Lamont offers detailed studies of some of the many women who helped shape the western. Their novels bear the classic hallmarks of the western (cowboys, schoolmarms, gun violence, lynchings, cattle branding) while also placing female characters at the center of their western adventures and improvising with western conventions in ingenious ways. In Emma Ghent Curtis’s The Administratrix a widow disguises herself as a cowboy and infiltrates the cowboy gang responsible for lynching her husband. Muriel Newhall’s pulp serial character, Sheriff Minnie, comes to the rescue of a steady stream of defenseless female victims. B. M. Bower, Katharine Newlin Burt, and Frances McElrath use cattle branding as a metaphor for their feminist critiques of patriarchy.