HISTORY
Kathryn Hughes
Brave Hearted
The Dramatic Story of Women
of the American West
by Katie Hickman
Virago £25 pp400
In 1856 a young woman
appeared from the scrubland
and stumbled towards Fort
Yuma on the California-
Arizona border. She wore a
skirt made of bark and her
distinctive blue facial tattoos
marked her as a member of
the Mohave tribe. In pidgin
English the woman explained
that her name was actually
Olive Oatman. For the past
five years she had been living
with the “Apache” and now,
aged 19, she was back among
her own people and ready to
tell her tale.
It transpired that in 1851
Olive and her younger sister
the bodies of their frailer
colleagues.
Then, in what feels like
an uncanny echo, comes
an account from Sarah
Winnemucca of the
Northern Paiute tribe. In
her autobiography, the first
written by a Native American
woman, Sarah says that while
growing up she was told that
the white people were coming
to eat her. On one occasion, to
keep her safe, Sarah’s mother
buried her up to her neck in
soil, digging up the child only
when it was clear that the
ravenous white men had
safely passed.
Quite possibly all this talkof gobbling up other people
was a way of dealing with the
rapacious capitalism that had
been unleashed in the garden
paradise of Oregon and
California. Opportunities to
get rich quick were immense,
especially given the way that
established hierarchies of race
and class were reconfigured.
One of the largest wagon
manufacturing businesses in
Missouri during the 1850s
and 1860s was owned by the
entrepreneurial Hiram and
Matilda Young, who were
freed slaves.
And once gold fever hit
California in 1848 there
was even more scope for
“petticoated astonishers” to
make a killing catering to
single men far from the
comforts of home. One
woman cook found her
services the subject of a
gratifyingly fierce bidding
war even as she was
disembarking from the ship
that had brought her to San
Francisco.
And then there was Sarah
Bowman, a 6ft 2in giant of a
pistol-packing mama who
went proudly by the name of
the Great Western. Illiterate
but brave as a lion, Bowman
had fetched up in Texas in
1846 as a sort of freelance
camp follower during the
American-Mexican war. She
soon abandoned her canteen
kitchen for the ramparts of
Fort Brown, from which she
proceeded to pick off the
enemy. The next year she gave
as good as she got at the Battle
of Buena Vista in northern
Mexico. When Bowman died
in 1866 after the end of
the Civil War she was given
a full military funeral with a
flag-draped coffin and a
three-gun salute.
In the past 50 years there
has been an explosion of
scholarly research that has
served to dismantle those
hoary old myths about the
Wild West as a white male
space in which women wore
pinnies and looked worried
or sashayed into a saloon bar
looking for trouble. In Brave
Hearted Hickman makes deft
and sensitive use of this new
material. The result is a
glorious patchwork, which
can at times feel like
a hotchpotch as we jump
from life in the governor’s
mansion to getting by on
the reservation, but which
does these extraordinary
women proud. cface became a symbol of
what perils lay in wait for
white women who ventured
west.
In this spirited book Katie
Hickman does her best to go
beyond such causes célèbres
to tease out the experiences
of ordinary women —
Europeans, indigenous,
Africans and even Chinese —
who lived and worked west of
the Rockies from 1830 to 1880.
Drawing on a rich store of
letters, diaries and memoirs,
she recounts the loneliness
and terror of giving birth in
an encampment hundreds
of miles from the nearest
medical help; dealing with a
miscarriage when the wagons
are due to depart at dawn;
and watching your starving
child gnaw at tree bark.
Indeed, not having enough
to eat, or being forced to eat
the wrong things, becomes
a recurring motif. In a
particularly harrowing
passage Hickman tells the
story of the Reed family,
part of a pioneering group
that became snowbound in
the Sierra Nevada mountains
in late 1846. The stronger
members of the party
survived only by cannibalisingGETTY IMAGEShad been travelling with their
Mormon parents towards the
promised Land of Bashan,
which existed only in their
imagination, when they were
captured by the Yavapai tribe.
Finding the girls not much
use, her captors quickly sold
them on to the Mohave for
two horses, three blankets
and some beads. Thereafter,
Olive explained, she had lived
as a member of the chief ’s
family as an extra daughter.
The story was strange, but
carried the unmistakeable
tang of truth, until an
exploitative Methodist
preacher by the grandiose
name of the Rev Royal
Stratton got hold of it and
rewrote the narrative so that
it became an exciting and
titillating account of white
slavery in which Olive was the
victim of “man-animals” and
“human devils”. Naturally,
Life Among the Indians was a
publishing sensation and
Olive’s permanently tattooedRide ’em,
cowgirl
The women who made the Wild West —
from gold-rush cooks to sharpshooters
BOOKS
Whip smart An African-
American cowgirl in the
American west in the 1880sSarah Bowman
left her kitchen
to pick off
the enemy at
Fort Brown
26 22 May 2022