Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left
the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to
the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their
world.
Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley,
Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women
whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth
century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part
of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill,
Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa
Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new
society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would
follow them.
Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and
Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the
Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to
Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across
the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the
red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and
the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos.
Although their stories converge in the outback of the American
Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of
Boston's Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of
American modern art, and Santa Fe's art and literary colony.
Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into
the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the
personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of
the Modern Age.
