Harvey Girls

They’ve been dismissed as “just waitresses,” suggesting they weren’t at all important in the history of the Old West. But that ignores what the Harvey Girls meant to the settlement of this new frontier. “The Harvey Girls were just waitresses. Their counterparts were just cowboys; just miners with nothing to call their own but a mule and a pick; just trappers without families or homes,” writes Lesley Poling-Kempes, author of The Harvey Girls. Most know of these women only because