Review: Realistic trials of the frontier
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 4, 2013
Reviewed for Hearts on Fire Reviews by Sandy‘Banking on Termperance is a historical love story set in pre Civil War  America.  The plot is a entertaining romance, centering on a young  woman‘s attempt to get her rather large family of sisters and brothers to the ‘neutral’ zone of the Oregon frontier before the impending war .  Temperance is the eldest of her siblings and as such,  is depended upon heavily by both her parents as they try to relocate the large family from Pennsylvania to Oregon.  As with most travel of that era, the trek across the frontier is fraught with dangers and illness.  Temperance’s  father becomes terminally ill, causing the family to miss the last wagon train west for the season and stranding the family on the mercy of other s in St. Louis.  Temperance finds that she must depend on the kindness of strangers as she tries to support her family through the winter and prepare to fulfill her father’s final wishes to move them on to Oregon in the spring.Through Temperance’s trials, the reader is introduced to the struggles frontier women had to meet and overcome to survive.  Temperance is faced with finding food and shelter for her family, a way to respectably provide for them in a strange city and the other dangers present on the frontier besides illness and disease.  In order to accomplish this, she must make an uneasy alliance with a young banker, Basil, whom she finds attractive.  At first, our heroine is torn between her need to maintain her pride and self respect before this young man and her need to  succeed at providing and caring for those dependent on her.  Her independence and loyalty are two qualities that Basil finds quite attractive, but he is determined at first to keep matrimony at bay, especially considering the large dependent family that would be part of any alliance with Temperance.However, both Basil and his sister embody the spirit and attitude that conquered frontier America.  Seeing how hard Temperance is working to provide for her family, they do not hesitate to help her when they can.  Coming from a large family themselves, both brother and sister have seen how neighbor helping neighbor has made the difference on the frontier.  While Temperance hesitates to take their assistance ,  she finds herself in the position to more than repay their kindness when Basil’s sister has to deliver a child in an abandoned cabin far from any  other assistance than Temperance herself.  This give and take often made the difference between life and death on the frontier.  While Basil continues to try to evade the evitable, the appearance on the scene of another respectable man, who may be able to provide Temperance a way of achieving her goal, and  the coming spring when the wagons will once again begin to roll, finally prod him to an admission of love and the alter.The author does a very good job of presenting the reader with a realistic view of the trials faced by women on the frontier and the spirit of ‘help thy neighbor’ which enable the early pioneers to accomplish westward expansion.  The characters are well developed and the reader can easily relate to the motivation which drives each individual.  The story appears to be one of a series surrounding these two large families and the author sprinkles enough back story throughout the book to open doors to adventures for other individuals and entice the  reader  to explore further.  The historical detail is very good and does not seem to be ‘forced’ into the store line.  Rather it is woven into the trials of Temperance and Basil, giving the story a sense of the period and the external forces that drove these two young lovers.