RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)What is the effect of revisiting well-known episodes – the Oregon Trail in the 1840s, the California Gold Rush a few years later, the Donner-Reed party disaster, the \'Whitman massacre\' – from women’s perspectives? The most profound reorientation comes in Indigenous women’s accounts. They do not predominate numerically in this volume, but Hickman works to centre the hard truths they tell about the violence, environmental destruction and cultural ignorance attendant on westward expansion ... Part of the intensity of settler women’s accounts lies in the exquisite detail they allot to everyday social relations, an effect compounded by Hickman’s unerring eye for dramatic detail ... Working mainly with published sources, she has woven together an extraordinary range of women’s first-person voices – we hear from more than fifty of them – into a gripping narrative. Especially when she traces intersections among those stories, they show the West as a place of complex relationships.
