Burning the Breeze: Three Generations of Women in the American West

Abstract

In Burning the Breeze, Lisa Hendrickson tells the stories of three women who came of age in the American West, from the first generation who followed the Overland Trail to the third-generation in twentieth-century Montana. They charted paths common to white women in the West, yet the author brings out their individuality through firsthand narratives, oral histories, family scrapbooks, and newspapers. What emerges, powerfully, are the ways individual successes were not accomplished alone. If a person fulfilled their ambition, it was because they recruited family members to their enterprise and asked for help from friends, neighbors, mentors, and benefactors. A dense web of family and social networks form the backdrop to the stories in this book.In 1863, the widow Lizzie Nave Martin headed West with a large wagon train. She fled both her late husband's debts and wartime violence in Missouri. Hendrickson dramatizes Lizzie's experience crossing the plains by using the diaries of women in similar circumstances, as well as family lore shared by fourth-generation daughter Sherry Stursberg. The author tracks Lizzie's progress from Missouri to Warm Springs Creek, in the Crow country. Like many women in settler colonial towns, Lizzie earned her keep cooking and sewing for lodgers. Her story demonstrates themes common to Rocky Mountain history: white encroachment on Indigenous lands, the grandeur of Montana landscapes, mineral booms and busts, and women's economic survival through the service industries.Lizzie Martin's daughter Lulu married a cattle rancher in Crow country, “Doc” Bembrick. Lulu's story speaks for many second-generation white settlers who took up agriculture on the plains. Doc and Lulu's Circle J provided a subsistence living, with its vegetable garden, plum orchard, livestock, and carp pond. Lulu worked as a co-provider with Doc, harvesting and processing the food, sewing clothes and linens, tending the animals, training horses, and welcoming visitors, including Indigenous people. The Bembricks shared meals with everyone who came by, a tradition of hospitality that presaged their daughter Julia's career as a dude ranch owner.Julia Bembrick Bennett, a third-generation daughter, brings readers into the mid-twentieth-century West. Raised on a ranch, she knew her way around horses, kitchens, and people. At age twenty-two, she married Anson Bennett and they took over management of the Circle J. But Anson disliked ranching. Instead, he started and failed at several businesses, as did Julia. Their checkered early careers echo the stories of many settlers in Montana who didn't make it in a difficult regional economy.The most interesting chapters explore Julia's life as a dude rancher in the 1930s and 1940s. By 1931, she had divorced Anson and hatched a plan to start a tourist ranch. Julia's audacity was striking: she went to New York City during the Great Depression to recruit wealthy clients, without sufficient money for lodging, food, or creditors back in Montana. Her pattern of moving forward with a plan despite insufficient funds would be repeated several times over, as she built the Diamond J in Montana and the Diamond W in Arizona. But Julia survived crushing debt by asking for and accepting help from family members, friends, and wealthy patrons. Her charm and skill as a dude ranch proprietor carried the day.Of special interest to historians are glimpses of the early tourist industry in Montana: the selling of the West to easterners, the roles of Indigenous people in promoting tourism, and the economic fragility of dude ranching. Also of interest to historians is evidence of the ranch ethos of stoicism. If it sustained people through hard times, it also sometimes crippled people emotionally. Julia's daughter committed suicide, and her son-in-law took refuge in alcohol. These tragedies, too, are part of the western landscape and are told here with compassion and restraint. An excellent read, well researched, this book will have broad appeal to academics and lay persons alike.