Dannebert, Julie. Women writers of the West; five chroniclers of the American frontier.

Fulcrum. 87p. illus. bibliog. index. c2003. 1-55591-464-0. $12.95. JS This slim volume is well organized, creatively edited and impressively informative about these five writers. Jesse Benton Fremont was the daughter of a powerful senator from Missouri and wife of the well-known explorer and 1856 Republican candidate for the Presidency on whose 1842 and 1846 exploration reports she collaborated. Louise Smith Clappe went west to the gold mining camps with her doctor husband and wrote lively, detailed letters describing life in the California mining camps. These letters were eventually published, in 1854 and 1855.

Writer and illustrator Mary Halleck Foote went West with her engineer husband and wrote of her adventures in A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West. Helen Hunt Jackson, famous for her novel Ramona, is less well known for the extensive writing she did to champion the cause of the Native Americans who, in her view, were being badly mistreated by the US Government. Jackson's A Century of Dishonor was published in 1881. Gertrude Bonnin, or Zitkala-Sa, was a Yankton Sioux educated in a missionary boarding school. She eventually returned to her reservation in 1901. She wrote stories taken from her Native American heritage, but she also wrote widely in defense of her people and their rights. A bibliography on each writer is included. Patricia Moore, Brookline, MA