Badass Women of the West, by Julia Bricklin
There are some writers you read for the subject. Others you read for the writer. Julia Bricklin became the second kind for me somewhere around the middle of The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline. By the time I finished America's Best Female Sharpshooter, I had stopped checking what her next book was about before deciding to read it.
Her new book, Badass Women of the West (Farcountry Press), comes out tomorrow.
The premise is simple, and the book is a good deal overdue. The history shelf of any Western bookstore groans under the weight of hard men. Strong men. Great men. Bricklin profiles twenty women, from about 1800 to the years just after the World War II, who were every bit as bold, and every bit as impactful as any man whose name and deeds are universally known. Among them are Maria Gertrudis Barceló, the Santa Fe gambling queen known as La Tules, and Pi'tamaka (Running Eagle), a Blackfeet woman who raced straight into Assiniboine fire after her father's horse was shot, rescuing him. She was allowed to sing the Victory Song and went on to become a respected warrior and war chief of the Piikáni Piegan Tribe of the Blackfeet Nation.
There's Biddy Mason, who went from enslavement to building a Los Angeles real estate fortune, and Cathay Williams, who enlisted in the U.S. Army as a man. Nellie Cashman hauled potatoes and limes through a blizzard to scurvy-stricken miners, and Susan La Flesche Picotte became the first Native American in the United States to earn a medical degree. These women made their own way into Western history, and Bricklin gives each of their stories room to breathe.
In her introduction, Bricklin says plainly that this isn't meant to be a comprehensive profile of anyone. It's an introduction, meant to send readers off looking for more. That's the right ambition for a book like this, and she pulls it off incredibly well. Each chapter runs about ten pages, and not one of them reads like an encyclopedia entry.
Readers of this blog already know Morlacchi, or at least they know the version of her that turns up in Texas Jack's story. She was the La Scala–trained ballerina who played the Indian maiden in Scouts of the Prairie, taught Jack the basics of acting, and married him. What I appreciated most about Bricklin's chapter is that it doesn't treat her as a supporting player in his life. It follows her own career first: her 1867 American debut in The Devil's Auction at Banvard's, and the Boston engagement where she brought the full-length cancan to American audiences (and packed the house for two years while Puritan churchgoers fumed).
Then Bricklin pulls out the thread that justifies the word in the title. Morlacchi became the corps de ballet's advocate against managers who treated dancers as disposable. When DePol's company was stranded in St. Louis, she organized a benefit to get them home. When a stagehand broke a young dancer's helmet and management tried to dock the girl two dollars for it, Morlacchi took her by the hand and walked out of the engagement. That's badass in exactly the way I think Bricklin means it throughout this book: a woman using every bit of leverage she had, on behalf of people who had none.
Her life with Jack follows, but by then Bricklin has established whose chapter this is. It's a story I know about as well as any, and I still enjoyed watching her tell it. She's clear about what's documented and careful with the rest, and she knows which details will make a reader lean in.
One thing I particularly enjoy about this book is how Bricklin opens a chapter. General Kearny rides into Santa Fe without firing a shot and promises to better the lives of people he's about to impoverish. Polly Pry is blinded by a muzzle flash in her own doorway. Nine-year-old Lillian Smith hears her dog bark, looks up a redwood, and drops a wildcat with a .22. Every chapter starts in motion here. The context comes behind it, coloring the story we're immediately in the middle of. That's the page-turning quality I've praised in every one of her books. It's harder to pull off in ten pages than in three hundred, and she manages to do it twenty times in a row.
Longtime readers will notice some old friends here. The Polly Pry and Lillian Smith chapters condense two of Bricklin's own full-length biographies, Polly Pry: The Woman Who Wrote the West and America's Best Female Sharpshooter. Buntline, of course, is right there in the Morlacchi chapter, doing what Buntline did best. These chapters distill her full-length work well, but they also work surprisingly well as an entry point.
What ties her four biographies to this book is the quality I singled out in my review of her Buntline book. She treats her subjects with real humanity without letting them off the hook. When Polly Pry tells a romantic story about climbing a boarding-school wall in black velvet at fifteen to elope with an older man, Bricklin gently checks the marriage records. It turns out they married in their late twenties, and he was three years older. She does the same for Hannah Weinstein in Red Sapphire, and for Ned Buntline, who could hardly be considered a candidate for sainthood. She takes the legend seriously enough to explain why it was told, then shows you what actually happened.
The bottom line here is that I'd recommend this book even if Morlacchi weren't in it. Julia Bricklin brings the same three things to everything she writes: documented history, narrative clarity, and pacing that keeps you up reading well past bedtime. More than perhaps any other writer working in Western history right now, she keeps writing the book I want to read. It's also a slim, affordable paperback, which makes it the rare history book you can hand to a teenager, a book club, or the uncle who thinks the West was won single handedly by John Wayne.
Badass Women of the West is out October 1. Order it here, or, better yet, ask your local independent bookstore to carry it.
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