In Genuine Cowgirl Fashion

By -
In Genuine Cowgirl Fashion: The Life and Ride of "Two-Gun" Nan Aspinwall, by Mary Higginbotham

This must be one of my more obscure titles, and probably needs an explanation.  "Two-Gun Nan" was a cowgirl in Western-style shows from about 1905-1929--like Annie Oakley, but later on.  She would do fancy riding and lariat tricks, and of course lots of trick shooting.  My grandmother used to have a framed show poster hanging in her house, because Nan was a cousin of some kind to her stepfather.  Nan Aspinwall is practically unknown now, but she was quite a celebrity in her day, especially because of a publicity stunt--

In 1910, Nan rode by herself on horseback from San Francisco to New York City.  She was the first woman to make the trip on her own.  I have a copy of a newspaper story about it from a San Francisco paper somewhere around here, and I've been kind of interested in her for a long time.

I was quite surprised, though, when I came across this book on Amazon.  Nan does not appear in most histories of the West; she disappeared from public view and was forgotten, but somebody tracked her down and wrote up a biography for an MA thesis.  Thanks, Mary Higginbotham, wherever you are!

This very short biography (there isn't all that much information!) reads like the academic thesis that it is.  There are chapters about women in the West and how 'cowgirls' changed popular ideas about what women could do.  I was mostly interested in the biographical details, though.  Nan started off playing two roles in shows: "The Montana Girl," doing trick riding, and "Princess Omene," a family-friendly Oriental dancer.  There is a nice description of Nan's long ride, and a good deal about her career after that; she and her husband, Frank Gable, eventually owned their own traveling Western show.  And what happened to her after Frank's death?  She retired from show business and lived a long and quiet life, occasionally surfacing to talk about her experiences.

There was one problem, though; about a third of the footnotes got left out.  I went to go look up a source and it wasn't there!  

This biography is published as part of an equestrian travel series--if you want to read about long trips on horseback, these are your people!  There is a long list of titles in the back and several of them sound really interesting. 




Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more