In 1846, Sarah Bowman joined Zachary Taylor's forces as a laundress and went with them into Mexico. Standing almost six feet tall, the troops dubbed her The Great Western. She became a familiar figure, riding through the smoke and gunfire of battle to retrieve the wounded and care for them.
"Sarah Bowman, a frontier character of much color and notoriety, is as appealing in fiction as she must have been in life." Larry McMurtry