Who was the western woman? What was she like, this gentle yet persistent tamer of the wild land that was the American West?

Dee Alexander Brown, The Gentle Tamers, page 11

Focusing on the stories of women in the 19th century Western US, The Gentle Tamers is a relaxing entertaining read. With the stories taken from diaries, news clippings, and other factual sources of the time, it’s a bit light on minority experiences (especially Native American and African American), but gives rollicking good yarns on sturdy homesteaders, glittering prostitutes, triumphant crusaders, and all those other Wild West clichés people know from countless movies, television shows, and novels.

Schoolmarms, loving wives, eligible daughters, hopeful old maids, camp followers, adventuresses, missionaries, suffragettes, travel-book authoresses, actresses, reformers, calico cats.

They traveled westward not only in covered wagons but on river boats, in army ambulances, in jolting railway cars, aboard sailing ships to Panama and by muleback across the Isthmus, or around Cape Horn to San Francisco, and some of them even walked, pushing handcarts before them.

Dee Alexander Brown, The Gentle Tamers, pages 14-15

At times, it does suffer from the fact that these women are clichés now. With the archetypes firmly in place, Dee Alexander Brown takes no risks, instead choosing to blanket all of the narratives under another wide-ranging cliché – Woman as the Great Civiliser.

However, you can get easily lost in the fantastic stories, laughing and cheering on the indomitable spirit of these women as they live and love in the strange new world that was the West. Sure, it’s clichéd, and, sure, it’s not the full story. But it’s an excellent story nonetheless.