ABSTRACT
Isabel Paterson summarized her life by saying that she had “lived from the stone age to the air age.” She also said that her girlhood “was rather dull, being spent in the Wild West.” 1 But if the West wasn’t wild enough to suit her, it did have its exciting moments. She saw her neighbors, the Blackfoot Indians, conducting their great Sun Dance, and she saw the huge mogul engines of the transcontinental railroad rushing down the mountains and across the prairies, messengers of a new industrial civilization. Soon she saw the peculiar sight of an automobile “scurrying along the horizon” like “a large black beetle.” By the time she encountered her first airplane, she was prepared to think that “of course, people could fly. In this country at that time any one could do anything.” 2 And when she got her own chance to fly, she set a record.
