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She Rode West: Tales of Courage, Dust, and Destiny shines a long-overdue spotlight on the bold, complex women who helped shape the American frontier. While legends of the West tend to favor outlaws, lawmen, and lone riders, this powerful anthology—featuring stories by Chris Enss, Natalie Bright, Kimberly Burns, Dani Nichols, Betsy Randolph, Sharon Frame Gay, JoAnn Conner, and more—tells the other side of the story.

Here are the ranchers, teachers, healers, madams, and mothers who braved the unknown not just with grit, but with vision. They forged lives from prairie soil, raised families in rough camps, defied conventions, and faced danger with rifles slung low and chins held high. Some endured. Some rebelled. All persisted.

From forgotten footnotes to unforgettable heroines, these fictional and true-to-life tales reveal the power and resilience of women who didn’t just survive the West—they transformed it.

Saddle up for a journey across windblown plains and untamed towns. She Rode West is more than a simple collection of short stories—it’s a celebration. A reminder that behind every trailblazer, there were women blazing their own.

Gangsters. Lovers. Legends. Meet the Kellys—the bootlegging, bank-robbing, husband-wife duo known as “Machine Gun” Kelly and Kathyrn Thorne—who masterminded one of the most infamous kidnappings in American crime . . .

How did a small-time, hip-pocket bootlegger become one of the most notorious gangsters in the country? For George “Machine Gun” Kelly, the answer was simple: a woman. Her name was Kathryn Thorne, a charming, strong-minded beauty who had family connections in the crime world—and big ambitions for the tall, handsome bootlegger. By the time she met Kelly, she was already an experienced criminal herself, divorced twice, and ready to marry a man who could give her the posh life she always dreamed of. With that in mind, she bought Kelly his first machine gun. And the rest is history . . .

George Kelly wasn’t a natural-born gangster and never carried a weapon bigger than a revolver. But Kathryn changed all that. Like a mobbed-up Lady Macbeth, she pushed her husband to commit greater crimes, introducing him to her friends in the underworld and convincing him to join in a series of bank robberies. Soon, the Kellys were living large, with a house in Texas, expensive jewelry, the works. But it wasn’t enough, and eventually the couple hatched a daring plot to kidnap oil tycoon Charles Urschel. Their plan worked. They collected the ransom—and captured the attention of the nation, the world . . . and the FBI.

A shocking story of ambition and greed, crime and punishment, Meet the Kellys offers a fascinating portrait of a reluctant gangster named after a machine gun and a scheming moll as driven as Bonnie Parker and Ma Barker. A must-read for true crime fans.

The era of Wild West Shows revealed America at its most enterprising. Join Pawnee Bill and May Manning Lillie as they embark on a wild, sometimes tragic, but often joyful ride together. Theirs was a love story that rose to every challenge and seized every opportunity that came their way. They made headlines in newspapers, won fans among European royalty, and captured the heart of Americans from New England to California. This is their remarkable—and true—story.

“No women need apply.” Western towns looking for a local doctor during the frontier era often concluded their advertisements in just that manner. Yet apply they did. And in small towns all over the West, highly trained women from medical colleges in the East took on the post of local doctor to great acclaim. In this new book, author Chris Enss offers a glimpse into the fascinating lives of ten amazing women, including the first female surgeon of Texas, the first female doctor to be convicted of manslaughter in an abortion-related maternal death, and the first woman physician to serve on a State Board of Health.

The discovery of gold in the southern Black Hills in 1874 set off one of the great gold rushes in America. In 1876, miners moved into the northern Black Hills. That’s where they came across a gulch full of dead trees and a creek full of gold and Deadwood was born. Practically overnight, the tiny gold camp boomed into a town that played by its own rules and attracted outlaws, gamblers, and gunslingers along with the gold seekers.

Deadwood was comprised mostly of single men. In the beginning the ratio of men to women was as high as 8 to 1. The lack of affordable housing, the hostile environment, the high cost of travel, and the expense of living in Deadwood prevented many men from bringing their wives, girlfriends, and families to the growing town. Hordes of prostitutes and madams came to Deadwood to capitalize on the lack of women. By the mid-1880s, there were more than a hundred brothels in the mining community.

One of the most notorious cat houses in Deadwood was owned and operated by Al Swearengen. Swearengen was an entertainment entrepreneur who opened a house of ill-repute shortly after he arrived in town in the spring of 1876. Initially known as The Gem, the brothel was host to several well-known soiled doves of the Old West from Eleanora Dumont to Kitty LeRoy.

Among the many madams who ran other cat houses in and around Deadwood were Poker Alice Tubbs, Mert O’Hara, and Gertrude Bell. The names of some of the most popular brothels in Deadwood Gulch were the Shy-Ann Room, Fern’s Place, The Cozy Room, the Beige Door, and the Shasta Room. After more than a hundred years of continual operation, the brothels in Deadwood were forced to close in 1980.

In the summer of 2020, the Beige Door reopened for business. This time as a museum. The Deadwood Historic Preservation Commission, the Main Street Initiative Committee, and Deadwood History, Inc. (DHI) developed the idea of opening the only brothel tour in the Black Hills. The Brothel Deadwood has had a steady flow of visitors since the tour opened

The book An Open Secret: The Story of Deadwood’s Most Notorious Bordellos focuses on infamous cat houses like the Beige Door, those individuals who managed the businesses, their employees, their well-known clientele, the various crimes committed at the locations, and their ultimate demise.

On October 20, 1882, future actress Margaret Dumont was born in Brooklyn, New York. A Broadway regular by the 1920s, Dumont found lasting fame once she started appearing with the Marx Brothers. Tall and regal in bearing, her character provided the perfect foil to the wisecracking Groucho Marx in a series of films including A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup. Her character’s seemingly obliviousness to insult led to the widespread belief, encouraged by Groucho himself, that Dumont was a humorless person who never got the joke. a belief she contradicted in a 1942 interview. “I’m not a stooge,” she said. “I’m a straight lady. There’s an art to playing straight. You must build up your man but never top him and never steal the laughs from him. Straight Lady: The Life and Times of Margaret Dumont, “The Fifth Marx Brother” focuses on Dumont and her role in the production of the comedy teams’ most successful films. Several books have been written about the Marx Brothers as a comedy family and about their individual lives, but there haven’t been any books written about Margaret Dumont. This book will appeal to motion picture enthusiasts, Marx Brothers’ fans, and film historians.

In Along Came a Cowgirl: Daring and Iconic Women of the Rodeos and Wild West Shows, New York Times best-selling author Chris Enss introduces readers to the world of the early rodeo – and to the stories of the women whose names resounded in rodeo arenas across the nation in the early twentieth century.  These cowgirls dared to break society’s traditional roles in the male dominated rodeo and trick riding world. Some of the iconic cowgirls included in the book are Prairie Rose Henderson, Fox Hastings, Lucille Mulhall, and Ruth Roach.  With the desire to entertain crowds and armed with grit and determination, these talented bronc riders, trick ropers, and steer wrestlers were able to saddle up and follow their dreams.  Along Came a Cowgirl includes a foreword by Cowgirl magazine editor and publisher Ken Amorosano.

There weren’t many women in the late 1800s who had the opportunity to accompany their husbands on adventures that were so exciting they seemed fictitious. Such was the case for the women married to the officers in General George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. There were seven officers’ wives. They were all good friends who traveled from post to post with one another along with their spouses.

Of the seven widows, Elizabeth Custer was the most well-known. In the twelve years the Custers were together, Elizabeth lived history. She saw the surrender of Lee to Grant at Appomattox and was given the table at which the terms of surrender were drafted. After the Civil War, Custer was sent to Texas to fight the Indians which began another thrilling chapter of Elizabeth’s life, one that lasted until the memorable day when Custer and his comrades made their immortal stand against the Sioux Indians at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876. During that last battle of Custer’s men, Elizabeth was less than four hundred miles away at Fort Abraham Lincoln, waiting bravely for word of the outcome. Later, it was Elizabeth’s duty to tell the officers’ wives at the post that their husbands had been killed.

The women were overwhelmed with letters of condolence. Most people were sincere in their expressions of sorrow over the widows’ loss. Others were ghoulish souvenir hunters requesting articles of their husbands’ clothing and personal weapons as keepsakes. The press was preoccupied with how the wives of the deceased officers were handling their grief. During the first year after the tragic event, reporters sought them out to learn how they were coping, what plans they had for the future, and what, if anything, they knew about the battle itself. The widows were able to soldier through the scrutiny because they had one another. They confided in each other, cried without apologizing, and discussed their desperate financial situations.

The friendship the bereaved widows had with one another proved to be a critical source of support. The transition from being officers’ wives living at various forts on the wild frontier to being single women with homes of their own was a difficult adjustment. Without one another to depend upon, the time might have been more of a struggle. The Widowed Ones: Beyond the Battle of the Little Bighorn tells the stories of these women and the unique bond they shared through never-before-seen materials from the Elizabeth Custer Library and Museum at Garryowen, Montana, including letters to and from politicians and military leaders to the widows, fellow soldiers and critics of George Custer to the widows, and letters between the widows themselves about when the women first met, the men they married, and their attempts to persevere after the tragedy.