This article presents a contextual analysis of Caroline Kirkland's book, "A New Home, Who'll Follow? Or Glimpses of Western Life," and her views on frontier masculinity. Early in the nineteenth century, the U.S. frontier was associated with male adventurers like James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo and the Davy Crockett of popular almanacs. In the national imagination, the West was closely tied to these lone white males' conquests of enemies such as mountain lions, bears, and Indians. The writing of white women who moved West as settlers brings different perspectives to bear on this region. As Annette Kolodny, Judith Fetterley, and others have argued, the rhetorical competition between male adventure stories and female domestic narratives in defining the meaning of the West is at the heart of Kirkland's first book. Through her many books, articles, and sketches, Kirkland would go on to establish herself as a talented western writer and early realist. Indeed, her primary objective in "A New Home" is to challenge popular representations of the West as a playground for white male adventure. Through detailed description and analysis of everyday events in western households, Kirkland insists on her adopted region's devotion to what, in the doctrine of separate spheres, were considered female values--domesticity, community, and morality.