WESTWARD THE WOMEN is a book about women of every kind and sort, from nuns to prostitutes, who participated in the greatest American adventure―pioneering across the continent. Not only does the material represent half-forgotten history―which the author garnered from attics, libraries, state historical museums, and the reminiscences of Far Western Old-timers―but it is unique in presenting the woman’s side of the story in this major American experience. With dramatic clarity the author of FARTHEST REACH has written the intimate and human stories of certain outstanding personalities among these pioneer women; the Maine blue-stocking pursuing her studies of botany and taxidermy in frontier solitude; the gentle nuns from Belgium teaching needlework and litanies to “children of the forest”; the little ex-milliner who performed the first autopsy by a woman; the suffragette who established a newspaper for Western women and rode plushy river boats and the dusty roads preaching her gospel of Equal Rights; hurdy-gurdy girls from Idaho boomtowns; and many another martyr, heroine, diarist, gun moll, missionary, feminist, and mother in this turbulent era of pioneering.

Product Description: The book narrates the story of how the school, founded by women pioneers of public education in a Rocky Mountain mining settlement, became the centre and sustaining force of the town's community life from its beginning in the 1870s to the present day.

Provides an intimate look at the lives of pioneer women, based on journals, letters, and oral histories that evince the actual experience of pioneer life, from crossing the continent and the hardships and hazards of pioneer life to the struggle for women's rights.

A collection of seventeen poems describing the experience of traveling West during the 1800s, as seen through the eyes of pioneer women