Description: Mary Bennett Love had a physicality exceeded only by her personality. Six feet tall and over 300 pounds, Love was anything but shackled by the mores of her day. In the 1840s, she moved west from Arkansas via the Oregon Trail. A few years later, she separated from her husband and took her six minor children to Santa Clara, where she acquired a Me...
Brief description: David J. Langum, Sr. is Research Professor of Law at Samford University's Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama. He has written eight books in the field of legal history and biography, with a concentration in western America.
Review Quotes: Early California's socio-legal history has been told in general terms, but here we have an individual story of Mary Bennett Love, a working class nineteenth-century woman, battling to protect her property. This is good stuff, and readers interested in early California or frontier history, women's history, or legal history deserve to read about Mary Bennett Love's amazing life.
--Mark R. Ellis, author of Law and Order in Buffalo Bill's Country: Legal Culture and Community in Lincoln County, Nebraska, 1868-1910
--Lawrence Friedman, Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law, Stanford University