SO MUCH TO BE DONE Women Settlers on the Mining and Ranching Frontier <i> edited by Ruth B. Moynihan, Susan Armitage and Christiane Fischer Dichamp (University of Nebraska Press: $32.50 cloth, $12.95 paper; 325 pp.) </i>

When historians tackle subjects long popularized by the mass media, it’s usually to set the historical record straight. That’s certainly the case with “So Much to Be Done”; the journals and memoirs collected here indicate that pioneer women led lives rather more hard-working and perilous than Hollywood would have us believe.

The 19 women represented may not be typical of early women settlers--they seem preternaturally literate, and good storytellers to boot--but the variety of their experience confirms that most didn’t limit themselves to housewifely chores. One doesn’t hear much about nuns in Gold Rush days, for example, but Sister Blandina Segale appears to have cut a rather dramatic figure in Trinidad, Colo.; sent there mainly as a schoolteacher, she soon became a peacemaker as well. She once mediated a dispute between the townspeople and Billy the Kid, and reports that the outlaw eventually told her: “Any time my pals and I can serve you, you will find us ready.”

The lives of the other memoirists aren’t as colorful as Sister Segale’s, but they do exhibit similar courage. Almost all of them dealt, at some time or other, with crime, death and destruction: husbands killed by Indians, children by disease, friends and acquaintances in brawls and accidents. Some of the narratives concern almost unbelievable wretchedness, such as one woman’s account of her family’s losing everything, not once but three times, in and around the now-thriving Santa Clara valley.

Other stories add an unfamiliar and interesting dimension to our understanding of pioneer life, such as one woman’s charming description of her years as a traveling book-and-print agent in Northern California.

The editors of this volume have a point to make about women’s overlooked role in history, and it’s perhaps best summed up in the words of the “Cattle Queen of Montana,” a Mrs. Nat Collins: “To complain was never one of my traits of nature, neither was the expression ‘give up’ in my limited vocabulary.” One gets the feeling that when duty called, there wasn’t anything these women couldn’t do.