The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 87, July 1983 - April, 1984 Page: 98

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Myres discusses a number of broad questions. Did all white women
hate and fear Indians? What about acts of kindness extended by In-
dians toward settlers? She cites the peaceful and often helpful en-
counters between women and Indians, and notes that in the settle-
ments, as on the trail, friendly contact and beneficial interaction were
more common than violence and bloodshed. Who were the blacks on
the frontier? What was the extent of intermarriage and intercultural
mixing among Mexicans and Americans? To what extent did frontier
conditions attenuate the racial prejudices that Anglos brought with
them?
Day-to-day questions are also addressed. How did mothers wash
diapers on the overland trail when there was no water? Answer: they
did not. They dried, scraped, aired, and reused them.
Finally, Myres raises the question of whether women had more or
less freedom on the frontier. Were they drudges, subservient to men,
or did they find new outlets for expression and new fields for personal
development and satisfaction? In addition to her own opinion, she is
careful to include the viewpoints of both feminist and nonfeminist
frontier historians on these, as well as other questions raised in the
book.
Texas Foundation for Women's Resources, RUTHE WINEGARTEN
Austin
Oil Booms: Social Change in Five Texas Towns. By Roger M. Olien
and Diana Davids Olien. (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska
Press, 1982. Pp. xvi+ 22o. Preface, introduction, illustrations, map,
tables, appendixes, notes, bibliographical notes, index. $16.95.)
For too many years the last boom of the American West-oil-has
been ignored by historians. A vast amount of material is readily avail-
able on the gold, cattle, and silver boom towns of the West, but little
work, until recently, has been done on the heyday of the oil boom
town. Carl B. Glasscock's Then Came Oil (1938) was one of the first
books to examine this unique era. After Carl C. Rister's Oil! Titan of
the Southwest (1949), the subject lay dormant for nearly three decades.
This work by Roger M. and Diana Davids Olien is one of the studies
resulting from the reawakening of interest in America's oil boom. It is
different from many of the contemporary works, however, in that it fo-
cuses on the social and economic evolution of oil boom towns, specifi-
cally Midland, Odessa, McCamey, Wink, and Snyder in the Permian
Basin of West Texas.