rk Mark Miller - Sidesaddles and Geysers: Womens Adventures in Old Yellowstone 1874 to 1903

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright 2021 by M. Mark Miller

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN 978-1-4930-5545-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4930-5546-3 (electronic)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Travel in Yellowstone Park could be difficult as these tourists discovered when they had to repair their broken carriage.
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE.

This book is dedicated to my fellow volunteer at the Gallatin History Museum in Bozeman, Helen Backlin. She has always been an eager reader of my drafts and an enthusiastic seller of my books, as well as the finest of friends.

By the early 1900s most women abandoned sidesaddles and began wearing split skirts so they could ride astride.
GALLATIN HISTORY MUSEUM.

Ive been interested in stories by adventurous women who visited Yellowstone Park ever since I was a little boy listening to my grandmothers tales of her trip there in 1909. Grandma went with an entourage led by her aunt that included seven of her cousins and two of her brothers. They had a wagon for food and camping equipment, five saddle horses, and a surrey for my great aunt and the small children. The trip took four weeks and they camped out every night.

Grandma bragged about making herself a split riding skirt to ride through the park astride when most women still rode sidesaddle. She told stories about her father and grandfather who went to the park in 1882. One of their favorite tricks, she said, was stealing one anothers red flannel underwear and tossing it into a geyser to tint the next eruption red.

Grandma never wrote a complete description of the trip so I began looking for accounts of trips to the park to gain a better understanding of what it must have been like. I have wanted to compile a book of womens tales of their adventures in Yellowstone Park for a long time.

When I got a good collection of womens accounts of their Yellowstone Park travel, I applied to be a member of the Humanities Montanas impressive speakers bureau. Under their auspices I lectured on Sidesaddles and Geysers dozens of times all across the state for more than a decade. All that time I was collecting Yellowstone tourists tales. Recently I decided I had enough truly compelling womens stories for a book.