Abstract
Burning the Breeze traces the stories of Lizzie Nave (1835–1894), Luly Martin, (1856–1927), and Julia Bennet (1880–1971)—a mother, daughter, and granddaughter—who came to see themselves as westerners in a time of immigration to and White colonial settlement of the American West. Montana experienced rapid transformation in just three generations: Lizzie arrived behind a pair of oxen; granddaughter Julia spent her adulthood driving a car and traveling via train.
Born in 1835 to Lucinda and James, Lizzie became the second of what would be six children in the expanding Nave brood. In 1850, Lizzie—now “grown” at the age of 15—married David Martin. Six years later, Lizzie birthed daughter Luly in 1856, a joyful event sadly followed by David’s death in 1862. During the decades of Lizzie’s childhood and early marriage, secessionist loyalties embroiled the Nave family, and escalating tensions surrounding chattel slavery erupted in the conflict of the Civil War. Author Lisa Hendrickson relates that Lizzie’s male family members in Missouri sympathized with the Confederate cause but decided to leave their home, where political conflicts played out with neighbors and across the community. While Burning the Breeze does not examine the allegiances of the Nave females, they undoubtedly felt the full impact of the family’s decision to relocate to Montana.
As the war continued into 1863, it brought change and upheaval to the lives of many, including 28-year-old Lizzie and her daughter Luly, aged seven. In company with hundreds of other White Missouri emigrants and accompanied by members of the Nave clan, newly widowed Lizzie kept watch over Luly while driving a team of oxen, their belongings secured in the canvas-covered wagon that served as their temporary home en route to Montana. Burning the Breeze conveys the far-reaching ramifications of the Civil War as the move upended Nave family life in Missouri, occupied two years of travel for Lizzie and Luly, and structured their experience as recent arrivals in what was then Montana Territory.
Settler colonial stories often begin with pioneering entry into the western landscape, and all too often ignore the Native nations displaced by White immigration. In addition to rendering Indigenous inhabitants invisible, stories of the American West tend to pass over the contexts from which emigrants departed, as well as the lasting impacts of severing geographic, political, and relational connections upon relocation. Lizzie and Luly came to the Jefferson Valley in Montana Territory along with their Missouri fears and lack of finances as intangible baggage in their journey.
Beginning as a child and continuing through adolescence, Luly came to know Montana Territory during a time of intense violence. In the span of a few short years, Native nations that called the region home endured continued attack by the US Army, and suffered the effects of disease and genocide. Confined to reservations in Montana beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, Native Americans were forcibly removed from the region to create the fiction of free land available to White settlers like the Naves.
The conflict between Native nations and settlers shaped Luly’s sense of place, as she soaked up the story of Manifest Destiny promulgated as a legitimizing rationale for western conquest. Hendrickson includes Luly’s first-hand accounts of White and Native interactions, which provide useful fodder for identifying the ways that triumphalist narratives were created. But Luly’s perspective on her indigenous neighbors was inherently racist, and by presenting Luly’s interpretation without contextualization or rebuttal, Burning the Breeze does little to counteract the blatant factual and interpretive errors that Montana settlers promulgated. The ever-present narrative of White superiority no-doubt buttressed Luly’s identity, and Hendrickson documents the active cultural retelling necessary for just such a constructed story, an important contribution of the book.
Lizzie had married at the age of 15 and her daughter Luly followed suit, also wedding as a young teen. Luly’s new husband, Doc Bembrick, an established Montana resident, was nearly 30 years older, entering his second marriage in 1871 in his early 40s. From Lizzie’s financial struggles as a young widow to Luly’s challenges as a young bride, marital status affected the choices open to women of both Lizzie and Luly’s generations. Well before women could vote in Montana, Lizzie and Luly operated as proxies for their husbands, denied the right to fully control their property or secure support for and access to their children if they should divorce. The third member of the generational triad—Luly’s daughter Julia, who resided in Montana from 1880 through her death in 1971—faced changing but still confining regulations based on both gender and marital status.
The bulk of Burning the Breeze centers on Julia and the arc of her career in dude ranching from the 1930s through the 1950s. Hendrickson details Julia’s struggles to establish a successful dude ranch in Depression-era Montana, her work through the shifting mores of American recreational culture, her efforts to recruit paying visitors, and her struggles to secure the necessary capital to run a viable business. Julia’s life transpired at a tumultuous time for American women. At her birth, women could not vote. By her death in 1971, women had access to reliable contraception and claimed the legal rights of full citizens.
Hendrickson frames Julia’s story as a tale of exceptionalism, not unlike the trope of the Great Man so common in the American West. The typical male rendition regales the audience with tales of a lone individual that, through unique effort and ingenuity, beats the odds and accomplishes remarkable feats. The framing of Julia’s story follows suit: she brings unending enthusiasm and energy to her quest despite risky financial arrangements and tragic personal loss. Such a focus on women is essential in righting the wrong of incorrect and inadequate patriarchal history. Unfortunately, Hendrickson’s valorization of Lizzie, Luly, and Julia suffers from the same inadequacies that trouble Great Man stories. The starring characters are two-dimensional achievers falsely divorced from their historical context and relational dependencies.
Burning the Breeze claims that three generations of Montana women deserve attention because of their exceptionalism but does so without placing them as residents of particular historical eras, as individuals subject to societal forces, as autonomous adults with significant relational connections. Julia’s story did not occur in a vacuum, but rather in a world that presented choices and constraints based on social location, economic class, and individual circumstance. Avoidance of internal conflict, sadness, disappointment, and even triumph undercuts the claim of unique accomplishment. Without a sense of ordinary human lives, it is hard to understand how specific individuals can be labeled extraordinary.
Lizzie, Luly, and Julia are framed as enduring but not as adventurous, despite their lifetimes of physical exertion and risk taking. Julia, especially, is credited with threading the needle of femininity. She “was known to be strong but not tough, steadfast and never rattled, feminine but not fussy, and straightforward but not pushy, with never a complaint or word of self pity” (287). In contrast to the Great Man who is unquestionably strong and self-assured, Julia is heralded as a woman who embodies male characteristics while still being feminine, an impossible task made ridiculously herculean by the assumption that women can and should efficiently produce results while simultaneously making it all appear effortless.
Hendrickson’s text recounts important details of female experience across pivotal moments in American history and shines a light on the achievements of three generations of Montana women. Burning the Breeze offers insights for the history of the American West and studies of dude ranching and recreational history but falls short of its potential by failing to adequately ground its analysis in historical context. Heralding women for their accomplishments is long overdue, and such attempts deserve attention. But understanding Julia and her foremothers depends on a rigorous examination of gender, social class, and race alongside individual details. Societal systems operate in potent ways, and women like Lizzie, Luly, and Julia deserve attention for their response to cultural mores, not their existence in isolation from them.