BRAVE HEARTED

Wide-ranging survey of the multifaceted roles of women in the 19th-century settlement of the American West.

English historical novelist and travel writer Hickman combines those interests in this effort to correct the view that the frontier West was the sole domain of men. The story is less about gunfighters and lone prospectors than “one of the largest and most tumultuous mass migrations in history,” and women were there from the first. Among them, as early as 1836, were Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding, two missionaries who crossed the plains and mountains to Oregon, scouting a trail that their husbands would later follow. Known largely only to specialist historians, Whitman and Spalding were the first White women to witness one of the great Native American trade rendezvous, made up of thousands of people, including friendly women who, recognizing their achievement, wrote Spalding, “were not satisfied short of saluting Mrs. W. and myself with a kiss.” Another traveler was fortunate to have lived to tell the tale, exalting in the splendors of California’s Napa Valley after surviving the unfortunate Donner Party disaster. Hickman writes sensitively of Olive Oatman, a woman in a wagon party ambushed by Native warriors in Arizona and held in captivity for years, noting the unpleasantly prurient nickname poor Olive bore during that time. (Suffice it to say that it relates to Mohave women’s reaction at first seeing bearded White men, laughing because “the beards made the men look like talking vaginas.”) The author also illuminatingly profiles the larger-than-life Sarah Bowman, “Army camp follower, entrepreneur, cook, innkeeper, and battlefield heroine” and leader of “a thriving business as the madam of the local brothel”; and Hiram and Matilda Young, a Black couple whose wagon business, in the single year 1860, “produced three hundred wagons and six thousand ox yokes.”

A welcome corrective to the long-skewed male-centric history of westward expansion.