In 1937, Katherine Spencer Halpern, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago, decided she wanted to take some time off from her studies for a little field work.
The Massachusetts native also wanted to steer clear of New England, where male professors didn't think much of young women interested in getting a bit of dirt under their fingernails.Halpern had heard about a spot on a summer fellowship in anthropology at Chaco Canyon, offered by the University of New Mexico. She decided to try it out. But she also had two friends who were interested as well.
So, in the thick of the Depression, Halpern and her friends offered their services as a team. They got the fellowship, pooled their savings and split the $100 stipend three ways.
Sixty-one years later, the 84-year-old Halpern still remembers: "It was just an eye-opener."
Halpern later taught anthropology at Boston University, Harvard and American University in Washington, D.C. She is one of a large group of young women - among them anthropologists, artists, writers and collectors - who found their way to New Mexico, Utah, Arizona and Colorado during the first half of the 20th century, making major contributions to the study of American Indians and their way of life.
In "Daughters of the Desert," the women helped define how we look at American Indian culture. Yet their contributions in many cases have never earned the renown of their male counterparts.
A handful of the women - Mary Austin, Laura Gilpin, Erna Fergusson - have become household names, synonymous with Southwest Indian culture. But dozens of others, less well-known, cut their teeth working in the Southwest.
"They broke ground for other women to follow in their footsteps," said Santa Fe anthropologist Susan McGreevy, a former director of the Wheelwright Museum.
Most of the women have died, but a few are still around to remember the days when female grad-u-ate students first scoured the caves, hills and ruins of the Southwest in search of clues to ancient cultures.
In late 1800s, anthropology in the Southwest was "pretty much a governmental enterprise," said McGreevy. The discipline appealed mainly to a small group of military personnel with an interest in learning a thing or two about the tribes they were relocating.
Then an 1878 report on the ruins of southwestern Colorado promised "rich rewards" for archaeologists and ethnologists who ventured west of the Rio Grande.
The following year, Matilda Coxe Stevenson accompanied her husband to Hopi and Zuni pueblos with the first collecting and research expedition of the Smithsonian Institution's new Bureau of Ethnology.
She worked under the explorer John Wesley Powell, collecting information on women and the family life of the pueblos. Her work was published - under her husband's name.
After her husband died, Stevenson continued working at Zuni and Zia pueblos, concentrating on their religion for more than a decade before her death in 1915.
In 1918, Elsie Clews Parsons, the daughter of a Wall Street broker, lent her considerable resources to bankrolling anthropological research by creating the Southwest Society.
In 1920, Columbia University anthropology professor Franz Boas wrote to a colleague, "I have had a curious experience: All my best graduate students are women."
For the next 50 years, the Southwest became a fertile proving ground for young female anthropologists.
McGreevy said women such as Halpern "did not have a feminist agenda - they were just out there doing what they wanted to do. They went out there and they did very good work."
Still, said Halpern, the women "had to find their way into a men's world," where men were still in charge most of the time.
"We wanted to study anthropology and we wanted to be anthropologists, and so we just went out and did it. Anthropology was just an open enough field that we could," she said.
Many women came to the Southwest for a brief stint - a fellowship or summer of field work - and never came back. Some never left.
Fergusson, a New Mexico native, began taking tourists to see Indian dances in the early 1920s. Soon she was writing about the dances. Her 1931 book, "Dancing Gods," helped make them one of the state's top attractions.
Her tour company became so successful that the Fred Harvey Co. bought it and, in a departure from the usual hired cowboys, asked Fergusson to train "girl guides" to accompany visitors.
Jim Faris, a Santa Fe author of several books on Navajos, said the contribution of the women anthropologists to Indian scholarship has been "substantial," both from scientific and financial perspectives.
Well-heeled women such as Parsons, Mary Cabot Wheelwright, Millicent Rogers, Amelia White and Florence Hawley Ellis founded or helped found the Wheelwright Museum and the School of American Research in Santa Fe, the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos and Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu.
Still, in most anthropology texts, women's contributions are referred to only in passing. Few of the women anthropologists rate more than a casual mention.
"There's very few of them who have ever had the fame that men had," Faris said.