Women on the American Frontier

The J030136independent-minded western woman was often eclipsed in popular literature by sensations like Calamity Jane and Belle Starr. Dorothy Gray looks at the actual lives of women who made their own way out west.

Starting with Sacajawea, the Shoshone guide for Lewis and Clark, Women of the West gives a historical overview of various pioneers: Narcissa Whitman, trailblazer to Oregon and missionary to the Indians; Esther Morris and Carrie Chapman Catt, leaders for women's suffrage; Susette "Bright Eyes" La Flesche, the first Indian woman to become a political advocate for her race; and Willa Cather, the first writer to transmute the experience of western women into serious literature.

Women of the West is enriched by other portraits: Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young's ninth wife, who divorced him and fought against polygamy; Bethenia Owens-Adair and Anna Howard Shaw, pacesetters in medicine and the ministry; Agnes Morley Cleveland, author of the classic No Life for a Lady (also a Bison Book); Mary "Yellin" Lease, a populist who urged farmers to "raise less corn and more hell"; the black freedom fighter Biddy Mason; and Donaldina Cameron, scourge of the Chinese slave trade.

Forty years after the legendary overland travels of Oregon pioneers in the 1840s, Lucy Clark Allen wrote, "the excitement continues". Economic hard times in Minnesota sent Allen and her husband to Montana in hopes of evading the droughts, grasshoppers, and failed crops that had plagued their farm. Allen and her compatriots, in this volume of Covered Wagon Women, experienced a journey much different than that of their predecessors. Many settlements now awaited those bound for the West, with amenities such as hotels and restaurants as well as grain suppliers to provide feed for the horses and mules that had replaced the slower oxen in pulling wagons. Routes were clearly marked -- some had been replaced entirely by railroad tracks. Nevertheless, many of the same dangers, fears, and aspirations confronted these dauntless women who traveled the overland trails.

Generations of reders have delighted in Elinore Pruitt Stewart's Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1914) and Letters on an Elk Hunt (1915), among the most engaging accounts of life in the American West. Stewart related her adventures on an isolated Wyoming homestead with such vividness, gusto, and sympathy that she has become the woman homesteader. Until now, however, little has been known about her except what she chose to reveal in her published letters.Old friends and new acquaintances alike will welcome this book combining Stewart's previously unpublished or uncollected letters with Susanne K. George's extensive research. Here is as full and candid a portrait as wella re ever likely to have of The Woman Homesteader: the illness, disappointments, and grinding hard work that lay behind her genial public persona; the family, neighbors, and correspondents who peopled her letter-stories and shared her life.George has discovered in Elinore Pruitt Stewart a story fully as rewarding as any told by the Woman Homesteader herself. In an afterword George considers Stewart's use of fictional devices and her growth as a writer as well as her place in American letters.Susanne K. George is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Kearney who specializes in western and women's literature.

"Cashin's A Family Venture is a deceptively slim volume that packs quite a wallop. In a relatively few pages she comments intelligently, provocatively, and originally on many of the most disputed subjects in southern history -- the structure and function of planter families, the status and power of white women, the temperament and achievements of western migrants, and the nature of master-slave relations. Writing with clarity and grace, Cashin brings fresh interpretations to complex problems." -- Jane Turner Censer, William and Mary Quarterly

"Virginia Scharff's wonderfully readable account of women in motion complicates and enriches our understanding of the nineteenth and twentieth century Wests. Her gendered remapping of the regional landscape explodes traditional notions of western movement. All students of women and gender, travel and place, the West and America, would do well to read this excellent book."--David M. Wrobel, author of "Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West

"Virginia Scharff claims for women what has long been central to the masculine mythology of the West--free movement and its many gifts, real and imagined. Her book is as exhilarating and as intellectually and emotionally expansive as our enduring dream of flight across the American land."--Elliott West, author of "The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado

""Brilliant is not a word that is often a part of my critical vocabulary, but brilliantly is how "Twenty Thousand Roads begins. When writing of Sacagawea and Susan Magoffin, Virginia Scharff shows vividly how a single life can be a source of sophisticated cultural analysis without becoming an academic artifact or an object of condescension."--Richard White, author of "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West