Brave Hearted

August 1, 2022
Historian and novelist Hickman (Daughters of Britannia) delivers a painstakingly researched and fluidly written study of the women who helped settle the American West. Drawing on more than 800 letters, diaries, and personal memoirs, Hickman covers the period from 1836, when Presbyterian missionaries Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding became the first white women to attempt the overland journey from Missouri to Oregon, until 1880, after which, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the country no longer had a frontier. Along the way, Hickman offers women’s firsthand perspectives on the Indian Wars, the California Gold Rush, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and other milestones. Profile subjects include Marguerite McLoughlin, who oversaw Fort Vancouver, in the far northwest, in the earliest days of the wagon trains; Chinese sex slave Ah Toy, who was trafficked to San Francisco and became one of the city’s “most prominent madams”; and Biddy Mason, an enslaved woman who fought for her freedom in a California court. Throughout, Hickman pays close attention to the violent subjugation of Native Americans, documenting such horrific episodes as the Needle Rock Massacre of the Sinkyone tribe in Northern California from the perspective of women like Sally Bell, who lost most of her family in that slaughter. Full of heartrending accounts of courage and tragedy, this is a vital contribution to the history of America’s frontier.

September 15, 2022
Inspired by the photo of a bonneted frontier woman, London-based historian and novelist Hickman set about researching the experiences of women in the American West from 1836 to 1880, the year the U.S. government determined that the frontier was officially "closed." Drawing on diaries, letters, and journals, she provides numerous first person experiences to bolster a tightly crafted narrative which focuses on arduous journeys to Oregon and California. Anchored by Narcissa Whitman, who, with fellow missionary Eliza Spalding, were the first known European American women to cross the Rocky Mountains, Hickman's text explores the enormous devastation and privations endured by the women who rode the wagons. From Whitman's death years later with her husband, Marcus, in a violent encounter with the Cayuse, to the infamous Donnor Party, tragedy certainly is predominant in the text. Hickman's efforts to include Native American and Black voices are laudable, but the enduring Whitman controversy is largely ignored. Overall, Brave Hearted is a triumphant narrative that brings many overlooked women into the spotlight. Extensive source notes included.

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Starred review from September 1, 2022

Hickman (She-Merchants, Buccaneers & Gentlewomen) sets out to correct imbalances in the gendered ideas surrounding the idea of the "hero" in the American West. She rightly notes that stories have gone untold, and that realities have been flattened to conform to stereotypes, assumptions, and ideals. The stories she tells encompass women on groundbreaking journeys across uncharted terrain and the resiliency, resourcefulness, and struggle they endured. Well-illustrated with maps and historical photos and drawing on textual evidence from journals written by women, this book provides glimpses into the worlds of prostitutes and mothers, Black women seeking freedom, and Indigenous women brutally impacted by white colonizers, all tales that disrupt any monolithic view of what it meant to be a woman or an American then. VERDICT As easy to read as any Western with the added advantage of showing a new version of the Old West, one vital for readers to explore.--Emily Bowles

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2022
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.

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