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Reviews
THE COWBOY GIRL: THE LIFE OF CAROLINE LOCKHART
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by John Clayton
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| University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2007. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 321 pages. $21.95 paper. |
| John Clayton's lively account of Caroline Lockhart is a welcome biography that will be of interest to western historians, women's historians, literary scholars, and general readers. Little has been written about Lockhart, a journalist and novelist who wrote extensively about her surroundings and whose life in Cody, Wyoming, is memorialized with a substantial collection of written records, including ledgers and diaries, housed at the American Heritage Center in Laramie. |
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Lockhart was born on February 25, 1871, to Sarah and Joe Lockhart. The Lockharts, like many other Midwestern farm families during the post-Civil War years, invested in land, and moved from town to country and back and from Illinois to Kansas and back. Lockhart spent her childhood in Illinois and Kansas until her mother died at the age of forty. Alone with several young children and preoccupied with his extensive ranching and land enterprises, Joe Lockhart sent "Caddie" to wealthy relatives in Pennsylvania, where she attended an upscale school for young women, the Moravian Seminary. When she completed school, Lockhart found that her choices reflected neither the world of the social elite on the East Coast nor that of the impoverished frontier, where women returned home from school to teach school or take in mending to assist their struggling families. Instead, she tried elocution and drama in Boston, ultimately failing at both before becoming what was known as a "female stunt" reporter for the Boston Post. Female stunt reporters became regulars in East Coast papers during the late-nineteenth century; but their writing rarely moved off of the stunt pages, and they were not allowed in the newsroom. |
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In 1904, Lockhart followed a boyfriend to Cody, Wyoming. Cody's boardwalks and false-fronted main street suited Lockhart's fascination with what she perceived as the disappearing frontier West. Writing under the pen name "Suzette," Lockhart wrote local color stories of the West for the Philadelphia Press. As Suzette, she did not hesitate to bend the truth for the sake of the story; the authentic feel of the stories was more important to her than whether they were entirely non-fiction. Local residents did not always appreciate the way they were portrayed in Lockhart's stories or later in her novels, which included Me, Smith (1911); The Lady Shepherdess; and Lady Doc (1912). She did not "ridicule everybody," Clayton writes, only "cowards and blowhards in positions of power" (p. 67). |
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In Lady Doc, Lockhart blasted a fictionalized version of Cody's female doctor, Francis Lane, for providing abortions, cheating patients, and maintaining romantic relationships with other women. As Clayton points out, it is not clear if Lockhart intended for the book to be anti-homosexual, but Lockhart later wrote that Lane's homosexuality was the partial cause of their friendship's disintegration. Lockhart and Lane had once been friends and riding partners, but the friendship ended when Lockhart wrote an exposé on Lane for providing negligent medical treatment to immigrant workers who were building a local Reclamation Service dam on the Shoshone River. She gathered affidavits and petitions, prompting a government investigation that ultimately absolved Lane and damaged Lockhart's reputation as a journalist. Still, according to Clayton, Lockhart had "uncovered a vast conspiracy" (p. 81). |
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Despite the Lane troubles, Lockhart remained active in Cody's social life. The annual Cody Stampede rodeo was born in Lockhart's living room. The event, Lockhart wrote, would recapture and maintain "some of that old West that we love" (p. 148). In 1919, Lockhart purchased a weekly newspaper in Cody, the Park County Enterprise (later the Enterprise). In 1925, Lockhart purchased a ranch in Montana "on the Dryhead," under the provisions of the Stock-Raising Homestead Act of 1916 (p. 206). She remained a controversial figure in her new location, where feuds with neighbors over cattle rustling, water use, and fences nearly consumed her. Lockhart returned to Cody in 1950, where she died twelve years later at the age of ninety-one. |
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Clayton unfolds Lockhart's life with little interpretation, though he draws conclusions from her actions and her words. Lockhart never married, a choice Clayton attributes to a refusal to give "up her ability to choose what she would work at, where she would live, and whom she would hate" (p. 139). While Lockhart left a multitude of written records, it is not clear if they are reliable accounts of her own life. Lockhart was a complicated woman: on the one hand, she appears to be a judgmental, homophobic, difficult person who could not get along with her neighbors and who enjoyed ridiculing them in public; on the other hand, she turned her defense of immigrant workers into a crusade, and she took in many who had no food, no shelter, and no friends. Moreover, the Cowboy Girl resisted the West's gender conventions while simultaneously constructing new ones. |
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Cowboy Girl does not seek to solve the dilemma of Caroline Lockhart and the sources she left behind. Rather, the book offers an enjoyable and readable window into the world of a woman we should all know better. |
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| Laura Woodworth-Ney
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| Idaho State University |
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