Ladies of the Canyons

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

By: Lesley Poling-Kempes

Narrated by: Jo Anna Perrin

Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world.

Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the 20th century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them.

Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos.

Although their stories converge in the outback of the American Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of Boston's Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of American modern art, and Santa Fe's art and literary colony. Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of the Modern Age.

©2015 The Arizona Board of Regents (P)2018 Tantor

Women’s History of the Southwestern USA

This book came to me highly recommended. I enjoyed the history since I was raised in Sa Diego and I have lived even longer in Santa Fe county, New Mexico. I recognized names & places and learned of others. These were some amazing adventurous women. We hear so much more about men like Kit Carson that it was great to hear about so many female movers and shakers. They are surely turning over in their graves if they could see the Santa Fe and San Diego of today.

The performance of the reading was more mediocre. The pronunciation of some names and places were off —e.g. Lamy (where the train station for Santa Fe is should be pronounced Lay-Me) and the name Vigil (is pronounced Vee-Hill). She did okay on some other Spanish words.

I had a hard time concentrating on this.

I’m so sorry, reader had a nice voice, but was just too much like a lecture to keep my interest. Might be a better book to have a hard copy of.

Read it instead.

I tried but felt as if someone was reading a script. The women just had no life for me. However, it was recommended highly by someone who read the book so some feel differently.

Wonderful story but absolute dreadful narration.

I LOVE the story. However, The Narrator speaks in a clipped, brusque voice, racing through the narration with NO feeling, or emotion. It sounds like a professor rapidly reading a thesis on statistics. I am on Chapter 10 and can listen no longer. Going to return it. Buy the book.

Unexpectedly fulfilling.

The intonation of the narration could be livened up a bit. I was raised between New Mexico and the the East Coast so the topic was of natural interest to me. I would recommend it to any one interested in history of the arts.