Brave Hearted is not just history, it is an incredibly intense page-turning experience. To read what these women endured is to be transported into another universe of courage, loss, pain, and occasionally victory. This book is a triumph.”—Amanda Foreman
“Gripping, eye-opening, enlightening.”—Emma Donoghue, New York Times bestselling author of Room
“This book delivers a blazing 360-degree view of the American story. Each page is packed with gumption and grit and genius.”—Bettany Hughes, New York Times bestselling author of The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life
“Full of heartrending accounts of courage and tragedy, this is a vital contribution to the history of America’s frontier.”—Publishers Weekly
“[A] wide-ranging survey of the multifaceted roles of women in the 19th-century settlement of the American West. . . . Hickman writes sensitively. . . . A welcome corrective to the long-skewed male-centric history of westward expansion.”—Kirkus
“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.”—Library Journal (starred review)
“A triumphant narrative that brings many overlooked women into the spotlight.”—Booklist
“The most profound reorientation comes in Indigenous women’s accounts. . . . Hickman works to center the hard truths they tell. . . . She has woven together an extraordinary range of women’s first-person voices—we hear from more than fifty of them—into a gripping narrative.”—Times Literary Supplement
“Absolutely compelling; telling the stories of women who for so many years have been written out of history and making us completely rethink our image of the Wild West.”—Christina Lamb, Sunday Times (UK)
“Brave Hearted puts the rough texture of personal experience back into the big narrative of how the west was won.”—Literary Review
“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 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 does these extraordinary women proud.”—Kathryn Hughes, Sunday Times (UK)
★ 09/01/2022
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
2022-08-16
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.
