Burning the Breeze: Three Generations of Women in the American West by Lisa Hendrickson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Burning the Breeze: Three Generations of Women in the American West by Lisa Hendrickson Judy Nolte Temple Lisa Hendrickson. Burning the Breeze: Three Generations of Women in the American West. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 376 pp. Paper, $21.95; e-book, $21.95. Burning the Breeze is a three-generation biography focusing primarily on Julia Bennett, the first independent woman in Montana to own and operate a dude ranch. Her achievement is the culmination of her assertiveness, financial desperation, and Julia’s magnetic personality. Montana, after all, was the home of Jeannette Rankin. [End Page 91] Lisa Hendrickson oscillates between the lives of Julia’s grandmother, a widow who headed west from Missouri in an effort to make a living and pay off her husband’s debts, and Julia’s mother, who at age fourteen married a forty-three-year-old widower who said, “You raise the children and I will raise the cattle” (114). While this time-hopping is sometimes disorienting, Hendrickson has a knack for ending each short chapter with a page-turning close. And attention to Julia’s lineage of entrepreneurial women illuminates how she had the gumption to repeatedly go into debt to start ranches near Ennis, Montana, and later near Tucson, Arizona. Although this book leans toward hagiography, Hendrickson addresses complicated aspects of her subjects’ lives. For example, first-generation pioneer Lizzie Nave came from a Missouri family of pro-Confederacy guerilla brothers. She was essentially pushed to the West to escape the civil war occurring in her home state. And in another case, third-generation Julia Bennett’s Tucson dude ranch brochure stated, “Clientele restricted” and “The Diamond W Ranch accepts Gentiles only . . .” (244), an anti-Semitic gesture typical of the mid-twentieth century, although Julia’s granddaughter assured the author that her mother accepted Jewish guests. It was Julia Bennett’s granddaughter’s request for a biography that initiated Hendrickson’s work. Hendrickson pieced together Julia’s unpublished life narrative, a Woman’s Club reminiscence paper given by Julia’s mother about her adventures as she traveled throughout the West in wagon trains, excerpts of a transcribed 1867 diary (original missing), plus newspaper articles. Sometimes the seams show in the challenging quilt-like construction of the three lives. Burning the Breeze, written in nonacademic style, will do best among general readers of Bison Books. Although it contains documentation, it is virtually untouched by postcolonial or New Western History sources or insights. This is especially evident in Hendrickson’s pan-Indian gloss of “Natives” the first two generations of women faced, as told through the pioneers’ perspective. Hendrickson does, however, include cringeworthy passages from western writers of the colonialist era—one praising Montana Territory as extending “a continued line of white supremacy from the Mississippi to Puget Sound” (58). This provides [End Page 92] context for Julia’s mother’s memory of overland travel: “Even though the white man has been a trespasser and an invader in the Indian lands, I have seen too much of their dastardly, cowardly doings to learn to like them” (33). A simple acknowledgment in the introduction of the complexity of presenting the viewpoint of Julia’s forebears who took possession of an already-peopled land would have been helpful. In one case Hendrickson does an excellent job of showing how Julia Bennett’s life embodied this legacy of conquest. Julia grew up loving the stories of George Cowan, who in 1877 had been shot in the head by the Nez Percé while taking his family on a tour of the Yellowstone area that was promoted as a wonderland. The Bozeman newspaper hailed Cowan’s “Escape from the Clutches of the Red Devils” (131). Hendrickson explains that at this moment the Nez Percé were being harassed by the US Army because they refused to leave their treaty-protected homeland and move to a reservation. Julia recalled how old Cowan would fit the bullet he wore on his watch chain into its original dent in his skull. This is the same Julia who many years later posed with friend and Crow elder Max Big Man for a photograph atop New York City’s Roosevelt Hotel. He...