Colby Lonigan was out rounding up stray cattle in dismal Crazy Woman Creek when he found her. She looked like she’d stepped off the pages of a fashion magazine, except she was dirty, disheveled, injured, missing a shoe, and her memories. Not knowing what else to do, he takes her back to his ranch. It must be the Christmas spirit to make him offer for her to stay indefinitely. Faith adopted the name Colby gave her because she didn’t know her own. Or anything else about herself. As she stayed on at the ranch, she fell under the spell of Colby’s sweet little daughter and learned the ranching life. And the romance between her and Colby grew. But first she needed to find out who she was and why she had a pale white circle around her left ring finger. When Colby’s ex-in-laws sue for custody of his precious daughter, at Christmastime, Faith agrees to stay and fight with him, hoping she hasn’t left a child of her own somewhere out in Crazy Woman Creek.

A “blessedly unromantic” portrait of real women’s lives in the contemporary American West (Kathleen Norris). This wide-ranging collection of essays and poetry reveals the day-to-day lives and experiences of a diverse collection of women in the western United States, from Buddhists in Nebraska to Hutterites in South Dakota to “rodeo moms.” A woman chooses horse work over housework; neighbors pull together to fight a raging wildfire; a woman rides a donkey across Colorado to raise money after the tragedy at Columbine. Women recall harmony found at a drugstore, at a powwow, in a sewing circle. Lively, heartfelt, urgent, enduring, Crazy Woman Creek celebrates community—connections built or strengthened by women that unveil a new West.

Manuela Lisa, the beautiful raven-haired daughter of a wealthy Spanish fur trader, was forced t flee her St. Louis home and venture westward at the age of 13 after the mysterious untimely death of her father. At her fathers bedside she received a small packet and, in his dying breath, her father told her a secret that would cause her to travel the mountains and valleys of the American wilderness to fulfill her quest. This is her storya courageous woman who left her mark in a mans world in the American west of the 1800s.

Collected here for the first time ever are the surviving eyewitness accounts of the Bozeman's Trail's civilian emigrants: twenty-four diaries written during the journey and nine reminiscences prepared afterward. These accounts describe life on the West's last great emigrant trail, the shortcut from the Platte River Road to the Montana goldfields, from 1863 until 1866, when the route was closed by "Red Cloud's War." Ample introductions, extensive annotation, historical illustrations, and detailed maps enrich this oversized, two-volume compendium.