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8 The High Plains Women’s books about the High Plains—Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho—mainly ignored Owen Wister’s adulation of the heroic Wyoming cowboy in his wildly successful 1902 novel, ἀ e Virginian. They did put cowboys in their work, recognizing (as Wister did not) that after the disastrous winter of 1886–87 the cowboy had simply become a ranch hand. They saw the area as underpopulated, underdeveloped, and underappreciated. Winters were fierce, the plains were arid, its absentee-owned mines a cauldron of labor trouble. As the National Park movement emerged and High Plains spaces—Yellowstone, Glacier—became apt candidates for recognition, tourism began to emerge as the region’s major drawing card, and this was an angle particularly attractive to women. The cowboy himself could be thought of as a tourist spectacle, an eroticized symbol of the West itself. In fact, ἀ e Virginian is narrated from the perspective of a dude ranch visitor. But more important for women writers is that tourism had become a basic fact of the High Plains economy when the US government made Yellowstone into the first national park in 1872.Alice Wellington Rollins (see Chapter 7 for her Kansas book) published ἀ e ἀ ree Tetons: A Story of the Yellowstone in 1887. Her book complains about the absence of tourist luxuries that had become standard by the time Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson and others published their tourist books. Seton-Thompson’s A Woman Tenderfoot (1900), set in the northern Rockies, is “a tribute to the West. . . . The events related really happened in the Rocky mountains of the United States and Canada; and this is why, being a woman, I wanted to tell about them, in the hope that some goingto -Europe-in-the summer-woman may be tempted to go West instead” (n.p.). Women, she says—provided someone else does the cooking—need not “be more uncomfortable out in the mountains, with the wild west wind for com- panion and the big blue sky for a roof, than sitting in a 10 by 12whitewashed bedroom of the summer hotel variety, with the tin roof to keep out what air might be passing. . . . The usual walk, the usual drive, the usual hop, the usual novel, the usual scandal— . . . do you not get enough of such life in the winter to last for all the year?” (19–20). Thanks to the trip, “I know what it means to be a miner and a cowboy, and have risked my life when need be, but, best of all, I have felt the charm of the glorious freedom, the quick rushing blood, the bounding motion, of the wild life, the joy of the living and of the doing, of the mountain and the plain; I have learned to know and feel some, at least, of the secrets of the Wild Ones. In short, though I am still a woman and may be tender, I am a Woman Tenderfoot no longer” (360). Her sequel, Nimrod’s Wife (1907), urges the reader to “give your starved soul a chance—the road to the outdoors is open to all” (17). Alice Harriman’s comic romance of 1907 narrated through diaries (Chaperoning Adrienne: A Tale of the Yellowstone National Park), follows a tourist party through the Yellowstone, with notes on bears, mud geysers, Old Faithful, and other icons of this park. The comedy hinges on the remarkable obtuseness of the main narrator, an aunt who’s supposed to shield her niece from a persistent suitor but is completely hoodwinked by the pair while finding romance with a former suitor of her own. Though this may not have been the author’s intention, the book shows that any sort of unprepared person can have a tourist vacation in the once-wild West. The book’s drawings and photographs make it an apt tourist souvenir. In 1910Helen Fitzgerald Sanders, who had moved from California (see Chapter 4) to Montana, published an essay miscellany, Trails through Western Woods, in which tourism romanticizes and domesticates the vast spaces of the High Plains. Though dedicated to “the West that is passing; to the days that are no more and to the brave, free life of the Wilderness that lives only in the memory of those who mourn its loss” (n.p.), the book proposes that a visitor can recapture this lost world and that, in fact, such imaginative play is the reason for coming—temporarily—to the High Plains. In “Above the Clouds,” for example, “The...

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