The family trailblazer was Raymond Duke Arnold. He came west from Clay County, Missouri in 1910 at the age of 24, and signed on with the Norwegian farmers who were carving out a road grade that is now known as the Canejo Grade on U.S. Highway 101 in California. It is just about 50 miles west of downtown L.A. Ray was a mule skinner, and the Norwegians needed skinners to drive the many teams hitched to wagons loaded with rock and dirt. When the project ended in 1911, Ray returned to Missouri to gather up his new bride and all their worldly possessions to return to the land of opportunity. They ended up in Goleta, California, where Ray did well with his own freight company which he parlayed into a Seaside Oil franchise that he owned for over thirty years, and then retired. Along the way, Harold Duke Arnold was born and thirty years later, Jeffrey Dean Arnold, Ray's grandson, was delivered at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. In his younger days, Jeff was an army captain and helicopter pilot, deputy sheriff, and deputy medical examiner. It was an experience as a death investigator that spawned Jeff's book, Skin For Skin, written under the pen name, Jeffrey Maria D Arnold. Also under the same pen name, he wrote Red Haze and Peace, Medjugorje Miracle and Message. He did some mountain climbing and then, after graduating from Southern Oregon University, settled into a more sedate life as a CPA.Back in the day, as they say, there were plenty of Old West stories on T.V. to flood a boy’s imagination as he played cowboys and Indians in the backyard with his siblings and friends. Those fanciful memories stayed with Jeff and, finally, now that he has quit his day job, came to fruition when, long about 2017, he, his wife, Diane, and their two mini-schnauzers relocated to Arizona. Off the shelf, Jeff picked up a copy of True West magazine in 2018, and from the content, began to wonder what eventually happened to Ike Clanton. A little research produced the answer that inspired Jeff to research and write, under the pen name JD Arnold, a three-volume historical fiction on the life and times of Detective Jonas V. Brighton aka Rawhide Jake. He is the fellow who ended Ike Clanton’s life. Book One is due out in March, 2022, and Book Two in October, 2022. Book Three’s release date is yet to be determined. In the meantime, he has completed a frontier fiction book about a man, a woman, and their children as they make their way through the dynamic years 1893 to 1918 in and around Vernon, Texas. It may precede publication of Book Three of the Rawhide Jake trilogy. Also in the works is a novel about three characters found in the trilogy and a family saga, set in northeastern Arizona, about a young girl who comes of age at the dawn of the twentieth century, and navigates her way through the joys and trials of womanhood in the rural west. Jeff, Diane and Sofie, their canine love, live by the polo fields in Indio. Their children and grandchildren reside in the next county over to the west. He wishes peace for everyone, always.Read more about this authorRead less about this author