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Love Lessons from the Old West: Wisdom from Wild Women.

Maria Josefa Jaramillo was fifteen when she married well-known frontiersman Kit Carson on February 3, 1843. The thirty-three year old Carson made Maria’s stomach flutter with excitement. He was fearless and decent and in him she saw forever.

Maria Josefa was born on March 19, 1828, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her father, Francisco Jaramillo, was a merchant, and her mother, Maria Apolonia Vigil, owned substantial acreage in the Rio Grande area of the state. Maria Josefa helped her parents maintain their ranch and cared for her younger brothers and sisters. She met Carson in Taos in 1842. He had been on an expedition with Colonel John Charles Fremont in the Rocky Mountains and was anxious to visit a place where there were lots of people.

Although Maria Josefa and Carson were equally impressed with one another, her father would not permit them to marry because Carson was illiterate. Francisco was an educated man and very well respected in the community. He was aware of Carson’s work as an accomplished scout, criss crossing the western territories, but preferred his daughter marry someone with a scholastic background, at the very least someone who was a member of the Catholic faith. Carson was determined to make Maria Josefa his wife and decided to convert to Catholicism. He attended the necessary classes, counseled with a priest, and paid the fee required for a wedding ceremony in the church.

A short three months after the wedding, Carson left on the first of many expeditions he would participate in during his married life. Carson had been leading treks to various parts of the unsettled frontier since he was fifteen years old. He was born in Madison County, Kentucky, on December 24, 1809. Just after his first birthday his parents moved to Howard County, Missouri. Carson had five brothers and six sisters. His father was a lumberjack and died in a work related accident when Carson was nine years old. At the age of fourteen he was an apprentice to a saddle maker, a job which he said “soon became irksome to him.” He ran away (a one cent reward was offered for his return) and arrived in Santa Fe in the fall of 1826.

To learn more about Maria Josefa Carson and the other incredible women on the frontier read

Love Lessons from the Old West: Wisdom from Wild Women.

March 20, 2018

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: TwoDot Books

Caroline McManus: Marketing 203/458-4557

Helena, Montana —Today, TwoDot Books is pleased to announce The Pinks: The First Women Detectives, Operatives, and Spies with the Pinkerton Detective Agency has been recognized as a finalist in the 20th annual Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards.

As part of its mission to discover, review, and share the best books from university and independent publishers (and authors), independent media company Foreword Magazine, Inc. hosts its annual awards program each year. Finalists represent the best books published in 2017. After more than 2,000 individual titles spread across 65 genres were submitted for consideration, the list of finalists was determined by Foreword’s editorial team. Winners will be decided by an expert team of booksellers and librarians—representing Foreword’s readership—from across the country.

The complete list of finalists can be found at:

https://www.forewordreviews.com/awards/finalists/2017/

“Choosing finalists for the INDIES is always the highlight of our year, but the job is very difficult due to the high quality of submissions,” said Victoria Sutherland, founder/publisher of Foreword Reviews. “Each new book award season proves again how independent publishers are the real innovators in the industry.”

Winners in each genre—along with Editor’s Choice Prize winners and Foreword’s INDIE Publisher of the Year—will be announced June 15, 2018.

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The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West.

Eighteen year-old Nellie Mattie MacKnight stepped confidently into the spacious dissecting room at San Francisco’s Toland Hall Medical School. Thirty-five male students stationed around cadavers spread out on rough board tables, turned to watch the bold young women enter. The smell of decomposing corpses mixed with tobacco smoke wafting out of the pipes some of the students were puffing on assaulted Helen’s senses. Her knees weakened a bit as she strode over to her appointed area, carrying a stack of books and a soft, rawhide case filled with operating tools.

To her fellow students Nellie was a delicate female with no business studying medicine. Determined to prove them wrong she stood up straight, opened her copy of Gray’s Anatomy and removed the medical instruments from

It was the spring of 1891. She nodded politely at the future doctors glowering at her. A tall, dapper, be speckled professor stood at the front of the classroom watching Nellie’s every move. The sour look on his face showed his distain for a woman’s invasion into this masculine territory. “Do you expect to graduate in medicine or are you just playing around,” he snarled? The blood rushed to Nellie’s face and she clinched her fists at her side. She had expected this kind of hostile reception when she dared to enroll, but was taken aback just the same. “I hope to graduate,” she replied firmly. Disgusted and seeing that Nellie could not be intimidated, the professor turned around and began writing on a massive chalk board behind him. The students quickly switched their attention from Nellie to their studies. Nellie grinned and whispered to herself, “I will graduate…and that’s a promise.”

To learn more about Nellie MacKnight and other women physicians of the

Old West read

The Doctor Wore Petticoats.

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Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West

Sister Mary Baptist Russell and four other nuns from the Sisters of Mercy Convent weaved their way around a parade of scruffy miners, traveling salesmen, and saloon girls crowded on a sturdy dock that was hugging a shore in San Francisco. Wearing black habits complete with scapulars, veils, and coifs, the women stepped aboard the steamer boat that was splattered with mud and dirt. The deck of the vessel was a swarm with prospectors en route to their diggings down river. Some were sleeping, others were playing cards or discussing their mining claims. The Sister inched their way to a clearing near the bow and grabbed hold of the railing as the small craft moved slowly away from the landing.

The scene around the bay in August 1863 was chaotic. News of the discovery of gold north of the city had prompted people of every kind and description to pour into the place to gather supplies before rushing to the hills. Men, women, and children were living in shacks, or sleeping on the ground under blankets draped over poles. The noise and pandemonium lessened considerably as the boat continued on past abandoned ships, old-riggers, and new vessels anchored and waiting patiently for more eager passengers to come aboard.

The nuns smiled pleasantly at their fellow travelers before turning their attention to the golden brown landscape on either side of the clay-colored water. The furious mining activities in the mountains had left the one time clear and clean river muddy and rolling, and fast receding flood waters had left the channel that use to be deep, shallow and treacherous. Sister Russell spotted a steamer in the near distance that was stuck in the bars and lifted her heard to heaves in a silent prayer that their boat would not suffer the same fate.

If the vessel did not get lodged in the mud or a boiler did not explode, the trip between San Francisco and Sacramento was six hours. The intense heat and savage mosquitoes and fleas the nuns were forced to fight off made the trip seem longer. Sister Russell referred to the riverboat as that “miserable steamer” and had it not been for the fact that the ladies were dedicated to care and educate children in the isolated mining camps,

none would have chosen to ever leave the comforts of their San Francisco based order.

The nuns who dared to make the journey had proven to the leaders of the church to be the most qualified for the job. They were strong, resourceful women who had provided food to hungry pioneers who had lost everything coming west, tended to cholera patients, and taught school to orphans.

Sister Russell had endured a number of hardships on her way from Ireland to California and was the leader of the group of traveling Sisters. Born in County Down, Ireland in 1829, she was only twenty-five years old when she came to America to help develop the rugged west. Like all the Sisters of Mercy she devoted her life to the service of the poor, the sick, and the ignorant. As a member of the Sister of Mercy order in San Francisco she helped establish St. Mary’s Hospital, the oldest Catholic hospital in existence in the Gold Country.

To learn more about the Sisters of Mercy read

Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West

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Love Untamed: Romances of the Old West

A pair of large, mean steers burst out of the gate and raced onto the parade field. Eighteen-year-old Lucille Mulhall bolted after the beasts atop her trained horse, Governor. The beautiful blond with petite features and blue-gray eyes quickly tossed the lasso she was twirling and snagged one of the animals around its neck. The steer jerked to a stop as Governor planted his feet firmly on the ground. Lucille leapt at the steer with another rope and began to tie its feet together. In thirty seconds she had completed the task, breaking the steer-roping record at the rodeo grounds in Denison, Texas.

On a hot September day in 1903, Lucille won the Grayson County Fair’s roping contest, beating out two of the top cowboys in the county in the process. She was awarded a pendant of gold with a raised star in which was imbedded a diamond. In the center of the pendant was a steer-roping scene set in blue enamel. It was a prize she wore with pride for the rest of her career.

Lucille Mulhall was destined to be a cowgirl. Her father, Zack Mulhall, had her on the back of a horse before she could walk.

She was born on October 21, 1885, and raised on her family’s 80,000-acre ranch near Guthrie, Oklahoma. At an early age she showed a talent for horse riding. She was a natural in the saddle, at training horses, roping, branding cattle, and all the other chores associated with ranch hands. History records that she was extremely bright and could have gone on to be a teacher, but she preferred cowboying, and with her father’s help, she made it her life’s work.

After a successful roping-and-riding contest in 1899, Zack decided this form of entertainment had massive monetary potential. He put together a group of horseback performers and called them Mulhall’s Congress of Rough Riders and Ropers. Lucille was a part of the group and began her career at a riding exhibition in Oklahoma City. She was fourteen years old. Lucille and her horse captivated audiences with their speed and precision. In less than a year, she was the best-known cowgirl performer in the West.

In 1902 Lucille had an accident that would have caused any professional rider to give up the sport. It happened during a relay race in St. Louis when she was dismounting a bronco. She was struck by the pony of one of the other cowboys in the show and the muscles and tendons of her ankle were torn away and the limb badly bruised. She finished the tour with her leg in a cast.

To learn more about Lucille Mulhall and other tough ladies on the frontier read Love Untamed: Romances of the Old West

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Tales Behind the Tombstones

Nellie Bly was one of the most rousing characters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1880s, she pioneered the development of “detective” or “stunt” journalism, the acknowledged forerunner of full-scale investigative reporting. While she was still in her early twenties, the example of her fearless success helped open the profession to coming generations of women journalist clamoring to write hard news.

Bly performed feats for the record books. She feigned insanity and engineered her own commitment to a mental asylum, then exposed its horrid conditions. She circled the globe faster than any living or fictional soul. She designed, manufactured, and marketed the first successful steel barrel produced in the United States. She owned and operated factories as a model of social welfare for her 1,500 employees. She was the first woman to report from the Eastern Front in World War I. She journeyed to Paris to argue the case of a defeated nation. She wrote a widely read advice column while devoting herself to the plight of the unfortunate, most notably unwed and indigent mothers and their offspring.

Bly’s life – 1864 to 1922 – spanned Reconstruction, the Victorian and Progressive eras, the Great War and its aftermath. She grew up without privilege or higher education, knowing that her greatest asset was the force of her own will. Bly executed the extraordinary as a matter of routine. Even well into middle age, she saw herself as Miss Push-and-Get-There, the living example of what, in her time, was “That New American Girl.” To admirers, she was Will Indomitable, the Best Reporter in America, the Personification of Pluck. Amazing was the adjective that always came to mind. As the most famous woman journalist of her day, as an early woman industrialist, as a humanitarian, even as a beleaguered litigant, Bly kept the same formula for success: Determine Right. Decide Fast. Apply Entergy Act with Conviction. Fight to the Finish. Accept the Consequences. Move on.

Nelllie Bly is an example of possibility. She viewed every situation as an opportunity to make a significant difference in other people’s lives as well as her own. Not wealth or connections or position or beauty or outstanding intellect eased her way to greatness. She never dwelled on inadequacy or defeat. Bly just harnessed her pluck, her power to decide, and then did as she saw fit, to both impressive and disastrous ends.

To learn more about one of the most famous female journalists of the Old West read Tales Behind the Tombstones.