So Much to Be Done

In this new and enlarged edition the editors have built on an already strong collection with four new accounts. Colorado pioneer Augusta Tabor gives a sense of the heady days as Leadville became a major mining center. Abigail Duniway describes the challenges of life for women in the Pacific Northwest. Effie Wiltbank's short selection is a reminiscence of her grandmother's "receet" for washing clothes, a chore that epitomizes the practical skill, determination, and common sense required of so many Western women. Apolinaria Lorenzana offers a rare glimpse of the operations of the mission system while illuminating the perils of living with the acquisitive Americans.

Ruth B. Moynihan is an independent historian and writer. She is the editor of Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women.



Susan Armitage is a professor of history at Washington State University and series editor for the University of Nebraska Press’s Women in the West series.



Christiane Fischer Dichamp, an independent scholar, is editor of Let Them Speak for Themselves: Women in the American West, 1849-1900.