Our current exhibit, Remington and Russell in Black and White, features some of the artworks the artists made as illustrations to accompany a story in a magazine or a book. Most of the examples of such stories on display were written by men. (A noted exception in the museum exhibit is one of the illustrations Russell contributed to Carrie Adell Strahorn’s book, Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage: A Woman’s Unique Experience during Thirty Years of Path Finding and Pioneering from the Missouri to the Pacific and from Alaska to Mexico.) Publishers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco sought out western books, which implies considerable audience interest. And many of the authors who helped fulfill this demand were women who were committed to a career as a writer of the American West.
Today’s audiences may be familiar with names like Willa Cather, Gertrude Atherton, Kathleen Norris. But there were also hundreds of women who published books about the American West in the 19th and early 20th centuries, often providing a different perspective and interpretation of the landscapes and its people. Several of these writers wrote about women making lives for themselves in the West, as women were crucial to the development of families, farms, and businesses. This blog post will highlight some of the many women writers of this period and subject matter.
Head shot of Sarah Winnemucca. The daughter of Chief Winnemucca. Public Domain.
Sarah Winnemucca wrote Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), which is a must-read for those interested in Native American literature. Winnemucca was a Northern Paiute writer and advocate for the rights of American Indians. She traveled across the country to talk about the plight of her people and lobbied to Congress for the release of Pauites interned at a concentration camp in Washington after the Bannock War. Winnemuccca’s 1883 book is both a memoir and history of her people and is considered the first written and published nonfiction work by a Native American woman.[1] In 1993, Winnemucca was inducted posthumously into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.[2]
Sophia Alice Callahan published Wynema, a Child of the Forest (1891) just six months after the Massacre at Wounded Knee. Historians consider it to be the first novel written by a woman of American Indian descent (Muscogee/Mvskoke).[3] Callahan references Wounded Knee and the 1890 Ghost Dance of the Lakota in her book, perhaps the first fictional treatment of these subjects.[4] Today, her novel continues to be a source of study for many scholars.
Delilah Beasley. Public Domain.
Delilah Beasley spent nine years writing The Negro Trail-Blazers of California (1910), which is important to historians of California, the American West, and African American western history. In her book, Beasley writes about Black gold miners of the late 1840s and many other pioneering Black figures in California. Beasley went on to write for the Oakland Tribune, making her the first Black woman in California to regularly contribute to a major metropolitan newspaper.[5] For the run of her Sunday column, she highlighted the many achievements of successful Black men and women, both past and present, helping to portray a positive portrait of the Black community to the paper’s white readers.
Edith Maude Eaton. Courtesy of Simon Fraser University, image from the private collection of Diana Birchall, granddaughter of Winnifred Eaton.
Edith Maude Eaton was born to a Chinese mother and British father. She often used the pen name Sui Sin Far (a childhood nickname that means “water lily” in Cantonese) when publishing work about the Chinese immigrant experience. Living for many years on the West Coast, Edith frequently visited Chinatowns where she observed daily life. These first-hand encounters inspired her essays and novels about the Chinese American experience in the American West, particularly the discrimination they faced and the struggles of straddling two cultures. In 1909, Eaton published Mrs. Spring Fragrance, the first fiction book published in English by a woman of Chinese descent.[6]
María Ruiz de Burton, Public Domain
Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton was the first female Mexican American writer to publish in English. Based in California, where she lived before the state was annexed by the US, Ruiz de Burton wrote about perspectives of Mexican Americans, a marginalized national minority. Her second book and most famous novel, The Squatter and the Don (1885), followed a narrative from the point of view of a conquered Californio, or a person of Spanish or Mexican descent who lived in California when it was still a state of Mexico. Ruiz de Burton explored themes of identity and discrimination in these works of social reform fiction.[7] Today, she is considered a forerunner to Chicano/a literature.
Charles F. Conly, “Helen Maria Fiske Hunt Jackson,” circa 1884, albumen silver print, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Helen Hunt Jackson wrote on behalf of improved treatment of American Indians by the US government. Her most famous novel was Ramona (1884), a fictional dramatization of the federal government’s mistreatment of Indigenous peoples in Southern California after the Mexican-American War. Originally from Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was a classmate of Emily Dickinson, Helen first became interested in the plights of Native Americans when she heard a lecture from Chief Standing Bear (Ponca) in Boston in 1879. The author traveled around California, documenting the conditions she encountered with the Mission Indians in that region. Inspired by her friend Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Helen set out to write a novel (Ramona) that would move people’s hearts. “If I could write a story that would do for the Indian one-hundredth part what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life,” she wrote.[8]
Charles Fletcher Lummis, “Mary Hunter Austin,” ca. 1900, public domain
As John Muir is known for his writing about the Sierra, so Mary Hunter Austin’s literary reputation is synonymous with the Mojave Desert and American Southwest. Though a child of the Midwest, she moved to the San Joaquin Valley of California after college and spent the last decade of her life in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For nearly twenty years, Austin studied the lives of Indigenous people of the Mojave, and became best known for her 1903 book, The Land of Little Rain. The small volume is a collection of intimate vignettes of the land and people of the desert. Throughout her literary career, Austin explored a wide range of topics like water issues in the West, the mistreatment of Native Americans, and the mind-clearing power of open spaces.[9]
Many of these writers were forgotten shortly after their death. Fortunately, in recent decades scholarship has rekindled interest in their works and recognizing the contributions of these pioneers in American literature.
[1] Gae Whitney Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes. (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988).
[2] “Sarah Winnemucca,” Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, https://library.unr.edu/nevada-writers-hall-of-fame/sarah-winnemucca.
[3] Annette Van Dyke, “An Introduction to Wynema, A Child of the Forest, by Sophia Alice Callahan,” Studies in American Indian Literature. Series 2. 4 (2/3) (1992): 123–128.
[4] Lisa Tatonetti, “Behind the Shadows of Wounded Knee: The Slippage of Imagination in ‘Wynema: A Child of the Forest'”, Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2004, pp. 1-31.
[5] Jennifer Scanion, American Women Historians, 1700s–1990s: A Biographical Dictionary, (Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 15–16.
[6] “Life Story: Edith Maude Eaton, aka Sui Sin Far (1865-1914),” Women & The American Story, The New York Historical, https://wams.nyhistory.org/modernizing-america/xenophobia-and-racism/edith-maude-eaton/#
[7] Elisa Warford, “An Eloquent and Impassioned Plea”: The Rhetoric of Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don”, Western American Literature, Volume 44, Number 1 (Spring 2009).
[8] Valerie Sherer Mathes, Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1992), p. 258.[9] Kate Siber, “The 19th-Century Writer Who Braved the Desert Alone,” Outside Online, January 22, 2019, https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/books-media/mary-austin-mojave-nature-writer/
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