What kind of woman flourishes on the High Plains, that harsh but beautiful expanse of prairie stretching roughly from the Rockies to the Mississippi River? What some people may picture as a wasteland is, in fact, home to all the women in this book: sheep and cattle ranchers, grassland farmers, rural teachers and mail carriers, wilderness rangers - ordinary women who posses extraordinary grit.

In the true stories, poems, and reflections in Leaning into the Wind these women tell of the rigors, glories, and ironies of Western life over the past century. Some are native to the region, some are transplants, but all have made their living, at least in part, from the land - a land that both "wounds and heals, isolates and unites," in the words of Harriet Rochlin.

They are survivors: One proved her mettle at age eleven as a barnyard midwife during a prairie tornado; another's marriage was sorely tested by "the great bull round-up." Here are lessons - often hilarious - on the many uses of baling wire, how to navigate a tractor, and how to tell the real cowboys from the fakes. Here, too, are the family lives and legacies that strengthen these women's roots in the prairie soil.