Black Women of the Old West

Although African American women appear in few textbooks or movies about the Old West, they turned up on every American frontier. Some were born within Native American nations and others traveled west in pioneer wagons. Yes, many were devoted mothers and daughters, but they also built communities, schools, and churches, and stayed on to become poets and civil rights agitators, schoolmarms and nurses, cowgirls and homesteaders. Black women lived their American dream as they ran laundries, hotels, schools, stores, ranches, newspapers, and carting firms. Day into night they poured themselves into the labor, fellowship, and determination that kept communities afloat. As they challenged white bigotry, their grit helped transform dismal, sparsely settled frontier territories into thriving, populous states.

William Loren Katz is the author of forty books, including such award-winning titles as Breaking the Chains: African American Slave Resistance, The Black West, and Black Women of the Old West. He has been a Scholar in Residence at Teachers College, Columbia University and served as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institute.