Women of the American West

Ploughing a lonely furrow A family farm in Custer County, Nebraska, c1885. Between 1862, when the Homestead Act was passed, and 1900, the government allocated cheap land to an estimated 400,000 families

A wolf in men’s clothing Canadian stagecoach robber Pearl Hart (c1871–c1955), wearing male attire. Some women in the West found that wearing men’s clothes enabled them to pull off criminal heists

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Fishing for chips

A woman collects bison ‘chips’ (dung) in Kansas, c1893. In the tree-sparse Great Plains, dung was an important fuel – and the job of collecting it often fell to women