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The Life of an Ordinary Woman
Anne Ellis. Mariner Books: 1999 (paperback). ISBN: 0395957834. 301 pages.
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Hollywood has schooled us well. For many Americans, the words "Old West"
conjure up images of a standard cast of rebels-cowboys, Indians, gunslingers, maybe a prospector or two. Most of us, however,
don't tend to include women in this quick mental picture (unless we've spent a lot of time reading or watching Little House
on the Prairie). If we do include a woman in our Old West vision, she tends to be dressed in cheap satin and feathers, her
basic good nature camouflaged under a mask of garish makeup and bawdy talk-that's right, you know her, the hooker with a
heart of gold. Well, as you'd probably guess, most of the real women who settled in the West resembled this stereotypical
floozy about as much as most actual Native Americans of the period resembled the Lone Ranger's Tonto. But you may be
astounded to discover just how many of these women wrote about their frontier experiences--we know we were. Trust us, Anne
Ellis isn't exactly your ordinary woman. She doesn't try to pretend that life in Colorado's turn-of-the-century mining
towns was a wonderful adventure, but nonetheless, after the first few pages, you know you are in for a wild and funny ride.
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