Ladies of the Canyons

There are two especially gratifying elements of Lesley Poling-Kempes’s Ladies of the Canyons. The first is that the members of her “league of extraordinary women” come together in the Southwest much like the members of television’s A-Team assemble for their maverick adventures. We first meet Natalie Curtis Burlin, a brilliant and talented pianist born to Manhattan’s elite, on Washington Square. When she suffered a breakdown, her brother invited her to the Southwest to recover her health. She became a convert to the region’s landscape, rugged outdoor activity, and, especially, Native American music. We meet Alice Ellen Klauber, a San Diego native and artist who helped organize the Panama-California Exposition in 1915. And we meet the woman who prompted Poling-Kempes to write her book in the first place: Carol Bishop Stanley, a pianist from Massachusetts who spent her adult years overseeing dude ranches in northern New Mexico, eventually establishing Ghost Ranch, famous as the home and inspiration of artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The paths of all three women crossed as they endeavored to make unconventional lives for themselves in the freedom each of them found in the desert Southwest, particularly in the city of Santa Fe. In their wake followed other better-known, independent women: Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, sisters Amelia Elizabeth and Martha White, Elsie Clews Parsons, Mary Cabot Wheelwright, and O’Keeffe herself. The casualness with which Poling-Kempes is able to introduce figures like Austin and Cather provides the second gratification of the book. When a prizewinning fiction author like Poling-Kempes can take general readers’ knowledge of such women for granted, we can conclude that women who have hitherto largely drawn interest from academia have finally hit the mainstream.

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