Caroline Lockhart (1871-1962)

Abstract

For much of the twentieth century, Westerns were considered a male genre. Their heroes, authors, and themes were masculine. Recently, the study of gender issues in novels has become a fruitful academic discipline, and discussions of the genre have begun to include female authors of Westerns, especially those from the early days of the genre's development. During that time, writers such as Mary Hallock Foote, Frances McElrath, and B. M. Bower (Bertha Muzzy Sinclair) created their own visions of frontier society. Today, scholars rightly examine how these women structured the cowboy myth. One such author who met with a surprising amount of success in her time was Caroline Lockhart (1871-1962). Lockhart, whom H. L. Mencken called of the best humorists in the (Dominick 49), wrote seven novels between 1911 and 1933; three of these were made into films. While all of Lockhart's books were seen as western stories, they differed considerably from the genre's masculine template: they feature wit, a strong sense of place, and meaningful female characters. Additionally, her novels describe occupations such as cattle and sheep ranching, placer mining, and dude wrangling (perhaps the literary portrayal of this new industry). Necah Stewart Furman notes that Lockhart's novel, Me-Smith (1911), was a bestseller that the New York Times compared favorably to The Virginian (49). The Lady Doc (1912), her second, includes what Norris Yates labels the first unambiguous portrayal of a lesbian--and perhaps the unambiguous indication of an abortion--in American hardcover (Gender and Genre 44-46). Old West--and New (1933), her last, brought old-time cowboys into the twentieth century. As the genre evolved into the heavily symbolic gunfight scenario and Lockhart's books fell out of print, she focused less of her attention on fiction and more on her considerable outside interests. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Caroline Lockhart was born in Eagle Point, Illinois, on February 24, 1871, the oldest daughter of Sarah and Joseph Lockhart. Joseph was a farmer, real estate developer, and cattle dealer who soon moved the family to a homestead in eastern Kansas. By the turn of the century, he would become one of the largest landowners in that state, but during Lockhart's childhood, the family alternately lived between Kansas and Illinois, where her mother's family lived and where the Lockharts owned a house. Later in her life, Lockhart would claim that her legitimacy as a writer of stories arose in part from being raised on a Kansas ranch, which was perhaps a slight exaggeration. After her mother's death in 1888, Lockhart was sent to boarding schools. She eventually ended up in Boston, where she flirted with a career on the stage. Soon, however, she got a job as a stunt girl writing feature stories for the Boston Post. Nellie Bly had recently created a sensation by going on adventures and writing about them, and papers around the country were scrambling to find engaging young women to follow her lead. Lockhart fit the bill: young, brash, beautiful, and self-confident. She went to the bottom of Boston Harbor in a diving suit, played baseball with the local professional team, jumped off an apartment building into a fire-safety net, and got herself committed to a Home for Intemperate Women to investigate conditions there. Lockhart loved the limelight, and she wrote with a charmingly self-absorbed style that brought her local fame. In 1897, she quit her newspaper job to travel, spending several months in New Mexico, but by 1900, she had resurfaced in a similar role at the Philadelphia Bulletin, where she wrote under the pen name Suzette. At this time, Lockhart started nurturing greater literary ambitions. She published short stories in popular magazines, including Lippincott's and McBride's, and started working on a novel based on her experiences in New Mexico. …