Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. A myth-shattering look at the women who helped to settle the West, told through their own words and illustrated with 150 period photographs. Through these photos, plus diaries, memoirs, letters, and journals, introduces 11 real frontier women whose words combine to re-create a place and time when resourcefulness and courage were demanded of everyone. This is American history, not as it was romanticized, but as it was lived.