**"Brave Hearted is not just history, it is an incredibly intense
page-turning experience. To read what these women endured is to be
transported into another universe of courage, loss, pain, and
occasionally victory. This book is a triumph."--Amanda Foreman
**
"Absolutely compelling."--Christina Lamb, Sunday Times (UK)
The dramatic, untold stories of the diverse array of women who helped
transform the American West.
Hard-drinking, hard-living poker players and prostitutes of the new boom
towns; 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 - these were the women who settled the American West,
whose stories until now have remained mostly untold. As the
internationally bestselling historian Katie Hickman writes, "Myth and
misunderstanding spring from the American frontier as readily as rye
grass from sod, and--like the wiry grass-- seem as difficult to weed out
and discard." But 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.
Drawing on letters, diaries, and other extraordinary contemporary
accounts, sifting through the legends and the myths, the laws and the
treaties, Katie Hickman presents us with a cast of unforgettable women,
all forced to draw on huge reserves of resilience and courage in the
face of tumultuous change: the half Cree, Marguerite McLoughlin, the
much-admired "First Lady" of Fort Vancouver; the Presbyterian missionary
Narcissa Whitman, who in 1837 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 the Mohave, famous for her facial
tattoos.
This 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.
