Caroline Lockhart

Caroline Lockhart (1871–1962) started as a newspaper reporter in Boston and Philadelphia, working the stunt-girl beat Nellie Bly had made famous: she dove into Boston Harbor in a diver's suit and jumped from a fourth-story window to test a fire net, all for copy. She moved to Cody, Wyoming, in 1904 and stayed for the rest of her life. Her fiction began with Me-Smith in 1911, which critics measured against Owen Wister's The Virginian, and she became one of the bestselling Western novelists of the 1910s and 1920s. She also helped found the Cody Stampede rodeo and served as its first president, owned the Cody Enterprise, and ran a ranch in the Montana Dryhead country until she sold it in 1950, at seventy-nine.