Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West 1836-1880

The true-life story of women's experiences in the Wild West is more gripping, heart-rending, and stirring than all the movies, novels, folk legends, and ballads of popular imagination. Hard-drinking, hard-living poker players and prostitutes of the new boomtowns; wives and mothers traveling two and a half thousand miles across the prairies in covered-wagon convoys, some of them so poor they walked the entire route; African American women in search of freedom from slavery; Chinese sex workers sold openly on the docks of San Francisco; Native American women brutally displaced by the unstoppable tide of white settlers--all were women forced to summon huge reserves of resilience and courage in the face of tumultuous change. Drawing on letters, diaries, and other extraordinary contemporary accounts, sifting through the legends and the myths, internationally bestselling historian Katie Hickman presents us with cast of unforgettable women: the half Cree Marguerite McLoughlin, the much-admired "First Lady" of Fort Vancouver; the Presbyterian missionary Narcissa Whiteman, who in 1836 became the first white woman to make the overland journey west across the Rocky Mountains; Biddy Mason, the Mississippi slave who fought for her freedom through the courts of California; Olive Oatman, adopted by Mohave, famous for her facial tattoos. Brave Hearted is the story of the women who participated in the greatest mass migration in American history, transforming their country in the process. This is American history not as it was romanticized but as it was lived--Publisher's description.