Review: ‘Ladies of the Canyons’ tells the story of extraordinary women who blossomed in the Southwest

In May 1903, Natalie Curtis stepped into the Arizona heat for the first time. She was accompanied by her brother George, who’d been working in the region as a ranch hand. They came from a wealthy New York family and like many vaguely unwell Easterners, had been told to head to the dry Southwest for their health. Both recovered, and Natalie found something more: a calling.

She had brought with her a bulky Edison recorder, wax cylinders, a notepad and the hopes of recording Native American song. Thirty years before Alan Lomax set out with his father to make his famous field recordings, Curtis was capturing America’s vanishing native music.

Curtis is one of the “Ladies of the Canyons” profiled in Lesely Poling-Kempes’ new history of the American Southwest. She shares the pages with Mary Cabot Wheelwright, who is remembered for founding the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, N.M.; Carol Stanley, who built the New Mexico ranch that Georgia O’Keeffe would later call home; and Alice Klauber, a wealthy San Diego-based painter and art patron who played an essential role in connecting Santa Fe with the New York art community. To explore what enabled these outliers to make their unconventional choices, Poling-Kempes spends time on their lives as young women as well as their unusual lives in the West.

Curtis and Stanley were both driven by unfulfilled ambition and disappointment, Poling-Kempes writes. The two were barred from professional lives by the class codes of the day and burdened by duty to tend to their parents at home.

Curtis had trained to be a classical pianist, but that dream dissipated before she could launch her career. Yet her training and musical talent were essential to what she set out to do at age 28. As the Bureau of Indian Affairs was forcing Native American children to abandon their heritage, language and culture, she won the trust of Hopi leaders and elders who sang her their songs, often connected to religious rituals. In some places, singing had been forbidden by BIA officers, and Curtis all but abandoned her recorder in favor of detailed musical notation. She brought a notebook out on the trail, where she often traveled by horse and slept out under the stars.

“I have ridden with cowboys, sung with them, seen round-ups and bronco-busting, spent months amid a thousand head of cattle on one of the loneliest ranges in Arizona…. When the men left to ‘ride the range’ and I was alone in the cabin with a Colt revolver for companion; when I heard the plaintive sob of the wood pigeon in the cedars…. Then I understood the note of utter loneliness that sounds in many a cowboy song,” she recalled in 1920 in the Nation.

When Curtis traveled back to New York, she brought the cause of Indian-rights agitators (led by Charles Lummis in Los Angeles) into the living room of President Teddy Roosevelt. Old family connections — and Roosevelt’s willingness to speak with a young woman living on America’s frontier — meant that she returned to the Southwest with a letter of presidential sanction to move through Indian country without being impeded by the BIA. For his part, Roosevelt tried to support the cultural heritage of Native Americans after her visit but got only so far.

In 1907, Curtis published “The Indians’ Book: An Offering by the American Indians of Indian Lore, Musical and Narrative, to Form a Record of the Songs and Legends of Their Race” with 149 songs from 18 tribes. It has never gone out of print.

Curtis is at the hub of much of Poling-Kempes’ story, connecting major figures from ethnography, art, anthropology and politics. She was friends with Klauber, who had studied with and recruited Ashcan School painter Robert Henri, who helped establish an art community in New Mexico. Curtis and Stanley became friends in the West, and Stanley’s love for remote regions of New Mexico paralleled Curtis’ own.

Of course, there are the thorny matters of privilege and expropriation. The hundreds of acres that Stanley purchased had once belonged to the Native Americans whose culture these women tried to honor. Poling-Kempes doesn’t directly address this, but what comes through in the text is that the women she’s profiling made genuine efforts to do what they thought was right and just in the moment.

Considered spinsters back East, both Curtis and Stanley married younger men out West. Curtis wed Paul Burlin, a promising painter (her Greenwich Village mother disapproved of his Jewishness); Stanley eloped with a cowboy. It would be nice to freeze-frame here, with everyone getting what they wanted, freedom and fulfillment and happiness. But time rides on, some must leave the desert forever, and fortunes are lost: Stanley, who built a progressive community around her second ranch, was unable to hold onto it. O’Keeffe obtained it and brought her vision of the desert to museums around the world.

Poling-Kempes has done an admirable job scouring archives for these women, who have been largely left out of the historical record of the West. It’s a kind of prequel to our common history of the Southwest, peopled by women with long skirts and cinched waists in the desert heat, riding cowboy style, trying to do right by the land they all loved.

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Ladies of the Canyons: A League of Extraordinary Women and Their Adventures in the American Southwest

Lesley Poling-Kempes
University of Arizona Press: 384 pp., 24.95 paper

carolyn.kellogg@latimes.com