The Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart (Women in the West)

In 1901, Philadelphia's celebrity female journalist stepped off a train in Blackfoot, Montana, and into a world of living legends. The miners and frontiersmen, Indians and trappers that Caroline Lockhart met there inspired this beautiful, single, strong-willed woman to live a life she had only dreamed about in what remained of the Wild West. This is the true story of a woman whose work and life teetered between realism and romanticism and who wrote novels “like a man” yet ran her businesses and love affairs like a liberated feminist. Prep-school educated (she attended the Moravian Seminary for girls) and well-traveled (her assignments took her throughout Europe), she chose to live out her passions in a time when to bare one's ankle could ruin a woman for life. As a newspaper publisher in Cody, Wyoming, she founded the town's still-thriving Stampede Rodeo, received critical praise from the demanding H. L. Mencken, and saw three of her seven novels turned into films. Yet she also infuriated neighbors and admirers with her cantankerous crusades (she referred to novelist Zane Grey, for instance, as “that tooth-pulling ass!”) and indomitable will. In this all-encompassing portrait the Cowboy Girl, Caroline Lockhart, emerges as a woman who remade the fantasy of the West in life and in words, and who keeps us spellbound to this day.