Men are usually the heroes of Western stories, but women also played a crucial role in developing the American frontier, and their stories have rarely been told.
This anthology of biographical essays on women promises new insight into gender in the 19C American West. The women featured include Asian Americans, African-Americans and Native American women, as well as their white counterparts. The original essays offer observations about gender and sexual violence, the subordinate status of women of color, their perseverance and influence in changing that status, a look at the gendered religious legacy that shaped Western Catholicism, and women in the urban and rural, industrial and agricultural West.

This book presents vivid and compelling biographical essays on the struggles and achievements of multicultural women from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest and California in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taken together, these stories bring to life the complex and contradictory nature of gender, race and culture in the American West. Included in this collection are essays on: an African-American entrepreneur; a northern Paiute activist; an Ursuline nun; a Chinese homesteader; and a Chippewa-Creek basketball player. Highly entertaining, the essays are conceptually sophisticated yet clearly written, and are complemented by historic photographs and illustrations. Combined, these features ensure this exceptional book has great appeal for a broad general audience as well as for serious scholars of women's history and American studies.

At the start of this haunting memoir, Ruth McLaughlin returns to the site of her childhood home in rural eastern Montana. In place of her family's house, she finds only rubble and a blackened chimney. A fire has taken the old farmstead and with it ninety-seven years of hard-luck memories. Amidst the ruins, a lone tree survives, reminding her of her family's stubborn will to survive despite hardships that included droughts, hunger, and mental illness.

"Bound Like Grass "is McLaughlin's account of her own -- and her family's -- struggle to survive on their isolated wheat and cattle farm. With acute observation, she explores her roots as a descendant of Swedish American grandparents who settled in Montana at the turn of the twentieth century with high ambitions, and of parents who barely managed to eke out a living on their own neighboring farm.

In unvarnished prose, McLaughlin reveals the costs of homesteading on such unforgiving land, including emotional impoverishment and a necessary thrift bordering on deprivation. Yet in this bleak world, poverty also inspired ingenuity. Ruth learned to self-administer a fashionable razor haircut, ignoring slashes to her hands; her brother taught himself to repair junk cars until at last he built one to carry him far away. Ruth also longs for a richer, brighter life, but when she finally departs, she finds herself an alien in a modern world of relative abundance. While leaving behind a life of hardship and hard luck, she remains bound -- like the long, intertwining roots of prairie grass -- to the land and to the memories that tie her to it.