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The American West wouldn’t have been settled without the women who braved the frontier. Katie Hickman’s new history, “

Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West

But she doesn’t stop at the white women settlers who traveled by wagon or on foot. Drawing on diaries, letters and memoirs, she also brings to life Black enslaved women who went west with their master’s families, Chinese women who were brought by sex traffickers to the West Coast, and the Native American women who called the West home long before any settlers arrived.

Hickman paints colorful and dramatic accounts of these women’s lives with a novelist’s eye for detail. 

This week, on Big Books and Bold Ideas, she talked about her research with host Kerri Miller, shared some of the stories she uncovered and offered important correctives about what really happened during the largest mass migration in American history.

To listen to the full conversation you can use the audio player above.

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Old West mythology is full of dust-covered cowboys, lonesome gun slingers and gold-seeking prospectors. But if you only know the men’s side of the story, you only know part of it.

Author Katie Hickman on the women of the American West

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Author Katie Hickman on the women of the American West

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