Introduction

What is a frontier? If I was going to write a book about female pioneers, I needed to define what I meant by the term, and any attempt at defining "pioneer" brought me back to that illusive word. Was the frontier simply an imaginary boundary, a constantly moving line between supposed "civilization" and the "unknown" West?

To me, it is simply a place where your people have not gone before-it is the place on the map where the collective thinking of your society draws a large and compelling question mark. Of course, this doesn't have to be a geographical boundary-it might be an unexplored theological issue, a topic of conversation no one is comfortable discussing, an unfolding intellectual sphere, a newly-invented technology, or an insight irreconcilable with current social norms.

Just because no one you know has been there doesn't mean that it's never been inhabited by another group of people who have a prior claim to the place. But because no one you know has ever been there before, the space is wide open to possibility-a place where rules are still being worked out and decided. Frontier space is available to anyone, not just big players who ruled in the past. It's a place where the average person can help determine the way things are going to work, because it's still anyone's guess how the future will unfold.

The freedom of such a space is as exhilarating as it is disconcerting, and in a true frontier, the traditional safeguards and protections are as glaringly absent as the stifling rules. People can and will get hurt. That is why rules were made in the first place, at least hypothetically.

I was raised on the stories of strong pioneer women. Within my own family history, I have women who left luxury in England, positions of leadership among the Maori in New Zealand, and those who were drawn by their poverty from Wales. Some of my ancestors set up house in an abandoned chicken coop. I was raised on these stories. The blood of these women runs through my veins and I grew up seeing my life as a continuation of their own.

In many ways, all of our lives are. The frontier as we've defined it could as easily apply to modern technology, with its resulting onslaught of related inventions, as it does to the American West. We live today in a world of upheaval, a world that is changing at a frantic pace, a world where many boundaries of the past have been flung away, and we are now again deciding: what are the new rules? And who gets to say? Now, more than ever, we need to know the stories of the women whose blood runs through our veins, either literally or metaphorically.

While working on this project, I came across a box of books discarded by my university's library. Never one to pass up free book, I sorted through the stack and found an old, leather-bound volume entitled Pioneers of California. Thinking it might be useful, I thumbed through the pages. Chapter after chapter of the book profiled ministers, governors, politicians, settlers, and gold rushers. Without a single exception, they were white. And they were all male.

The book served as a reminder that we are not many generations removed from a time when it was perfectly acceptable to tell the story of California through the eyes of white males alone. But history is made up of so much more than wars and official government documents. It is made up of people-their stories, failures, and triumphs. As one prominent historian has noted, "If history is to be creative, to anticipate new possibilities without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare" (Zinn, 11).

Thousands of women-black, white, Native American, Mexican, Chinese, Polynesian, and other racial variations-experienced the frontier. As the "pioneers of California" can be broadened to include women, so can the term also be redefined to no longer be the special province of U.S. expansionism. The women in this book come from a wide variety of backgrounds and traveled in a number of different directions-these stories represent a mere handful of the women who survived and even thrived on a number of gritty, tumultuous frontiers. Many were crushed by the challenges, their voices silenced and discarded in the passing of time. But some of them triumphed; some of their stories remain. In spite of all odds stacked against them, their voices persist, whether through a journal kept in a leaky wagon, or through a life so remarkable the world was forced to take note.

Fragments of their stained, complicated, gloriously real lives have been passed onto us, giving us tales to fuel our own efforts to build on these "fugitive moments of compassion," and create lives that will become stories worth telling. The further I got into this project, the more I marveled at the contemporary relevance of these women. So many of the questions that still haunt and inspire us, both as individuals and as a nation, can be traced to the events contained in the lives of these women. You will be astonished at how familiar their struggles appear, and I can promise that you will find yourself in these pages. Pioneering of every variety, in every generation, requires a stubbornness of thought, a willingness to disregard public opinion, and a grit to endure. These stories are fit inspiration for modern-day efforts to venture into new and unknown paths, to climb ragged, rocky mountains, and to cling to a vision of how we might rebuild this tumultuous world into something better, truer and stronger for generations yet to come. Enjoy this journey, and find impetus here to forge your own frontier.