Background
She was born in Kentucky, the daughter of Stephen Turner Rives and Mary Ragsdale. Her father was from a prominent Virginia family. An author"s biography in one of her books notes that her father, who had fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War and spent two years in a Northern prison camp, had "made her his little comrade" when she was a child and she was an excellent rifle shot and a bareback rider who was called "the Rives" little wildcat" by outsiders.
Her father allowed her to spend so much time outdoors because her mother had been an invalid in the years before she died.
