Skulduggery, Passion, and Everyday Women | Cathy Luchetti and Carol Olwell, Women of the West

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Women of the West is a compelling tribute to the “everyday women of history,” as the jacket copy puts it. “Lively stories of courtship, love, inventiveness, humor, skulduggery, [and] passion” are told in the words of eleven Western women who wrote diaries and letters between 1830 and 1910 interspersed with more than 140 contemporary photographs of women, some in formal poses but many in unusual settings which are much more revealing of their daily lives. 

This is the second book to be published by Antelope Island Press. The first, A Gift to the Street, was a picture book of San Francisco’s Victorian architecture. Olwell, the photographer for Gift, chose Women of the West as her next project and moved the press to St. George, a central location from which to spend a year driving to towns and cities throughout the West, looking for photographs at historical societies, public libraries, and university photo collections. She also designed the book. Her collaborator, Cathy Luchetti, a freelance writer and editor, found the writings which comprise the bulk of the book and prepared an introductory essay and a chapter on minority women. 

Olwell and Luchetti have succeeded admirably in their goal of scanning in words and pictures diverse representatives of the 800,000 women whose neglect in most histories of the westward movement is just now beginning to be remedied. The first step in this process is simply to recognize their presence. The second is to examine and evaluate their contributions. This work makes progress toward both goals. It is not intended to be an academic history based on the political and social events of settling the West, as Luchetti notes in her preface, but a document of personal experience. It certainly provides raw materials for more academic analysis, however, and it also presents a bibliography that will be extremely useful to students in search of further information. 

The eleven women featured range from Bethenia Owens-Adair, who, at age forty, left her Oregon home to get a medical degree at the University of Michigan, to Pauline Lyons Williamson, a black woman who emigrated from New Jersey to California where she struggled to support her self and her young son by nursing and housekeeping. Each quotation is introduced and concluded with biographical information as available. 

The Mormon representative in the book is Priscilla Merriman Evans, a Welsh hand cart pioneer of 1856. She and her husband, Thomas, settled in Spanish Fork, where they farmed and planted orchards. Her eleventh child was born in 1875, while Thomas was, for the second time, doing missionary work in Wales, splendidly at tired in a “bottle green suit” that Priscilla had made from homespun, home-dyed yarn after he told her how tired he was of seeing everyone in gray. 

An account by Sarah Winnemucca represents yet another kind of frontier experience. The granddaughter of a Paiute chief from Nevada, she became a translator for the U.S. Army, trying to prevent Indian uprisings even as she saw her people moved from one reservation to another by government forces. Her story is excerpted from her book, Life Among the Piutes (original spelling), edited by Mrs. Horace Mann, whose contribution may have ex tended beyond mere editing, as Luchetti acknowledges. 

My main reservation about the book is its reliance upon already published works for half of the women included. Admittedly, some of these are not widely available, but others, like Elinore Pruitt Stew art’s The Letters of a Woman Homesteader, are. Selections from the ample supply of unpublished materials might have been more valuable. That, of course, is the choice every editor faces. 

I agree, however, with two additional editorial choices. My favorite quotation is from Keturah Penton Belknap, who moved several times with her parents on the Ohio frontier and then with her husband went to Iowa and California. She wrote, in her journal, “Those wer the days that tryed mens souls and bodys too, and womans constitutions they worked the mussle on and it was their to stay.” The editors decided to retain the erratic spelling, punctuation, and capitalization for their freshness and charm. I appreciate this one too: “We have not introduced the feminist questions of our times, nor our own political views, because we felt it would be unfair to use the lives of others—who might have felt quite differently from the way we feel — for those purposes.” 

The introduction successfully ties together the threads of experience represented in the letters and diaries, adding quotations from other Western women to supplement them. In the chapter on minority women, Luchetti presents a good summary of the little that is known about the lives of Western women who were not Anglo-Saxon. An occasional misspelled word or misplaced punctuation mark slipped by the editors in these essays, and in a photo caption Corinne, Utah, becomes “Corrine,” but such errors are rare. In general, the writing is both clear and graceful. 

The photographs are even better. They alone are worth the price of the book. As I write, many images cross my mind: Mrs. Smith, of Glenrock, Wyoming, with her rifle on her shoulder, holding the hind feet of a wildcat she had shot; a procession of eighteen men and one woman nearing the summit of snowy Chilkoot Pass in Alaska; teamster Arizona Mary, standing on a dirt trail beside her seven yoked teams of oxen; Sarah Winnemucca, dressed in the elegant regalia of her tribe; twin Indian babies in their carriers, looking slightly apprehensive on one page, yelling open-mouthed on the next. I would be hard pressed to choose a favorite from this wonderful collection. 

William Forrest Sprague wrote in his Women and the West that Western women were hopeful, ambitious, and enterprising (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1940, pp. 111-18). This work sturdily supports that conclusion. 

Women of the West, by Cathy Luchetti in collaboration with Carol Olwell (St. George: Antelope Island Press, 1982), 240 pp., $25.00.