These aren’t the women who built the west. Not nurses or teachers or crusaders for women’s rights, they rarely show up in history books.They are a different breed of women. Adventurous and rebellious, they strayed outside the permitted and undertook the unexpected. 

Most of the women who came to the west coast of Canada between the time of the gold rush and the 1940’s settled in Vancouver or Victoria, or in the growing towns in the interior valleys. Out beyond the cities, a different world existed. Imaginative, determined, often raucous and sometimes raunchy, women in the wilds did what they wanted to do. They ran traplines, hotels and bawdy houses, prospected for gold, lived in the wilderness, and married as many times as they wanted or not at all.  

Rosemary Neering tells the stories of strength, independence and sheer determination of women such as Lillian Alling, who tried to walk home to Russia; and Evelyn Penrose, who divined for water, oil and criminal tendencies. Madam, prospector, writer, each of these amazing individuals lived a life that challenged the rules most women lived by.