cover image So Much to Be Done: Women Settlers on the Mining and Ranching Frontier

So Much to Be Done: Women Settlers on the Mining and Ranching Frontier

. University of Nebraska Press, $50 (325pp) ISBN 978-0-8032-3134-4

Challenges, defeats and triumphs of the harsh 19th-century American frontier are portrayed vividly through the words of 19 women who wrote of their experiences. Mrs. Lee Whipple-Haslam, whose father died in a barroom fight, describes hard-drinking miners and frontier justice in 1850s California. Mrs. J. W. Likins supports herself and her daughter by traveling to different towns as a ``lady agent'' selling engraved pictures of General Grant. A particularly intrepid woman, Mrs. Nat Collins, is captured by Indians and loses her possessions in a fire but ultimately triumphs to become ``Cattle Queen of Montana.'' Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, daughter of a Piute chief, recalls the forced midwinter relocation of her tribe from their Nevada homeland to the Yakima reservation in eastern Washington. In Colorado territory, Sister Blandina Segale (a nun) stops a lynch mob and prevents an illegal attempt to take over a mine. Moynihan wrote Rebel for Rights: Abigail Scott Duniway ; Armitage is co-editor of The Women's West ; and Dichamp edited Let Them Speak for Themselves: Women in the American West, 1849-1900. Illustrations not seen by PW. BOMC, QPB and History Book Club selections. (July)