Mary Hallock Foote was one of the first woman regionalists to write about the western part of the United States. Born and raised in New York State, she went west with her mining engineer husband at the age of twenty-nine and did not live permanently in the East again until old age. The first woman to write about the mining camps of the West, she had a significantly different point of view from other woman diarists of her era because unlike most she was well educated and not taken up by the time-consuming tasks of farming or ranching. Her talent as an illustrator and soon her writing gave her a small income that allowed her to avoid most of the household drudgery of raising her growing family. In addition, like Willa Cather a generation later, Foote was able to maintain a detached perspective on the West because she...