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 OHQ vol. 113, no. 2 one statistical example, Boag points out that the Idaho Daily Statesman carried “no fewer than forty stories related to cross-dressing” between 1890 and 1908, but that works out to only forty stories in approximately 6,515 days, or little more than two stories per year (p. 205). Also, when the author utilizes the “Daughters of Calamity Jane” as a chapter subtitle he is confusing because Calamity’s cross-dressing differed markedly from that of the female-to-male persons discussed in that chapter. In addition, the author probably has not read Frederick Jackson Turner’s first book, The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin (1891), or he would have avoided asserting that Turner saw Indians as only a barrier to white settlement on the frontier.Others might have some difficulty accepting the very close links Boag posits between a closing frontier and shifting attitudes about sexuality because the sociocultural and economic shifts from a frontier to a post-frontier West were so fluid, diverse, and hazy. But in his major emphases Boag is on very sound ground.Western historians have paid little attention to cross-dressers.Early scholars in thrall to a mythic Old West attempted to erase or marginalize male-to-female cross-dressers or to explain away female-to-male transgressive sexual or gender identities. Boag does much to bring these people and their stories onto the stage of a more inclusive western history. He also urges historians to avoid storytellers’ earlier and mistaken tendency to establish “perfectly logical reason[s]”for cross-dressing that usually overlooked the “ethereal realm of emotions, feelings, and perhaps identity” (p. 143). Too often, Boag continues, a “progress narrative”of western history based on western myths and a distaste for transgressive sexual and gender behavior drove writers to distort the lives and meanings of cross-dressers. Overall, then, Peter Boag has contributed much to a new, enlarged understanding of sexuality in the American West at the end of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth. He has uncovered large amounts of new information,provided thought-provoking and contextual interpretations of these crossdressing stories, and done so in a pleasingly written narrative. Clearly, for those interested in cross-dressing and its sociocultural significances , Boag’s new work is a major source of facts, interesting lives, and thought-provoking conclusions. Richard W. Etulain University of New Mexico, Emeritus Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West by Nyan Shah University of California Press, Berkeley, 2011. Illustrations , maps, notes, bibliography, index. 361 pages. $26.95 paper. One measure of a capable author is the ability to provide a work that can be read on multiple levels.In this respect,Nyan Shah delivers in his newest book, Stranger Intimacy. For anyone looking to understand a piece of western history largely unfamiliar,Shah’s work — focused on the early 1900s migration of men from India to the North America West —uncovers and assembles much that is previously unknown, and justly warrants one reviewer’s description of his “virtuoso research” (back jacket). The pointed analytic of his investigation, however, is the dynamic of race and sexual and domestic intimacy in the socio-political making of the West. As Shah states in the introduction, his goal is to reassess“the contradictory demands, meanings,and opportunities of transience and settlement that fueled capitalist expansion, aggravated rule-of-law governance,and goaded the fortunes of diverse and democratic societies ” (p. 1–2). Given that, as the author notes, a full 80 percent of theWest’s population growth  Reviews during the first thirty years of the 1900s was comprised of transient, male laborers from around the world, this goal is far from idle curiosity. Shah works to unravel the yawning disconnect between the United States’ and Canada’s dominant political vision and narrative of white family settlement from the reality of the international mix of migrant,and largely male, workers whose labor fueled western economic expansion and whose associations often threatened the two republics’social pact. This sea of humanity converging on the West conjured, among other things, a myriad of interpersonal possibilities and realities. While...

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