Women of the West
By: Linda Wommack 06/01/2009
Agnes Lake Hickok (University of Oklahoma Press, $29.95) In this first biography of Agnes Lake, the woman finally steps out of the shadows of her famous husband Wild Bill Hickok. Working through Agnes’s own embellishments, Linda A. Fisher and Carrie Bowers reveal a savvy businesswoman. The one-time circus performer spent 30 years in the circus business, in company with the likes of P.T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill Cody.
Social Class in the Writings of Mary Hallock Foote (University of Nevada Press, $34.95) A popular writer of the early 1900s, Foote would gain fame much later, in 1979, when Mary Ellen Williams-Walsh exposed Wallace Stegner’s liberal appropriation of Foote’s letters in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1971 novel Angle of Repose. Those letters are discussed in this book. Focused on Foote’s literary career and her life, the book includes the writer’s adventures in 1879-90 in the silver camp of Leadville, Colorado, where she based three of her novels on Western social class.
Making the Grade (Washington State University Press, $19.95) These women, many teenagers themselves, often faced unruly children. You have to admire the pluck of these frontier women. Working with wit, quick thinking and a bit of ingenuity, they managed to control and educate. In this oral history account of 13 former Kittitas County, Washington, schoolmarms, we learn of the hazards, joys, tricks and triumphs of teaching in a rural community.
Red Light Women of the Rocky Mountains (University of New Mexico Press, $34.95) In this book, the Rocky Mountains somehow includes Arizona. Jan MacKell’s observations of the Earp women and the “control of prostitution” for the O.K. Corral shoot-out will give Arizona historians pause. Avoiding the usual sources required for research, she relies on handier material, such as Wikipedia, to include the Kaloma photo, incorrectly identified as Josephine Marcus Earp. True West readers will remember that controversy spilling out on these pages in the 1990s.
—Linda Wommack
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