Laura Arata

Author of "Race and the Wild West: Sarah Bickford, the Montana Vigilantes, and the Tourism of Decline, 1870-1930"

January 10, 2022

Laura J. Arata is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Public History at Oklahoma State University, where she specializes in public history and the American West. Her recent work includes contributions to two volumes of the Hanford History Project, consultation with historic Vernon AME Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma and ongoing research on James Coody Johnson and the fight for racial inclusion in Oklahoma.

Born a slave in eastern Tennessee, Sarah Blair Bickford (1852–1931) made her way while still a teenager to Montana Territory, where she settled in the mining boomtown of Virginia City. Race and the Wild West is the first full-length biography of this remarkable woman, whose life story affords new insight into race and belonging in the American West around the turn of the twentieth century.

Bickford’s story offers a window into the dynamics of race in the rural West. Although her experiences defy easy categorization, what is clear is that her navigation of social norms and racial barriers did not hinge on exceptionalism or tokenism. Instead, she built a life that deserves to be understood on its own terms. Through exhaustive research and nuanced analysis, Laura J. Arata advances our understanding of a woman whose life embodied the contradictory intersections of hope and disappointment that characterized life in the early-twentieth-century American West for brave pioneers of many races.

"Race and the Wild West" has won two book awards – the 2021 Spur Award for Best First Nonfiction Book from Western Writers of America, and the 2021 Gita Chaudhuri Prize for Best Book on Rural Women's History from Western Association of Women's Historians. 

URL: https://library-dep.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2022-honorees/laura-arata

Last Updated: 11 January 2022