Like the enslaved, Chinese girls and women trafficked to San Francisco had no say in their journey.

One weary pioneer hopped down and refused to continue when her husband finally left her behind, she overtook his party, circled back and set his wagon on fire. Others succumbed to typhoid, cholera, exposure, starvation or sheer madness en route. Whitman, who left the day after marrying a fellow missionary she barely knew, was later killed by the people to whom they proselytized. The women she spotlights met various fates, few of them happy. Hickman organizes her mosaic narrative by place (mines and forts, sites and territories, a half-baked utopian colony) and travel routes (the Oregon-California and Mormon trails the cutoffs that sent some pour souls, like the famed Donner-Reed party, on catastrophic shortcuts). Census Bureau pronounced the frontier closed.īy then, half a billion dollars’ worth of gold had been hammered out of the earth, buffalo had been hunted to virtual extinction, Native children were being de-patriated in boarding schools and the massacre of entire Sioux families at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota marked the harrowing last gasp of “expansion.” It covers the period from 1836, when Presbyterian missionaries Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spaulding, the first “westering” women, set out with their husbands for Oregon country, to 1890, when the U.S. Katie Hickman’s riveting new history, “ Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West,” works to correct this imbalance by foregrounding the historical experiences of Western women - Black, white, Mexican, indigenous, mixed race and Chinese. Even revisionist westerns that puncture the romance of settler colonialism (“ Meek’s Cutoff,” “ The Power of the Dog”) sideline Mexicans (the first cowboys), African Americans (who also rode West on wagon trains) and, most confoundingly, Native Americans. It’s harder yet to imagine a moment when dismantling it is more important than it is today, as a kind of manifest destiny drives everything from pipeline permits to SpaceX moon flights. It’s hard to imagine a future in which the myth of the American West isn’t dominated by white men. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores. Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West

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