Who is Cherokee Sal and why is she so unique to the town in "The Luck of Roaring Camp"?

We don't
learn much about Cherokee Sal, though she is unique to the Roaring Camp. She is unique because
she is the only woman living there among more than a hundred men, and, in addition, she has a
babysomething unprecedented in the life of the camp.

Unfortunately, however,
given how central she is, she never gets to speak, and we only get the sparsest outline of her
physical appearance or interior self. All we learn is that she is "coarse" and
"very sinful."

The story is told from the male point of view, and
we have to take the male narrator's word about Sal. When she dies after giving birth, the
narrator states that the town has been cleansed:

Within an
hour she had climbed, as it were, that rugged road that led to the stars, and so passed out of
Roaring Camp, its sin and shame, forever.

This is, to put
it mildly, a highly misogynist view of Cherokee Sal. She, alone, was the
source of sin and shame? Not likely.

However, with Cherokee Sal conveniently
out of the waywe are told she is...