WOMEN OF THE WEST by Cathy...

WOMEN OF THE WEST by Cathy Luchetti and Carol Olwell (Crown/Orion Books: $22; 240 pp., illustrated). Luchetti and Olwell refute the popular image of the frontier as an almost exclusively male domain in this vivid compilation of diaries, letters and photographs. Although a resigned sameness marks the accounts of harsh weather, failed dreams, births, deaths and never-ending physical labor, these intimate recollections capture the gritty reality of establishing a home in an empty wilderness. Keturah Penton Belknap remembers that she “got seventy five cents a week for doing common house work and some times a dollar for a hard Job and I would wash all day for twenty five cents.” Bethenia Owens-Adair describes preparing meals on the Oregon frontier with “a pot, tea-kettle and bake-oven (all of iron), a frying pan and a coffee pot.” The many archival photographs of women at work in fields, branding cattle etc. present a truer, fairer picture of the romanticized Old West.