Hard-drinking, hard-living poker players and prostitutes of the new boom towns; wives and mothers travelling two and a half thousand miles across the prairies in covered-wagon convoys; African-American women in search of freedom from slavery; Chinese sex-workers sold openly on the docks of San Francisco; Native American women brutally displaced by the unstoppable tide of white settlers - all had to be brave-hearted women.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and other contemporary accounts, sifting through the legends and the myths, the laws and the treaties, Katie Hickman tells the epic story of the transformation of the American west, as seen through the eyes of the women who were there.

'Not just history... an incredibly intense page-turning experience. To read what these women endured is to be transported into another universe of courage, loss, pain and occasionally victory' Amanda Foreman

'Puts the rough texture of personal experience back into the big narrative of how the west was won. Along the way, she shows us what was lost' Lucy Lethbridge, Literary Review

'Deft and sensitive... a glorious patchwork... does these extraordinary women proud' Kathryn Hughes, Sunday Times

'Richly evocative... where opportunities for women were opening up in an often lawless atmosphere of greed, gambling, drinking and whoring. It was a rough ride, and the survivors were heroines, all of them' Daily Mail