One of the foremost Western writers of her age, Mary Hallock Foote is today regarded primarily as a local-color writer whose writing does not merit scrutiny, except from literary historians interested in her work as an archive of a bygone age. Yet, in her own day she was hailed, along with American writers and artists such as Owen Wister, Frederic Remington, and Bret Harte, as one of the finest chroniclers of the frontier experience. Writing in 1922, the renowned Western illustrator William Allen Rogers marveled that "somehow she and Wister, two products of the most refined culture of the East, got closer to the rough frontier character than any writers I know." Wister himself wrote in 1911 that Foote was the first writer "to honor the cattle country and not to libel it." Also among Foote's admirers were author and Atlantic Monthly editor William Dean Howells, Western author Helen Hunt...