IN her stetson and easy rider checked shirt, writer Gill McDonald-Constable looks every bit the cow-girl - which partly explains how she manages to sell cowboys and Indians to the Americans, despite having never visited the USA.

Even more bizarrely, the jovial grandmother is learning to ride tall in the saddle like a cowboy . . . at Accrington Riding Centre.

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And to complete this web of yee-ha intrigue, she has the native American name Niigaan Osekwa, meaning ‘woman who leads’, which she was given by an elder of the Chippewa tribe of Wisconsin.

Gill lives on the wild plains of Clayton-le-Moors and has been intrigued by westerns ever since she was a child.

“That’s all there was worth watching when I was young,” she says. “I was never very keen on Clint Eastwood. My hero was Little Joe Cartwright from Bonanza. He had a lot of black curly hair and, funnily enough, my heroes often have black curly hair.”

She never expected the fascination to turn into a career but so it has. For she has two publishers, here and in the USA, and has six books to her name, which happens to be Amos Carr or Gil McDonald – “I didn’t think a woman’s name would go down well for the genre,” she says.

Gill had been writing for many years in a variety of genres. Her first published work was a poem in the Lancashire Evening Telegraph about the Vietnam war when she was 14.

“When I saw my name in print, I knew I had to be a writer,” she says.

Over the years she had articles and poems printed, but never achieved her dream of getting a book published. That is, until fate played into her hands.

Her late husband Chris had never known the identity of his father. His mother would never tell him.

“When she passed away there were some photographs found among her papers of people nobody knew.”

So for his 60th birthday Gill bought him a DNA test, the results of which were posted on the Ancestry website. Within three weeks a reply from an American man revealed that their results showed some similarities. So Gill and Chris sent the photographs they’d found and the American contact recognised one of the people on the picture as his uncle. So they were cousins.

It turned out that Chris’s father had been an American airman, but he was also the great grandson of a Chippewa Indian chief.

“I’d always been a big fan of native Americans and it turned out that I’d been married to one all along,” says Gill. “When Chris passed away after two strokes and a bout of pneumonia, he had met members of his family and that was a great comfort to him. It gave him peace of mind to know where he was from. He was given a native American name and a relative, one of the elders of the tribe, gave me my name, which I’ve used for my website.”

At around the time of the family link discovery, Gill awoke from a vivid dream and could remember every detail of a story for a book. Not surprisingly, it turned out to be a Western.

“I just woke up with this whole story running through my head like a film and I just had to sit down and write it.”

She wrote it as fast as she could and sent it off to the only publisher she knew in the UK who published Westerns. Robert Hale published The Ghosts Of Poynter (Linford Western Library) in 2012. Gill became one of only four women in the UK who write westerns for Hale, and they all write under male names.

Her second book, Crazy Man Cade (Linford Western Library) came out later the same year.

Gill has since found herself an American publisher, Prairie Rose Publications, for whom she uses the name Gil McDonald. All six of her books are available on Amazon and at local libraries.

She draws on her vivid memories of old westerns and books for her research and somehow the formula works. She’s not afraid to throw in a spot of gunslinging violence either.

“One of my heroes is tied up and badly beaten. He can’t go anywhere, the wolves are closing in and he’s saved just one bullet,” she says cheerily.

“I can’t believe how my life has turned out.

“I’m happy that my husband was alive to see my first two books published. Most writers are only lucky enough to have one publisher, so I’m really happy to have two. I’d love for one of my books to be turned into a film, though,” she says.

Gill spent much of her life growing up on farms and loves animals. She was a keen horserider until her twenties and owned two Shetland ponies as pets.

“Since my husband passed away, I’ve got back into horse riding,” she said.

“Then I discovered that Accrington Riding Centre do American riding.

“From my first lesson, I was hooked.””