This book feels like Gallagher is busy trying to fill in all the blank spots left by those male historians when they ignored the other half of the race. Like when 1849’s Luzena Stanley Wilson’s husband dumps her and their four children in Sacramento and she moves to the felicitously named Coyote Droppings on the Comstock Lode in Nevada.
“As always occurs to the mind of a woman, I thought of taking boarders.” Wasting no time, she found two planks (precious in a region short on sawmills), fashioned them into a table, surrounded it with sheltering pine boughs, and bought some overpriced provisions. That night, she attracted twenty diners, each of whom “as he rose put a dollar in my hand and said I might count him as a permanent customer.”
And
Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte, the nation’s first Native American [Omaha] physician and public health reformer…The gravely pretty, lace-collared Victorian lady was the entire region’s only doctor, and she treated many Native and White adults as well as children, often paying house calls by horseback or wagon…Like Florence Nightingale La Flesche leaned heavily on the twinned Victorian ideals of cleanliness and godliness, which on the reservation meant sanitary water and screen doors, church and temperance.
And writer and Quaker Mary Hallock Foote, who followed husband and mining engineer Arthur de Wint Foote west.
Frontier “dime novels” had been around since…1860, but like her artwork and nonfiction, her “Westerns were distinguished by her clear-eyed, evenhanded treatment of the sexes and her refusal to romanticize the region with conventional tales of handsome cowboys and damsels in distress. In 1883, Houghton Mifflin published The Led-Horse Claim, the first of her dozen novels…which centered on a woman torn between a lover and a brother engaged in deadly competition in the dirty, dangerous Hades of mining…Much like Foote and her husband, the women and men she created were equalized by their subordination to a spectacular but distinctly unpastoral, sometimes downright menacing Mother Nature.
And many more, featuring a diverse cast whose chief similarity comes from being mostly ignored by history. Until now.
Book Review Monday Chatter New Women in the Old West Winifred Gallagher