Mary Roberts Rinehart as Outdoorswoman

When she was in her mid-thirties, the famous author Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) experienced a radical break in her domestic life.   She discovered the American West.  She made the contact through a former Pittsburgh friend, Howard Eaton, who had started ranches in various spots in the West. From 1915 onward, she led a bifurcated life.  During most of the year, she was a busy author, wife, and mother in her luxurious houses first outside Pittsburgh and then in Washington DC.  But in the summer she went to Wyoming to live on one of Eaton’s ranches and take long horse packing trips through the mountains.  The picture above shows her in her mid-forties, proudly posing in her Western gear. 

She kept this up for decades, documenting her adventures in popular booklets such as Tenting Tonight.  It was a somewhat luxurious form of camping, including a horse train, cooks, guides, and trunks of clothing.  Nonetheless, she slept in tents on the ground and took dangerous adventures, like a four day trip shooting the rapids on the Flathead River.

She even became an advocate for the Blackfeet Indian Tribe. Above you see her in a more common outfit, working for their interests in Washington DC.

One wonders what she would have been like if she had started her life in Wyoming, instead of in Pittsburgh.  In women’s magazines, she presented herself as a conservative, suspicious of many of the changes for women in the 1920s.  But in the summer, she lived for adventure–and dressed for it too.