the research process for this book look like? Did you find out anything interesting that you didn’t end up finding a home for in the novel?

Natalie Appleton: The research was tricky and interesting at first because she had so many names over the course of her life. The name she died with, ‘Mrs. Dale,’ was not the name she had at the time of her trial, so it definitely took some sleuthing. I read dozens and dozens of old newspapers, online and via microfilm that had to be sent to my local library from the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan. I read hundreds of pages of trial records and police reports. I spent a lot of time hunting through border crossings, marriage certificates, census records, etc. I even got to speak on the phone with one of Belle Jane’s great nieces in the US. That was all just to get a sense of the timeline. I had already been working on another novel set in that era and place so I had already done a lot of research to create that world, but certainly pursued more research specific to her life, such as saloon-keeping and mining in Montana, the art of lace-making and the rather cruel process of ‘fixing’ brands on horses.

I believe almost anything I found about Belle Jane was included in the novel.

All Lit Up: There’s a pleasant mirroring in the liberties that Belle Jane takes with her own history – such as changing her age and omitting details about her marriage(s), depending on whom she’s talking to – and that of the role of the historical fiction writer. You say at the start of the novel: “here are the adventures of Belle Jane as I imagined them.” How do you walk the line between fact and fiction? Is there any tension in the writing process because of it?

Natalie Appleton: I think because of my background in journalism and narrative non-fiction, I felt committed to grounding the story in as many facts as possible. I was lucky so much of the gritty, dazzling truth of her life was there for me to find, but there was also much to imagine. I knew from newspaper clippings where she was or who she was married to a certain time, but how did the scenes unfold that led to one fight, gunshot or divorce? Those details couldn’t be known. Even with some plot points, I often had to remind myself: You’re writing a novel. The officer can take two days instead of three to come back to the ranch. But of course, like I said, so much of the truth of her life gave her character and her tale its personality. I think she made my job a lot easier.

All Lit Up: Thinking of the western as a distinctly North American genre (though it certainly has its fans and creators off the continent), how does I Want to Die in My Boots contribute to its canon? How does it subvert the genre?

Natalie Appleton: As a work of Prairie literary fiction that takes a salty twist to history, I think I Want to Die in My Boots would be thrilled to share a bookshelf with Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog. I see its lineage in Canada with books such as Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man and Winnifred Eaton’s Cattle.

I Want to Die in My Boots probably is an outlier in a few ways: the writing wanted to be poetry in places, with leaps and imagery and white space. It had to be reined in a little in the layout stage. In some chapters, the reader gets plunged into the depths of an icy lake, and in others, the writing is languid, like a shallow creek in August, and calls for slow, thoughtful reading. The pacing and plotting is outside what would be ‘perfect’ or traditional, but somehow felt right, and is perhaps feminist itself.

All Lit Up: At one point in the book it’s written that “Belle Jane had adopted the colourful talk of…ranch hands in general. It suited her and she found it often saved time, making a point. Especially with men, by whom she was surrounded.” It’s clear from the narrative how being a woman was a constraining thing in the early 1900s. How does Belle Jane’s gender – and her subversions of it – contribute to her mythos as a historical figure?

Natalie Appleton: It was a struggle to find an image for the cover that would truly reflect Belle Jane as she was, or as I believed her to be. She wore earrings and lipstick and a belt of bullets. She cut and stitched the flesh of horses, she played piano at parties and made lace underthings and loved beauty so much she wallpapered her biffy. So she was not a Calamity Jane trying to be a man, nor was she the Caroline Ingalls of Little House on the Prairie. I think Belle Jane embraced all her ways of being—feminine and masculine—and that’s likely what made her the perfect cover for nearly a decade.

All Lit Up: Is there another book in the works? Can you let us in on what you’re working on next?

Natalie Appleton: Yes! The novel I wrote before Boots—also set in this era and region, but not a prequel or sequel—is meant to be out in 2026. It’s also about star-crossed misfits in this wild, haunting land.

I have a few other ‘Prairie’ stories at various stages and lengths that don’t want to fit neatly in a traditional form, so who knows?