wild women of the west

Blood gushed from fifty-three-year old sheepherder George Webb’s head as physician Thomas Maghee eased the man onto a hospital bed in his office in Rawlins, Wyoming.  Dr. Maghee’s assistant, Lillian Heath, covered the injured patient’s nose [what was left of it] and mouth with a chloroform soaked cloth, and within a few moments, Webb was...

She cut. The bullet that slammed into the injured cowboy’s chest had come to rest next to his lungs and had to be removed.  Dr. French widely opened the wound to extract the slug.  Her hand was steady and eyes sharp.  She was no stranger to performing complicated medical procedures under pressure.  A woman in...

Boards, automotive parts, and motorboat engines blocked the main entrance of a majestic home in Ogden, Utah known as the White Mansion, home of Frank White.  Nearly every inch of the yard surrounding the house was crowded with engines, windshields, tools, and tires.  The interior of the house was in the same condition.  It was difficult for residents...

Fifteen-year-old Gertrude Hutchings sat on the edge of her sister Florence’s bed, crying.  Florence, a pretty girl of seventeen with long, dark hair lay motionless under a mountain of blankets.  A massive purple and black bruise on the side of her right cheek was the only color on her slender, pale face.  Her eyes were closed and her...

Sarah Louisa Dutcher was the first woman to make her way to the top of Half Dome. Historians believe the intrepid young woman accomplished the feat in 1875.

“From reckless despair she drifted into the life; it is with determination bordering on reckless that she starts to quit it.” Josie Washburn’s thoughts on the reformation of a prostitute – 1905 A large wagon filled with fallen angels rattled down a dusty street in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was daylight, but a hard rain obscured...

“The West is overrun with bawdy houses and soiled doves.” Gold miner Charles Bartlett in a letter home to his family in Virginia – 1872 Madam Laura Bell McDaniel’s broken body lay in a ditch beside a snowy thoroughfare conjoined with the twisted rubble of what was once her pristine Mitchell sedan. It was late...

Ellis Meredith was the daughter of pioneers. Born in Montana Territory, in 1865, she was the daughter of Emily R. Meredith, a well-known advocate for woman suffrage, and Frederick Allison, a journalist. The family had been drawn to the gold-rush boomtown and territorial capital of Bannack Montana, living there for a couple of years before...