Most fans of women's basketball would be startled to learn that girls' teams were making their mark more than a century ago--and that none was more prominent than a team from an isolated Indian boarding school in Montana. Playing like "lambent flames" across the polished floors of dance halls, armories, and gymnasiums, the girls from Fort Shaw stormed the state to emerge as Montana's first basketball champions. Taking their game to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, these young women introduced an international audience to the fledgling game and returned home with a trophy declaring them champions.

World champions. And yet their triumphs were forgotten--until Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith chanced upon a team photo and embarked on a ten-year journey of discovery. Their in-depth research and extensive collaboration with the teammates' descendents and tribal kin have resulted in a narrative as entertaining as it is authentic.

"Full-Court Quest" offers a rare glimpse into American Indian life and into the world of women's basketball before "girls' rules" temporarily shackled the sport. For anyone captivated by "Sea Biscuit," "A League of Their Own," and other accounts of unlikely champions, this book rates as nothing but net.

Moving personal account of frontier women left behind in Minnesota when their husbands went west to prospect for gold in Colorado and Montana in the mid-1800s.

Enriched by over 200 vintage photographs, Frontier Children is a visual and verbal montage of childhood in the nineteenth-century West. From a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith, well known for their books on western women, have brought together stories and images that erase the stereotypes and bring to life the infinite variety of the experience of growing up in the American West.

Most fans of women's basketball would be startled to learn that girls' teams were making their mark more than a century ago - and that none was more prominent than a team from an isolated Indian boarding school in Montana. Playing like ""lambent flames"" across the polished floors of dance halls, armories, and gymnasiums, the girls from Fort Shaw stormed the state to emerge as Montana's first basketball champions. Taking their game to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, these young women introduced an international audience to the fledgling game and returned home with a trophy declaring them champions. World champions. And yet their triumphs were forgotten - until Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith chanced upon a team photo and embarked on a ten-year journey of discovery. Their in-depth research and extensive collaboration with the teammates' descendents and tribal kin have resulted in a narrative as entertaining as it is authentic. Full-Court Quest offers a rare glimpse into American Indian life and into the world of women's basketball before ""girls' rules"" temporarily shackled the sport. For anyone captivated by Sea Biscuit, A League of Their Own, and other accounts of unlikely champions, this book rates as nothing but net.

"We traveled this forenoon over the roughest and most desolate piece of ground that was ever made," wrote Amelia Knight during her 1853 wagon train journey to Oregon. Some of the parties who traveled with Knight were propelled by religious motives. Hannah King, an Englishwoman and Mormon convert, was headed for Salt Lake City. Her cultured, introspective diary touches on the feelings of sensitive people bound together in a stressful undertaking. Celinda Hines and Rachel Taylor were Methodists seeking their new Canaan in Oregon. Also Oregon-bound in 1853 were Sarah (Sally) Perkins, whose minimalist record cuts deep, and Eliza Butler Ground and Margaret Butler Smith, sisters who wrote revealing letters after arriving. Going to California in 1854 were Elizabeth Myrick, who wrote a no-nonsense diary, and the teenage Mary Burrell, whose wit and exuberance prevail.

During the last half of the nineteenth century, thousands of men went west in search of gold, land, or adventure - leaving their wives to handle family, farm, and business affairs on their own. The experiences of these westering men have long been a part of the lore of the American frontier, but the stories of their wives have rarely been told. Ten years of research into public and private documents - including letters of couples separated during the westward movement - has enabled Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith to tell the forgotten stories of "women in waiting." Though these wives were left more or less in limbo by the departure of their adventuring husbands, they were hardly women in waiting in any other sense. Children had to be fed, clothed, housed, and educated; farms and businesses had to be managed; creditors had to be paid or pacified - and, in some cases, hard-earned butter-and-egg money had to be sent west in response to letters from broke and disillusioned husbands. This raises some unsettling questions: How does the idea of an "allowance" from home square with our long-standing image of the frontiersman as rugged individualist? To what extent was the westward movement supported by the paid and unpaid labor of women back east? And how do we measure the heroics of husbands out west against the heroics of wives back home? Based on the experiences of more than fifty women - from Abiah Hiller, whose business sense equaled or excelled her husband's, to Emma Christie, who knew virtually nothing about the matters she was called upon to manage - Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement offers a rare glimpse into life on the home frontier and provides new insights into fairly common, though poorly documented, aspect of the history of the settling of the American West.