The Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart by John Clayton (review)

B o o k r e v ie w s 8 3 a comer or lives yielding to pressure. These poems zig and zag, leading in one direction only to tug in another. “I shake it,” is how this collection opens. And that’s exactly what we expect a good poem to do. And these are very good poems. They shake it. They unsettle. The Cowboy Qirl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart. By John Clayton. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 352 pages, $21.95. Reviewed by Victoria Lamont University of Waterloo, Ontario John Clayton’s The Cowboy Girl is as meticulously researched as it is a bona fide page-tumer. A biography of popular western author, newspaper editor, and rancher Caroline Lockhart (1871-1962), The Cowboy Girl is also a fascinating window into the complexities of western mythology and reality in the early twentieth century United States. In many ways, Lockhart’s western experience was not unlike that of her more well-known contemporaries, yet hers is a most unconventional life. Like Owen Wister, Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and other privileged Easterners, Lockhart saw the West through the lens of a set of myths that her class was largely responsible for producing. Bom in Illinois to a family whose fortune had come mostly from real estate speculation, Lockhart first achieved celebrity as a stunt journalist for the Boston Post before moving to Cody, Wyoming, with ambitions of becoming a celebrated western author. She made inroads toward that goal with her first novel, Me—Smith (1911), which was favorably compared to The Virginian (1902). Although a succession of novels, short stories, and articles established Lockhart’s reputation as an accomplished chronicler of the West, she, like most women authors of the period, was excluded from the popular western canon and has since been largely—and unfortunately—forgotten. Lockhart devoted considerable energy to other forms of mythmaking, which, ironically, helped prevent her from achieving the level of fame as a western novelist that she so desired. She spearheaded a number of projects designed to cultivate her adopted hometown’s image as an icon of the West, particularly by capitalizing on the fame of its founder, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Lockhart cofounded the Cody Stampede—still a popular event in Wyoming—and led the commission of a monument to Buffalo Bill Cody by famed sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. She also pursued a number of business ventures including a newspaper and cattle ranch. Throughout it all, she managed to juggle multiple lovers, often at the same time (even in the same house!), and amass a long list of enemies whom she delighted in skewering in her novels and newspaper articles. The most well known of these enmities was with Dr. Frances Lane, whose character Lockhart assassinated in her novel The Lady Doc (1912). To this day, Lockhart’s inexplicable and lifelong hatred for W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 8 Lane remains part of local lore in Cody. Among the many new insights Clayton brings to knowledge of Lockhart’s life is his discovery of a document in which Lockhart finally explains her motivations for persecuting Lane—which I will leave for readers to discover for themselves. What sets The Cowboy Girl apart from standard works of western Americana, aside from the inherently sensational life of its subject, is the way it weaves together details of both Lockhart’s public and private life with insights about the historical, social, and cultural developments of which Lockhart was a part. The result is a fascinating read and an enlightening look at the ironies of early twentieth-century frontier mythmaking in its historical context. For example, Clayton details Lockhart’s prominent role in establishing the reputa­ tion of Cody, Wyoming, as an icon of the old West yet points out that the town was actually founded as a real estate venture by William Cody, who hoped that irrigation would bring fertility and real estate buyers to the town. It was boost­ ers, including Lockhart, who later established Cody’s reputation...