Liberating movements

WHEN men take to the road in books and movies, their experiences are often celebrated as journeys of exploration and conquest, self-discovery and self-perfection. But when the women in “Thelma & Louise” do the same, they are depicted as runaways and desperadoes who end up dead.

The unspoken bias against women who leave hearth and home is exposed and debunked in “Twenty Thousand Roads,” a scholarly but also rhapsodic study of the role of women in the making of the American West and, quite literally, how the freedom to get up and go changed what it meant to be a woman.

“Movement belongs to men,” observes Virginia Scharff, a history professor at the University of New Mexico. “The freedom to move is a marker of social power and of legitimacy, and for women, that freedom always seems in doubt. When women move, they surprise us.”

The journey in “Twenty Thousand Roads” begins with Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who famously accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition into the West in the early 19th century. Scharff points out that she may be the most-written-about Native American woman in American history, but we actually know little about her -- even the name that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark recorded in their journals is probably a distortion, if not an outright fiction. What’s more, she was not the only woman who traveled with the expedition, although the others, who labored as porters and teamsters, have been literally erased from the historical record.

“We will never know the truth about Sacagawea; we will never even know her name,” writes Scharff. Of the many other women who are utterly lost to history, she says: “We know little about them, but we do know that they were present, and moving, in a fully inhabited landscape that Americans wanted to call ‘empty.’ ”

Women, as Scharff allows us to see, played a crucial if mostly invisible role in the making of Manifest Destiny. Thus, for example, she introduces us to Susan Shelby Magoffin, an 18-year-old woman from Kentucky whose honeymoon in 1846 consisted of trekking with her husband across the Santa Fe Trail -- reputedly the first white woman to do so. She was a homemaker, the kind of woman essential to the pioneering of the West, Scharff says.

“It was their job to transport, enact, and reproduce the customs of American domesticity, the habits at the heart of American life,” Scharff explains. “Every recipe and dress pattern, every homily and admonition that westering women advanced carried a little piece of empire along.”

The automobile revolutionized the lives of women no less than the whole of the American West. When antiquarian and historian Fabiola Cabeza de Baca was growing up in New Mexico at the turn of the 20th century, according to her own memoir, “I always envied any woman who could ride a bronco.” With the coming of the Model T, however, she was able to embark on a 30-year career as an itinerant home extension agent, traveling throughout rural New Mexico and introducing farm families to such newfangled inventions as pressure-cookers and sewing machines. Upon her retirement, Cabeza de Baca literally went global: She offered her services to the Peace Corps.

“In a world of flux, of perpetual creation and destruction of spaces,” writes Scharff, “the power to name and claim a place, and perhaps a ‘good life,’ belonged to people who asserted the will, the capacity, and the right to mobilize.”

Scharff displays a genius for extracting the hidden and often profound meanings of ostensibly ordinary lives. But some of the lives on display in “Twenty Thousand Roads” are extraordinary. Pamela Miller Des Barres, for example, earned her 15 minutes of fame with a stint in an all-girl band sponsored by Frank Zappa and with her book “I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie.” For Scharff, she is an example of a generation of young women who were called “out of themselves in quest of a bigger, wider, higher reality.”

Des Barres hitchhiked from venue to venue across California -- the Rose Palace in Pasadena, the Troubadour and the Whisky in West Hollywood, the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, and occasionally all the way to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and even farther afield. She experimented in sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, all with shattering effect. But Scharff sees her travels on “the counterculture’s errant and exciting paths” as no less important to the making of the West -- and no less a symbol of courage, transformation and redemption -- than those of Magoffin or Cabeza de Baca.

“The fate of the earth is in their hands, and under their wheels,” concludes Scharff. “For better or worse, as the West becomes, again, more myth than place, this landscape is a geography of women’s movements.”

Sex was the stock in trade of Mildred Clark Cusey, another remarkable and memorable woman whose wanderings in the Old West are recalled in “Madam Millie” by Western novelist Max Evans (“The Rounders”). “Millie was a whore, a madam, an entrepreneur,” explains Evans, “and above all, a survivor.”

Cusey was orphaned at the age of 6, narrowly escaped a jail sentence on an assault charge at 12 -- the juvenile court judge in Kansas City was Harry S. Truman -- and started working as a Harvey Girl at one of the restaurants on the Santa Fe Railway line when she was 14. She soon discovered she possessed another way of making a living.

“It’s like a wise ol’ Jewish clothier I traded with told me later on,” Cusey told Evans. “ ‘You’ve got your merchandise with you all the time. You sell it, go to bed with it, and wake up with the same damn merchandise.’ ”

When she embarked upon her career as a prostitute and later a brothel owner in Mexico, cowboys still were riding the range; she was still at work when men were walking on the moon in 1969. In between, her clientele included “soon-to-be presidents and first ladies, senators, judges, bishops and movie stars.” Indeed, the life of “Madam Millie” is the saga of the West as it played itself out in bedrooms and back alleys.

Evans allows Cusey to tell her own story, and she depicts herself neither as a victim nor a happy hooker. “Her mirth was as infectious as a happy plague,” Evans recalls of his interviews with Cusey, who died in 1993. “Somehow you felt the triumphs dominated the enormity of the tragedies.”