Race and the Wild West, Volume 17: Sarah Bickford, the Montana Vigilantes, and the Tourism of Decline, 1870-1930, Arata Laura J.

For many years, Sarah Bickfords known biography fit into a single paragraph. By examining her life in all its complexity, Arata fills in what were long believed to be unrecoverable silent spaces in her story. Before establishing herself as a successful business owner, we learn, she was twice married, both times to white men. Her first husband, an Irish immigrant, physically abused her until she divorced him in 1881. Their three children all died before the age of ten. In 1883, she married Stephen Bickford and gave birth to four more children. Upon his death, she inherited his shares of the Virginia City Water Company, acquiring sole ownership in 1917.

For the final decade of her life, Bickford actively preserved and promoted a historic Virginia City building best known as the site of the brutal lynching in 1864 of five men. Her conspicuous role in developing an early form of heritage tourism challenges long-standing narratives that place white men at the center of the Wild West myth and its promotion.