New West Book Review

Cowboys Were Her Weakness: John Clayton’s “The Cowboy Girl”

By Jenny Shank, 5-30-07

The Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart
By John Clayton
University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books
338 pages, $21.95

Caroline Lockhart, born in 1871, was a pioneering female journalist, a world traveler, a promoter of Buffalo Bill’s legend and legacy, one of the founders of the Cody, Wyoming Stampede rodeo, a novelist, a newspaper publisher and editor, and a Wyoming rancher.  But until reading John Clayton’s fine biography, The Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart, I’d never heard of her, and chances are that many others haven’t either--she doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry, for example. 

Lockhart reminded me of Molly Brown, as these Western women were born only four years apart and through sheer force of personality were able to overcome the restrictions that society placed on women at that time and to improvise their own careers.  Lockhart was even more enterprising than Brown, but in part because Brown happened to survive the sinking of the Titanic, her name remains familiar, while Lockhart’s once considerable fame has faded.

Lockhart grew up in Kansas, was educated in Pennsylvania and Boston, and spent most of her life in and around Cody, Wyoming, with brief forays to Denver (where she was a columnist for the Post), and a lot of national and international travel.  In writing this biography, Clayton has sorted through stacks of material, including Lockhart’s publications, intermittent journals, and a somewhat misleading memoir, and has written a fascinating story of a driven, adventurous, lusty, at times abrasive and even murderous woman. 

Clayton also did a careful job of piecing together Lockhart’s life during years when primary sources such as journals weren’t available; I enjoyed the way he put two-and-two together to fill in biographical gaps, and provided just the right of amount of historical context as he tracked Lockhart’s life, such as in this observation about the probable similarities between the Lockhart family and the family of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had moved to Kansas four years earlier:

“We can assume with some confidence that their lifestyle applied to the Lockharts as well.  Like the Ingallses’ various houses, the Lockharts’ was doubtless a log cabin, which Sarah may have tried to make homey with quilts and red check tablecloths.”

Lockhart began her career as a “stunt girl” journalist at the Boston Post, in the manner of the more familiar Nellie Bly.  Clayton writes, “Her stunts included taking the wheel of a full-rigged ship, spending Christmas Eve on the street in Boston’s most squalid neighborhood, posing as a servant girl to hire out of an employment office, working as a cranberry picker, wearing bloomers for a day, and going down a toboggan chute.” After writing for several East Coast newspapers and magazines and gaining notoriety, Lockhart, who always considered herself a Westerner, moved to Cody where she began a career as a novelist.
Lockhart’s books were usually satires based on her experiences, and Clayton suggests that the reason why most modern readers haven’t heard of her work is because her plots and characters were too melodramatic to equal the literary achievement of contemporaries such as Willa Cather, and not formulaic enough to pioneer the Western genre, as did Zane Grey and Owen Wister.  Although Lockhart’s books (which I haven’t read) don’t seem to be as remarkable as her life, she still had many breakthroughs in them such as one of the first portraits of a lesbian in literary fiction (or, as Clayton judiciously puts it, “Without making too lengthy a debate, we can say at least that (a) Lockhart intended for readers to understand that Harpe was lesbian or bisexual, and (b) she did so with stronger implications and more obvious code than perhaps any previous American literary figure.")

Lockhart herself is far more complex than most of the characters she wrote about, who tended to fall in black-and-white categories of good and evil.  She was exuberant and attractive to men; she never married or had children, but romanced a string of boyfriends her entire life, and cowboys seem to have been her weakness.  Even after she had begun to sprout facial hair, her love life never cooled, and she enjoyed the attentions of a sixty-something boyfriend when she was eighty-eight.  At times she juggled several boyfriends at once, and one of her lovers even shot another out of jealousy.

Lockhart, as revealed through her journals, was hyper-confident in her literary abilities and vindictive; she once hired a man to kill a neighbor who was bothering her (though the contract was never completed), and she frequently savaged those who crossed her, as in her ongoing feud with a Cody doctor named Frances Lane, who she eviscerated in the 1912 roman-a-clef The Lady Doc. 

Lockhart, in Clayton’s balanced, non-judgmental telling, is often difficult to love but always larger-than-life, and The Cowboy Girl is a striking portrait of a Western woman who lived on her own terms throughout her long, extraordinary life.

John Clayton is currently on a book tour throughout Wyoming and Montana; details about his appearances are on his website.

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