Burning the Breeze: Three Generations of Women in the American West

Public relations executive Hendrickson (coauthor, Kiritsis and Me) delivers an entertaining if uneven group portrait of Julia Benett, the first woman to own and operate a dude ranch in Montana, and her grandmother and mother. In 1863, the recently widowed Lizzie Nave Martin and her seven-year-old daughter Lulu left Missouri to join a wagon train headed west. After 10 arduous month on the trail, they reached Virginia City, Mont., where Lizzie found work as a seamstress. At age 15, Lulu married a widower nearly 30 years her senior, and the couple ran a profitable cattle ranch, with Lulu responsible for bookkeeping and raising the children. Julia, the eldest, loved ranch life and hunting, and in 1902, she married Anson Bennett, the son of a nearby sheep rancher. He proved unreliable and unfaithful, however, and the couple finally divorced in 1931. Julia secured bank loans to open a dude ranch (an early 20th-century innovation in the West) and built a lucrative web of connections that allowed her to open a second ranch in Tucson, Ariz. The story soars when Hendrickson focuses on the relationship between the women and the land, but sags when Julia spends time indoors on business deals and handling myriad family problems. Still, women’s history buffs will find plenty of drama and adventure in this thoroughly researched account of how one family’s “spirit of resilience” helped form the character of the American West. Illus. (Sept.)