I was never a good student of history when I was in school. I was too distracted by trying to remember names and dates, and trying to care about tea taxes and the crack in the liberty bell to ever get a strong sense of real people living that life. I'm a little surprised to find myself becoming a student of history now.
But the specific time in history that interests me doesn't surprise me at all. When I was a kid, there was a television western called Annie Oakley that I could see at my friend Carol's house, right next door, if I was extremely well-behaved all week long.
During the week I dreamed up new episodes, and created my own characters who became so real to me that I wondered why they weren't on the show. My Annie Oakley had friends and family that were far richer in my imagination than anyone could have fitted into a half hour a week, and they went everywhere with me.
So the story of Maude and Sallie March has been a real gift of being able to look back through time and find out about the parts that would have been interesting to me if they were in the history books. Of course the television program I mentioned bore only a convenient resemblance to life in the west. I thought Maude and Sallie deserved better than Annie Oakley got and I've had a lot of fun finding out about the life and times, 1869.
I've tried to represent the kind of challenges Maude and Sallie would meet as honestly as possible and still offer you as entertaining a book as I could write. I think Sallie would have liked it. I hope you do.
Some facts about the time period:
Sallie March's favorite reading material is the dimer. Dimers are softcover chapter books that were sold in stores for ten cents, hence the name. The stories portrayed the lives of those people who moved west in an exciting way that made the readers of the time want to be part of it. Stories were given titles that started with the words: the true adventures of . . . , or, an honest account of . . . , and readers oftentimes believed the tales to be true. The reality though, was that traveling west was very difficult.
The newspapers of the time were equally guilty of making traveling west sound romantic and much more appealing than it really was. While the journalists of the time did not set out to falsify the report of an event, they did try to write a story interesting enough to encourage readers to buy their paper rather than the competition's paper.
The period of time during which 'the west was won' could be divided into fairly distinct sections:
the exploration period, when the land was being mapped.
the expansion or pioneer period, during which the wagon trains were plowing their way across the plains, and the few years when the California gold rush was on, and the Pony Express made it's brief but vivid mark on history.
the development or cowboy period, during which railroads were built and ranching became a larger industry, spawning stories cowboys and sixgun-toting lawmen.
It was during this last period that Sallie and Maude were having their adventure. The railroads were laying track, in a race from both the east and west coasts toward a meet in the middle. Stage coach lines delivered the mail and made bank runs carrying gold. These huge coaches provided the only transportation to outlying areas that couldn't count on the water routes (sometimes the water got too low for boats) or the railroads (which would not reach them till years later).
There are, in fact, records of several women who lived under the pretense of being men, and more women who ran ranches and businesses of all kinds out west, where men, some of them anyway, valued their contribution to forging a life in the wild.
