The story of the pioneering women who worked as waitresses at Fred Harvey's restaurants along the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway from the 1880s through the 1950s. At the time when there were "no ladies west of Albuquerque," these young women, between the ages of eighteen and thirty, left comfortable homes in the Est to work in what was then the Wild West. They came as waitresses, but when their contracts were up many stayed and settled, building new lives in the struggling cattle and mining communities. They, along with other Harvey employees or railroadmen, became the founding mothers and fathers of the West -- Book jacket.