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Acknowledgments Many people helped me as I worked on this book. I owe special thanks to: Susan Armitage for help with Phoebe Goodall Judson. Katie Armitage for connecting me to Pat Michaelis of the Kansas State Historical Society, who helped me with Mary E. Jackson. Also, from the Kansas State Historical Society, Lin Fredericksen who helped me with Annie Diggs’s birth and death dates. Dale Bauer for suggesting two novels by E. D. E. N. Southworth and Kathleen Norris’s Foolish Virgin. Venice Beske of the Wyoming State Library for help with Sarah Emilia Olden. Susanne George Bloomfield for directing me to Elia Peattie, Kate M. Cleary, and Patience Stapleton. James Crisp for help with Adina De Zavala, Mary Austin Holley, and Texas history. Charles Davis for discovering Mary Cone and Caroline Churchill in a California bookstore. Bethany Eisenlohr for research on Helen Fitzgerald Sanders and for taking notes on Sanders’s History of Montana; Jill Bergman and Brady Harrison for finding Bethany Eisenlohr. Eric Gardner for directing me to Maud Cuney-Hare, Delilah Beasley, Josie Briggs Hall, and Bernice Love Wiggins. Susan Goodman for help with Mary Austin. James Keeline for directing me to Grace May North and for help with Evelyn Raymond. Arnold Krupat for help with Zitkala-Sa and Native American writers in general. Karen Kunz at Coren Printing for finding me a copy of their reprint of Annie Green’s Sixteen Years on the Great American Desert. Victoria Lamont for directing me to Emma Ghent Curtis and for conversations about Frances McElrath. Paula Mitchell Marks for help with Mary Maverick. Jeanne Moskel for directing me to Melinda Rankin. Diane Moul for help with Grace Sartwell Mason’s life and for directing me to Mason’s ἀ e Lady and the Car. Robert Dale Parker for directing me to Mabel Washbourne Anderson and Marianna Burgess. Karen Ramirez for help with Helen Hunt Jackson. Jeanne Reesman for help with Rose Wilder Lane. The late Merrill Skaggs for help with Willa Cather. Sharon Snyder for directing me to Sharlot Hall, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Frona Wait; Sharon Snyder and Richard Anderson for sharing their unpublished paper, “In Pursuit of Marah Ellis Ryan” (copyright 2004) with me. Mandy Wescott, my RA for one semester, for biographical sleuthing. Rusty Yerxa of the National Park Service at Glacier Bay for help with Eliza Scidmore. For comments on an earlier, longer draft of the introduction, thanks to Dale Bauer, Margaret Bolsterli, Lawrence Buell, Robert Levine, Vivian Narehood, Frederick Newberry, and Richard Powers. Richard Powers’s generosity helped me survive several computer glitches. The Andrew Mellon foundation supported travel and book purchases through an Emeritus Fellowship. Without the library of the University of Illinois, the English Department of the University of Illinois, and funds from my Swanlund Endowed Chair at the University of Illinois, this book couldn’t have been written. 312 . acknowledgments ...

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