The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1958. The book was among the earliest popular histories to focus specifically on women’s experiences in the American West — published well before the feminist historiography of the 1970s made women’s history an established academic field.
Brown traces women’s presence in the West from the first overland migrations of the 1840s through the closing of the frontier. He covers the full range of female experience: emigrant wives on the Oregon and California trails, army wives at remote frontier posts, schoolteachers and missionaries in mining towns, ranchers and homesteaders who managed land on their own, prostitutes in the cattle towns, and suffragists who won the vote in Western territories decades before the Nineteenth Amendment.
The book’s central argument — implicit rather than stated — is that women were not merely passengers in Western expansion but active agents of social transformation. They established schools, churches, libraries, and cultural institutions; they campaigned for temperance and suffrage; they maintained economic enterprises; and they adapted to conditions of extraordinary hardship with resourcefulness and determination.
Brown drew on diaries, letters, memoirs, and newspaper accounts to construct individual portraits that give texture and specificity to the collective story. The title — “gentle tamers” — reflects the era’s conventional language but the content challenges the gentleness: many of these women were tough, pragmatic, and ruthless when circumstances demanded it.
Collecting The Gentle Tamers
First edition (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1958): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$75
- Very good/very good: $10–$30