"At once a community study, a collective biography, and a statistical portrait of women residents of a Rocky Mountain mining town, historian Paula Petrik takes readers inside the world women created for themselves and their families in Helena, Montana, during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Using census records, tax rolls, county legal documents, personal letters, and newspapers, Petrik describes prostitutes, entrepreneurs, reformers suffragists, and middling women who lived in this dynamic commercial town on Montana's frontier."--Jacket.