Primary Sources: The American West: Diversity

"Housed in the DeGolyer Library, the Archives currently has over 200 collections that fall into two areas: letters, diaries, and journals of women who settled in or traveled through the West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the papers of 20th and 21st century women who have influenced women’s roles in society and shaped the culture, arts, business, social issues, law, and politics in Texas and the Southwest."

Federal Writers Project Interview with Matthew "Bones" Hooks an African American pioneer cowboy.

"The Chinese in California, 1850-1925 illustrates nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese immigration to California through about 8,000 images and pages of primary source materials. Included are photographs, original art, cartoons and other illustrations; letters, excerpts from diaries, business records, and legal documents; as well as pamphlets, broadsides, speeches, sheet music, and other printed matter." Some materials are available online.

Access Library of Congress digital collections that are focused on women's history.

"The documents in this set can be used to help students explore westward expansion of the United States and the resulting interactions among the West’s many cultural groups."

Nat Love, the son of enslaved parents Sampson Love and a mother whose name is unknown, was born in June 1854, on Robert Love's plantation in Davidson County, Tennessee. After Emancipation, Nat Love's parents remained on the plantation as sharecroppers. In February 1869, Love left Tennessee and headed west. He found work as a cowboy, first on the Duval Ranch in the Texas panhandle, then on the Gallinger Ranch in southern Arizona (1872-1890). During these years, Love traveled extensively throughout the western U.S. as he helped herd cattle to market. In 1889, he married a woman named Alice, and the couple had one child. In 1890, Love retired from cow-herding and worked on the railroads as a Pullman sleeping car porter. His last job was as security guard with the General Securities Company in Los Angeles, California, where he died in 1921.

"As part of her Washington State University History 398 classes, professor Sue Armitage asked her students to conduct oral history interviews with women who had spent their early lives in the Pacific Northwest. Totaling over 230 hours of audio, this collection holds nearly 200 of these interviews, originally recorded between 1979 and 2005. The majority of the women interviewed were born between 1881 and the early 1930s, and the collection provides invaluable first hand documentation regarding the role of women in the northwest during the early and mid 1900s."