So Much To Be Done

In this new and enlarged edition the editors have built on an already strong collection with four new accounts. Colorado pioneer Augusta Tabor gives a sense of the heady days as Leadville became a major mining center. Abigail Duniway describes the challenges of life for women in the Pacific Northwest. Effie Wiltbank's short selection is a reminiscence of her grandmother's "receet" for washing clothes, a chore that epitomizes the practical skill, determination, and common sense required of so many Western women. Apolinaria Lorenzana offers a rare glimpse of the operations of the mission system while illuminating the perils of living with the acquisitive Americans.

Ruth B. Moynihan is an independent historian and writer. She is the editor of Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women. Susan Armitage is a professor of history at Washington State University and series editor for the University of Nebraska Press's Women in the West series. Christiane Fischer Dichamp, an independent scholar, is editor of Let Them Speak for Themselves: Women in the American West, 1849-1900.

Publishers Weekly

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)

Ruth B. Moynihan is an independent historian and writer. She is the editor of Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women. Susan Armitage is a professor of history at Washington State University and series editor for the University of Nebraska Press’s Women in the West series. Christiane Fischer Dichamp, an independent scholar, is editor of Let Them Speak for Themselves: Women in the American West, 1849-1900.