Frontier Women

Sometimes sorting the donated books gives us a window into what people have been thinking about. Lately we received a couple of cartons of books about early Southwest pioneer history, and about women ranchers and homesteaders both historical and modern-- books like Desert Wife by Hilda Faunce; a Charlie Siringo book we don't already own (a little beat up; not sure we can add it to the collection); two of Elinor Pruitt Stewart's books; several by Linda Hasselstrom; semi-academic titles like Sandra Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience 1800-1915; Joanna Stratton's Pioneer women : voices from the Kansas frontier; Schlissel's Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey; Faragher's Women and Men on the Overland Trail.
       Picking up the subject headings from some of these books can be fruitful: Frontier and Pioneer Life West U S has 207 titles (and that's just the books cataloged recently enough to have thorough subject headings); West U S History, 132 titles; Frontier and Pioneer Life New Mexico, 38 titles.
       Exploring around the catalog in this way leads you into wider and wider circles of material; among the more modern authors writing modern pioneer and ranch life, you might try Pie Town Woman : the Hard Life and Good Times of a New Mexico Homesteader, in which Joan Myers revisits the history of one of the women documented in Russell Lee's depression era FSA photographs; Judy Blunt's hair-raising memoir, Breaking Clean; Barbara van Cleve's photo study, Hard Twist : Western Ranch Women, or Sandra Day O'Connor's memoir, Lazy B : Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest.