1 After July 1836, the western portion of Michigan Territory was renamed Wisconsin Territory, in preparation for the eastern portion of the territory being admitted to the Union as Michigan State.
2 After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the US had a notional claim to all the land from its original borders, as far west as the Rocky Mountains. In a global geopolitical chess game then playing itself out an entire continent away, Napoleon Bonaparte, anxious that it should not fall into British hands, had “sold” this vast area—530 million acres—to the American government for $15 million, just three cents an acre. What this meant was that the US had bought the “preemptive” right to obtain all these lands for itself, either by conquest or by treaty with the Native inhabitants, to the exclusion of all other colonial powers. It goes without saying that the Indigenous people who lived there were not consulted, and, as some historians have pointed out, the purchase was, at this point, largely “an imperial fiction,” since in reality Native Americans controlled almost all of it, “the largest portion belonging to the Sioux.” See Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America.
3 While many trappers and mountain men married Native American women, the majority of these liaisons, important though they were, were themselves often regarded as transitory arrangements. Many of these men also had white wives and families waiting for them back home.
4 I have used both settler and emigrant to describe these overlanders. Given that neither Oregon nor California were part of the US at this point, the word emigrant—which describes a person who leaves their own country to settle permanently in another land—is technically correct, and this is how they described themselves. The mass movement of these people is thus “an emigration,” and the routes they traversed are known as “emigrant trails.” However, from the Native American perspective, they would more accurately be described as settler-colonists, since the US government, in later years in particular, was actively seeking to replace the Indigenous population with a new society of white settlers. I have used both terms throughout, slightly favoring the word settler.
5 These figures are from Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonour.
6 Figures are from Merrill J. Mattes, Platte River Road Narratives.
7 The term manifest destiny and the idea that God had a special plan for Americans in the West was first posited by a New York journalist, John O’Sullivan.
8 A total of 2,637 personal narratives of overland travel, deposited in more than thirty libraries and archives, of which perhaps a third are by women, are listed in Will Bagley’s Across the Plains, Mountains, and Deserts.
9 Under the Plan of Union of 1801, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church and the Connecticut General Association of Congregational Churches agreed to merge. Later, the plan would also be approved by congressional associations in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.
10 Britain was experiencing a similar evangelical revival at this time. Maria Edgeworth’s The Child’s Companion contains this “arithmetical puzzle”: “If there are six hundred millions of Heathens in the world, how many missionaries are needed to supply one to every twenty thousand?”
11 Parker had not encountered these men himself but had been inspired by an article in the Methodist newspaper The Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald, written by a Methodist named William Walker. While it is possible that a meeting never in fact took place, there was enough truth in the story of the Tribe’s interest in Christianity to cause elation in evangelizing circles, and the article was widely reprinted. “Hear! Hear! Who will respond to the call from beyond the Rocky Mountains,” wrote the Advocate. “All we want is men. Who will go? Who?” See Converting the West by Julie Roy Jeffrey.
12 They also specified that the party should include a teacher, a farmer, and a mechanic.
13 William Gray, a carpenter and cabinetmaker by profession, had been appointed by the board at the last moment as a lay assistant and mechanic to the expedition.
14 These were a nineteen-year-old called Miles Goodyear and another man who is referred to only as Dulin.
15 The couple had been married on February 18 and had left on the first leg of their journey, to Liberty, Missouri, the following day.
16 Among the animals taken by the missionaries were seventeen head of cattle, including four milch cows. This is thought to have been the first herd of cattle ever to be driven over the plains and across the Rocky Mountains to Oregon. Without the fresh milk to sustain her, it is very likely that Eliza Spalding would not have survived the journey. See Drury, Where Wagons Could Go.
17 Black Harris, who may have been of African American descent, was known for his striking appearance. The artist Alfred Jacob Miller, who traveled with the American Fur Company caravan to the Rendezvous the following year when Black Harris was leading the caravan, described him as “wiry of frame, made up of bone and muscle, with a face composed of tan leather and whipcord finished up with a peculiar blue black tint, as if gun powder had been burnt into his face.” See The West of Alfred Jacob Miller.
18 Known until 1836 as Fort William.
19 In 1836, this was at Horse Creek on the Green River, the site of present-day Daniel, Wyoming.
20 They were, in fact, one of only a small handful of non–Native American women ever to witness the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous. Within just four years, it had ceased.
21 Fort Hall had been built just two years earlier by an independent fur trader, Nathaniel Wyeth, as protection against the hostile Blackfeet Tribe, through whose terrain they were now traveling.
22 Later renamed Fort Boise.
23 He was sufficiently convinced to take his own new bride, Mary Dix, over the same overland route just two years later.
24 Fort Vancouver lay at the site of what is now Vancouver, Washington, and should not be confused with Vancouver, Canada.
25 One of the oldest fur-trading companies in the world, the Hudson’s Bay Company had been founded in 1670, during the reign of Charles II.
26 Narcissa Whitman wrote that while “every article for comfort and durability” could be found at Fort Vancouver, “fancy articles are not here.” Less than a decade later the Fort Vancouver account book (1844) listed such luxury articles as “ladies short kid gloves, hooks, eyes, ribbons, ‘best diamond pins,’ ladies round platted Hats, and shawls.” I have often wondered who bought the diamond pins. See John Hussey, “The Women of Fort Vancouver.”
27 The Capendales were a husband-and-wife team: he had been brought out from England to supervise the company’s farm, while his wife was to take charge of the dairy and “to superintend an infant school.” Like the Beavers, they had made the journey by sea, around Cape Horn.
28 Their name is also given variously as Waden, Wadden, and Waddens.
29 The North West Company was later merged with Hudson’s Bay Company.
30 Famously, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were heavily reliant on a Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, to be their interpreter and guide on their 1804 expedition across North America, shortly after the Louisiana Purchase. Sacagawea is well remembered for her part in this venture, but there were hundreds of Native women, their names and achievements now long forgotten, who provided similar vital assistance to fur trappers. Sacagawea was married to a French Canadian mountain man, Toussaint Charbonneau.
31 A majority of Hudson’s Bay Company employees were from the Orkney Islands.
32 When Rae was appointed clerk-in-charge at Fort Stikine, a remote Hudson’s Bay outpost in Russian Alaska, Eloise and their tiny baby accompanied him—the first of several extraordinary journeys she would undertake as his wife.
33 A situation that has remarkably close parallels with the “wives,” or bibis, of British officials of the East India Company during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See my She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India 1600–1900.
34 Marguerite and John McLoughlin took part in just such a remarriage, on November 19, 1842. The church records state that they were “legitimate spouses . . . wishing to renew their consent to marriage.” The ceremony was officiated by the archbishop of Quebec. See T. C. Elliott, “Marguerite Wadin McKay McLoughlin.”
35 Francis Parkman, a young Bostonian who in 1846 undertook “a journey of curiosity and amusement” into American Indian territories west of the Missouri, was so struck by one instance of this that he recorded it in his journal. “The squaw of Henry Chatillon [the French Canadian fur trapper with whom he was traveling], a woman with whom he had been connected for years by the strongest ties which in that country exist between the sexes, was dangerously ill. She and her children were in the village of The Whirlwind, at the distance of a few days’ journey. Henry was anxious to see the woman before she died, and provide for the safety and support of his children, of whom he was extremely fond. To have refused him this would have been gross inhumanity. We abandoned our plans of joining Smoke’s village, and of proceeding with it to the rendezvous, and determined to meet the Whirlwind, and go in his company.” See Francis Parkman, The California and Oregon Trail.
36 Her exquisite black-and-gold Chinese lacquer sewing bureau is today one of the treasures of the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.
37 It was the fact that they taught the children to sing hymns to which he took a particular exception. “Sacred music should only be used on solemn occasions, but it is made here a common entertainment of an evening, without the slightest religious feeling or purpose” (quoted in Whitman and Spalding, Where Wagons Could Go).
38 The furs themselves took up relatively little space in the ship’s holds.
39 A bushel was a measure of dry goods, equal to eight gallons.
40 McLoughlin’s policy of helping American emigrants was controversial at the time, and not everyone at the Hudson’s Bay Company agreed with it, urging him instead to turn the emigrants away when they came to him for help. One of John McLoughlin’s main concerns was that if he did not help them, the incoming Americans would seek to open up their own chain of supplies.
41 Both the explorer Nathaniel Wyeth and the Methodist missionary Jason Lee were to claim that their knowledge of Oregon first came from Kelly’s descriptions.
42 “I heard an old pioneer assign as a reason why he must emigrate from western Illinois the fact that ‘people were settling right under his nose’—and the farm of his neighbor was twelve miles distant, along section lines!” See Verne Bright, “The Folklore and History of the ‘Oregon Fever.’ ”
43 It has been suggested that Mary’s sister, Martha Young, and her family were also part of this company, but I have not been able to confirm this. In his “Reminiscences,” dictated toward the end of his life, Mary’s husband, Joel, declared that as many as forty other settlers had agreed to make the journey that year, but that they were not ready in time. The Youngs had originally intended to go to California, but they changed their mind at Fort Hall and went to Oregon instead.
44 Figures are from Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey.
45 Three of her other children had died, the latest, “my dear little girl Martha,” having passed away just two weeks earlier, on October 30, leaving them with only “one puny boy.”
46 Others included Westport (Kansas City), Liberty, and Council Bluffs (Kanesville).
47 The Santa Fe Trail, the most important overland trade route between the United States and Mexico, predated the emigrant trails by several decades.
48 Some 3,572 in 1860.
49 This remarkable man and woman had both started life as slaves in Tennessee. Hiram Young was so skilled as a carpenter that he had been able to save up enough money to buy both his own freedom and that of his wife, Matilda. The Youngs employed both white and Black men in their business ventures, many of the latter being slaves from the surrounding plantations. By paying their Black workers equal wages to that of their white employees, they made it possible for many of these enslaved people to buy their own freedom, as the Youngs themselves had done. The census of 1860 ranked Hiram Young as one of the wealthiest men in Jackson County, with real estate valued at thirty-six thousand dollars and personal property at twenty-thousand dollars. See Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, Sweet Freedom’s Plains. Also, memorabilia in the Independence Jail Museum.
50 The Missouri Supreme Court had ruled that “in all slaveholding States color raises the presumption of slavery, and until the contrary is shown, a man or woman of color is deemed to be a slave.” See Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, Sweet Freedom’s Plains.
51 Kentucky law prevented Carlotta from staying on in her home state after her manumission.
52 Also known as “devil’s snare,” jimsonweed is a plant species in the nightshade family and highly toxic.
53 The others were Sarah Gilbert White Smith, Myra Fairbanks Eells, and Mary Augusta Dix Gray. The latter’s husband was the William Gray who had attached himself to the Whitman-Spalding expedition of 1836. On witnessing the enthusiastic reception that the missionaries had been given at the Rendezvous of ’36, Gray had determined to return east and bring back his own bride-to-be. The following year, 1837, he left the annual Rendezvous ahead of the fur-company caravan, against all advice to the contrary. Exactly as the mountain men had predicted, Gray was ambushed by Lakota at Ash Hollow, in present-day Nebraska, and narrowly escaped with his life (all four of his Native American companions were killed). Mary Dix was William Gray’s second choice of wife. The first had hastily broken off her engagement at the sight of two bullet holes in her prospective bridegroom’s hat.
54 She adds later that the baby was not killed.
55 Partly due to the hostility that Henry Spalding still evinced for Narcissa, the Spaldings had gone on to build their own separate mission, at Lapwai, a hundred and twenty miles distant, among the Nez Percé.
56 As they did in fact almost destroy her fellow missionary Sarah Gilbert White Smith, who had to be evacuated from the Smiths’ mission at Kamiah in 1842, a broken woman in both health and spirits.
57 Her death profoundly affected all the missionaries. “The death of our babe had a great affect upon all in the mission,” Narcissa would later write. “It softened their hearts toward us, even Mr. S[palding]’s for a season. I never had any difficulty with his wife” (letter of October 10, 1840, quoted in Whitman and Spalding, Where Wagons Could Go).
58 A single man, Cornelius Rogers, had also attached himself to the ’38 expedition, although he was never a full member of the mission. He returned East in 1841. As well as her own child, who was then still living, Narcissa had already adopted two other children: Mary Ann Bridger, the daughter of the famous mountain man Jim Bridger, and Helen Meek, the daughter of another well-known fur trapper Joe Meek and his Nez Percé wife.
59 A tragicomic twist to this unseemly and sometimes positively hostile rivalry between Protestant and Catholic missionaries for control over Native American souls was their use of a visual teaching aid known as a “ladder,” in which various episodes in biblical history—Noah’s ark, Solomon’s temple, the Crucifixion, and so forth—were shown chronologically, in pictures. In the Catholic version, Protestant “heretics” such as Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII were shown on the bottom step of this eschatological ladder, burning in hell. The Protestant missionaries, not to be outdone, made their own version in which the “heretics” had been replaced by the Pope. What the Cayuse made of this is anyone’s guess.
60 Oregon was not officially recognized as a territory—the precursor to statehood—until 1848. Its request for statehood was delayed many times, mostly due to a long-standing debate over whether it should enter the Union as a slave or a free state. When Oregon finally entered the Union in 1859, it was only the southwestern portion of the territory that was included. The rest of Oregon Territory would eventually become present-day Washington State, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming.
61 Oregon country was still disputed territory between the US and Great Britain at this time. The settlers recognized that these “Organic Laws” were provisional and only effective until such a time as the United States should “extent its jurisdiction over us.” The border with Britain was finally settled peacefully, along the forty-ninth parallel, in 1846.
62 Over the years the Whitmans would foster sixteen or more children for periods of up to a year. At the time the Sager orphans arrived in 1844 there were another five children already living with them: alongside Mary Ann Bridger and Helen Meek, Henry and Eliza Spalding’s daughter, also called Eliza, was there so that she could attend Narcissa’s school; in addition to these three little girls, there was a half-Spanish, half–Native American boy whom they had named David Malin, brought to Narcissa half-starved and covered in lice, and a nephew of Marcus Whitman’s, fourteen-year-old Perrin Whitman, who had accompanied his uncle when he returned west in 1843.
63 They all went on to live eventful lives, perhaps none more picaresque than that of the youngest, Henrietta. Having been born on the Oregon Trail, lost her mother and father, and then, three years later, both her brothers and her adoptive parents, she went on to marry twice “and was reported killed at Red Bluff, California, in 1870, when an assailant aiming for her husband, shot her instead.” She was just twenty-six years old. Catherine, Elizabeth, and Matilda Sager, The Whitman Massacre of 1837.
64 At least one of them, the chief Tiloukaikt, was genuinely guilty; the others are thought to have been men who simply volunteered for the good of their Tribe.
65 It exists today. The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation includes the Umatilla and Walla Walla peoples, as well as the Cayuse.
66 Mexico had achieved independence from Spain in 1812.
67 This is the name given to the Tribe by whites; they called themselves the Numa, which means “People.” The Northern Paiute should not be confused with the Southern Paiute, whose language is entirely different.
68 As Sarah’s friend and editor, Mrs. Horace Mann, who helped to prepare her book for publication, wrote in her preface: “In fighting with her literary deficiencies she loses some of the fervid eloquence which her extraordinary colloquial command of the English language enables her to utter, but I am confident that no one would desire that her own original words should be altered.” See Life Among the Piutes.
69 Although this is the term that is used by Sarah Winnemucca, it has been pointed out that the status of “chief” was not one generally in use among the Northern Paiute.
70 It is possible that this was the Biddleston-Bartwell expedition, the very first small emigrant train to travel overland to California in 1841. They were a splinter group from a larger company traveling the Oregon Trail.
71 The word Sioux was a blanket term for a group of related and allied people, including the Lakota; see “A Note on Native American Names.”
72 The Lakota band with which Parkman was traveling
73 It would later become known as the Scott-Applegate Trail. It had been surveyed earlier that year by a group of men led by Levi Scott and including two brothers, Lindsay and Jesse Applegate, who had been hoping to find a safer route to southern Oregon. It was on their return to Fort Hall that they had met with the settlers and persuaded a hundred and fifty of them to divert from the usual route.
74 Sadly, Grandma Keyes did not live long. She died on May 29, just six weeks into the journey, and was buried, like so many others, beside the trail.
75 The Greenwood Cutoff had been forged by none other than Caleb Greenwood in 1844.
76 The Rocky Mountains are collections of geologically distinct chains.
77 Seventeen-year-old Moses Schallenberger and two companions had built this doorless shelter in 1844. They had volunteered to remain at Truckee Lake when winter snows prevented their wagons from crossing the pass. The three were left in charge of half the party’s wagons and goods, while the rest of the party, unencumbered, made it safely over the pass. The three men had endured many similar privations to the Donner-Reed party, but perhaps because all survived, and there were no women and children involved, their story is far less well known.
78 The original no longer exists, but a photostat of it, without the emendations of later editors, is preserved in the Southwest Museum Library in Los Angeles.
79 The treaty, which came into effect on July 4 that year, transferred ownership not only of California but of a vast area comprising all present-day Nevada and Utah, more than two-thirds of Arizona, half of New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming to the US. Under the same treaty, the Rio Grande was fixed as the border for Texas. Texas, also formerly part of Mexico, and having briefly declared itself an independent republic, had entered the Union in 1845.
80 The symptoms of mercury poisoning were sometimes known as “Mad Hatter Syndrome,” after the character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: in Victorian England, mercury was commonly used in the process of hat making. Bluemass, which delivered up to a hundred and twenty times the World Health Organization’s acceptable daily intake of mercury, is thought to have been the cause of Abraham Lincoln’s wild rages and periods of deep depression (Royal Society of Chemistry, March 22, 2010).
81 While nothing is known about the fate of the brother, the little boy was later recovered, safe and sound, traveling only a few days behind her in another emigrant train, having been traded to them for a horse.
82 The Oglala and Brulé (Sicangu) Lakota.
83 She was born in 1797 and lived to be ninety years old.
84 Much as women after the French Revolution would send their white muslin dresses to the Caribbean to be bleached.
85 It was here that the US’s most famous bartender, “Professor” Jerry Thomas, the inventor of the “Blue Blazer” and the “Tom and Jerry,” began his long career. The Blue Blazer was hot whiskey mixed with sugar, poured from one silver-plated tankard into another so that, when lit, a spectacular blue flame fired up along the trajectory.
86 The same establishment that was attended only a few years later by the poet Emily Dickinson, whose grandfather had been one of the founders.
87 Alexander Hill Everett, a writer, diplomat, and editor of the North American Review, whom she met and fell into conversation with when they were both passengers on a stagecoach.
88 He had never finished his medical studies but by some mysterious means had acquired his doctor’s certificate “in absentia.”
89 Her contemporaries certainly thought so. It was widely believed that the editor and short-story writer Bret Harte had stolen some of his best material from her letters—a bitter irony, given that it was also well known that he had always snubbed all her attempts to contribute to his magazines and anthologies. Her work, a contemporary wrote, was “as much ahead of Bret Harte’s stories as champagne is ahead of soap suds.” See Rodman Wilson Paul, “In Search of Dame Shirley.”
90 “Yellow-covered,” meaning sensational or lurid popular novels, so called after the yellow covers with which they were often bound.
91 It is likely that Andrew, who would always be known as Andrew Munroe, was sold on to another family named Munroe.
92 They would formally marry in 1857.
93 Mount Shasta City, in Northern California, paid five dollars for every head brought to its city hall—just one example among many.
94 While modern society still tends to believe that scalping was an American Indian activity, the practice as carried out by whites goes back to colonial times. In California between 1846 and 1873, scalping was an almost exclusively white practice. “Scalping served as a way to inventory killing, collect macabre trophies, and express a profound disdain for victims.” See Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide.
95 As previously noted, a derogatory term for an Indigenous person.
96 In June 2019, the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, issued a formal apology to California’s Native American communities. As historians of the period have long seen it, he called the past atrocities they had suffered a genocide.
97 A grove of redwood trees at the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park is now named in her honor.
98 Before 1848 it is estimated that there were a hundred and fifty thousand Native Americans in California. By 1870, there were fewer than thirty thousand. See Madley.
99 Between 1840 and 1860, Native Americans killed 363 whites on all emigrant trails—just eighteen per year, representing only 4 percent of all deaths on the road. Settlers were twenty times more likely to die from accidents and disease. See Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide.
100 This had been created by the secretary of war, John C. Calhoun, in 1824 as the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
101 In the bitter fight over the succession that followed Smith’s death, Brigham Young was only one among a number of contestants, and the Mormon Church splintered into several denominations. Young became the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, three and a half years after Smith’s death.
102 Young himself may well have agreed with her. When he first learned of Smith’s new theory about plural marriage himself, he is alleged to have said, “It was the first time in my life that I desired the grave.” He in fact had fifty-five wives, twenty-six of whom were “conjugal,” by whom he had a total of fifty-nine children.
103 He had lost it at age seven in an accident in a forge, where he had been apprenticed as an iron roller.
104 The storehouse later burned down, and they never saw any of their possessions again.
105 Clubb had emigrated from Britain to the US in 1853. He was, among other things, an abolitionist and a journalist.
106 These usually took the form of a short skirt with pantaloons underneath, closely modeled on those worn by Turkish women. The temperance advocate and journal editor Amelia Bloomer did not invent the eponymous “bloomers” but was one of their earliest champions.
107 This was made possible by the US government’s Preemption Act of 1841, a forerunner of the better-known Homestead Act of 1862. The Preemption Act allowed for settlers who were living on government-owned land to purchase up to 160 acres for just $1.25 per acre, before the land was offered up for sale to the general public, if certain conditions were met. One of these was that the settlers—effectively “squatters,” as they were quite openly referred to—had to have been residing on the land, and working it, for a minimum of fourteen months. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family were among these, an experience described in Wilder’s most famous book, Little House on the Prairie. Both Kansas and Nebraska territories, which had only been incorporated in 1854, were largely settled (by whites) by this means. This took no account of the fact that these lands were already home to many Indigenous Tribes. The situation was complicated still further by the fact that a large section of “Indian Territory” immediately west of Missouri (present-day states of Kansas and Oklahoma) had been designated by the US government as a kind of “dumping ground” for the continent’s original inhabitants. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson had signed the Indian Removal Act, whereby, in one of the most shameful episodes in US history, as many as a hundred thousand Native people—highly educated, slave-owning Cherokee plantation owners among them—had been forcibly relocated from Georgia and other southern states to small strips of windswept prairie west of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, their fertile lands expropriated to make way for cotton farming. On the forced marches, known today as the Trail of Tears, many thousands died of starvation, exposure, and disease. Thus, the Colts did not actually “own” their land at all, which was still rightfully, and legally, Osage Tribal land. See Frances W. Kaye, “Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Kansas Indians.”
108 Quanah Parker “was the embodiment of the dynamics of ethnic incorporation . . . his rise to power illustrates the opportunities the multiethnic Comanche society offered to people who were not full-blood Comanches.” See Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire.
109 In 1675, a twenty-pound ransom was paid for Mary Rowlandson, who had been taken captive in Massachusetts. Twenty pounds was the average yearly income for a skilled worker.
110 In fact they were Yavapai, an Apache subgroup. The ethnologist A. L. Kroeber listed them as Yuman Yavapai, sometimes called Mohave-Apache or Yuma-Apache. The term Apache was used throughout the Southwest at this time as a blanket term for any warrior-like Native people.
111 The Mohave would have agreed. In 2005, Olive Oatman’s biographer interviewed a Tribal elder, Llewellyn Barrackman. “They felt sorry for her,” he said. “We have a feeling for people.” See Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo.
112 Fur trappers had “trapped out” most of the area. Their habit of leaving the dead bodies of skinned beaver on the riverbanks was particularly offensive to the Mohave, for whom the beaver was a sacred animal. See Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo.
113 It has been suggested that the reason for the attack was that, like the Pima they had encountered at Maricopa Wells, the Yavapais were starving.
114 Olive describes Espaniole as the village “chief,” but he was most likely a kohota, or festival leader, responsible for overseeing celebrations. See A. L. Kroeber, “Olive Oatman’s Return.”
115 Olive gives two separate dates for the death of Mary Ann. In Stratton’s version, she gives it as 1853; in her interview with Captain Burke, she gave it as 1855.
116 This land was not incorporated into the US until December 30, 1853. Under the Gadsden Purchase, a 30,000-square-mile block of land south of the Gila River, comprising what is now southern Arizona and the southwestern part of New Mexico, was acquired from Mexico because the US wanted to build a southern transcontinental railroad, the Southern Pacific Railroad, which it did between 1881 and 1883.
117 American Indians were nothing if not sartorially inventive. In the same year, many hundreds of miles north, an Oglala winter count for 1854‒55 records that a Pawnee warrior had been killed wearing a suit of steel armor, probably a relic of a Spanish conquistador. See Waggoner, Witness, appendix 5.
118 Olive was also known as Aliutman, an elision of “Olive” and “Oatman.”
119 For a more detailed discussion of Olive Oatman’s literary afterlife, see Margot Mifflin’s excellent The Blue Tattoo.
120 An Army officer, Edward Tuttle, who knew Sarah Bowman well in the 1860s, identified her. See J. F. Elliott, “The Great Western: Sarah Bowman, Mother and Mistress to the U.S. Army.”
121 General Zachary Taylor.
122 The teller of this tale would add that this was “a story the boys tell, I don’t know whether it’s true or not,” but clearly the Western was the kind of woman to whom stories stuck.
123 Around six thousand settlers made their way west during this time. See Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey.
124 Local legend has it that the riders rode their horses directly into the hotel building to collect their satchels full of mail. Altogether the riders are estimated to have carried 30,835 letters, at a cost of five dollars per half ounce.
125 Julesburg had formerly been an important overland station on the Oregon Trail, but in 1864 it had been attacked and burned to the ground by a war party led by Chief Spotted Tail, in revenge for the killing of a large number of peaceful Cheyenne at Sand Creek. Hundreds of volunteer soldiers led by Colonel John Chivington had razed the sleeping village to the ground, killing and brutally mutilating 150 people, most of them women, children, and the elderly. One pregnant woman had her stomach ripped open, and even the fetus had been scalped. Most of the dead were hideously dismembered. The soldiers had kept not only the scalps of their victims but also their body parts—women’s breasts, hearts, fingers, noses, and even their genitals—and used them as decoration on their hats and saddles. It was an act of senseless barbarism that would not only spark short-term reprisals such as the attack on Julesburg but also radicalize a generation of outraged Cheyenne and their Lakota allies. Chivington was never brought to trial.
126 The first “Hell on Wheels” town was near Fort Kearny, in Nebraska Territory. Before completion of the railroad, they also included Julesburg, Cheyenne, Laramie, Green River, and Benton. Curiously, the Central Pacific Railroad, which began laying railway tracks east from Sacramento, does not seem to have attracted the same kind of activities.
127 The author of the diaries, Mrs. Jean Hickok McCormick, claimed to be the daughter of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok. In fact, Calamity Jane, whose real name was Martha Canary, never met Wild Bill. Nor did she ever take part in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, as her “daughter” would claim. It may be true, however, that she once rode horses for the Pony Express and on at least one occasion joined forces with a band of outlaws who pulled off a successful gold heist—stories which, curiously, never made it into her “diary.”
128 The first company to complete the entire overland journey, from Leavenworth, Kansas, to California, was the Pioneer Line. It took thirty days and cost the eye-watering sum of two hundred dollars.
129 The sound is caused by a sonic boom.
130 Fannie Boyd never explains who her companion was, although it seems likely that she may have been the wife of another, unnamed, Army officer.
131 This was Virginia City, Nevada, not to be confused with Virginia City, Montana, at the end of the Bozeman Trail.
132 The wealth created by the silver mines gave rise to an unusual variety of jobs for women in Virginia City. Census figures show that as many as a hundred seamstresses and dressmakers catered for the wives of the newly rich, among whom nothing less than Parisian-style high fashion would do. Further census data shows that as well as traditional occupations for women such as teaching and laundering, women in Virginia City worked as merchants, waitresses, cooks, saloon and restaurant operators, an opium den operator, a bookkeeper, a book folder, a fortune-teller, a peddler, an upholsterer, a hairdresser, a house painter, a dairy operator, and a laborer. While women were almost entirely excluded from mining activities, in 1871 a group of women opened their own mine on B Street. A mine tunnel dug by women was so unusual that the Territorial Enterprise wrote two surprisingly supportive articles about them. “We do not see any reason why women should not engage in mining as well as men,” it wrote. “If they can rock a cradle, they can run a [mining] car; if they can wash and scrub, they can pick and shovel. Although some gentlemen friends of the ladies are attempting to persuade them from continuing work, they are determined, and we are pleased to see it.” Forth Ward School Museum, Virginia City.
133 The same frontier “roughs” who panned for gold, herded cattle, and made up the vigilante groups could become almost pitifully starstruck when faced with one of their stage darlings. The arrival of the beautiful Jewish actress Adah Isaacs Menken in Virginia City in 1863 was greeted with almost hysterical fervor. Menken was one of the superstars of her day. Her melodramatic performances included Mazeppa, or The Wild Horse of Tartary, adapted from a poem by Lord Byron. This involved a display of horsemanship in which she rode onto the stage on a horse before galloping up a runway, enclosed on either side with cardboard cutouts of craggy mountains. Opinions varied as to her equestrian skill—which since she had to be strapped onto the horse backward, and in a semirecumbent position, was perhaps not very great—but this did not matter so much as the thrilling fact that she was (for the times) practically naked. Menken’s stage attire varied according to each of her particular acts. They included “The French Spy” and “Pirates of the Savanna,” but many were of the “captive eastern slave” variety and were clearly designed to show off her legs. One particularly notorious “costume,” and one in which she was frequently photographed, consisted of nothing more than tightly fitting underwear—in itself a sensational piece of performance art. For weeks before her arrival, posters in which Menken’s half-naked body was draped dramatically over the back of a rearing black stallion adorned the walls of every saloon bar and gambling den.
134 As any backpacker will know, it is a phenomenon alive and well in far-flung places even today.
135 It is a measure of the phenomenal speed with which the railroad was built that when the Boyds left Camp Halleck a year later, the tracks had been laid to within twelve miles of the place. The couple were able to travel by train (albeit a construction train) all the way back to San Francisco, although the freight car was so uncomfortable, and became so packed with railroad employees, that the atmosphere “soon became intolerable,” Fannie wrote. “The roadbed was so new and the jolting so alarming, I concluded that a stage ride would have been preferable, as we could at least have seen what was before us. . . . I felt almost glad to have taken what had become so completely a memory of the past—a stage-ride over those grand old mountains.”
136 Certain kinds of wild herbs, particularly if eaten by the cows in the early spring, had this effect: it also affected the taste of milk and even meat. In Texas, especially, Fannie noted, “the flavor was abominable.”
137 A vast sum for the Boyds: as a lieutenant, Orsemus’s monthly pay was $120, which went down to half that amount when they were either traveling or on leave. The expenses they incurred when traveling from post to post on half pay, which officers paid from their own pockets, was a perpetual source of grievance.
138 Elizabeth’s brother-in-law.
139 She is referring to the Novaya Zemlya (also known as Nova Zembla) archipelago, in the Arctic.
140 At Fort Bridger, Wyoming, a bill, dated May 27, 1865, from the Saint Louis wholesaler S. H. Bailey, “Manufacturer of Best Quality, Steam Refined candy,” gives an idea of the astonishing range of sweets that could be bought at the sutler stores. Items on the bill include ten boxes each of Rock Candy, Small Stick Candy, Fancy Candy, and Maple Sugar Candy; forty boxes of French Kisses; forty boxes of Mint, Victoria, Grape, and Frosted Drops; forty boxes of Hearts, Stars, Rings, and Sugar Almonds; twenty boxes of Rose Almonds and Arabian Drops; thirty boxes of Lemon, Strawberry, and Vanilla Drops; and twenty boxes of Jenny Lind and Pineapple Drops. S. H. Bailey was also a purveyor of “Motto Verses, Fireworks, Fire Crackers and Torpedoes of every description, always on hand” (Fort Bridger Museum, Wyoming).
141 Sutler’s stores were far less likely to be dissipated places if a woman had a hand in the running of them. The sutler’s store at Fort Bridger, Wyoming, was run by Mary E. Carter and her husband William Alexander Carter, who together amassed a fortune. The couple opened the store in 1857 and later diversified into lumber, mining, livestock, and politics. After her husband’s death in 1881, Mary continued to run the family store on her own, and with equal success, until the fort was abandoned in 1890.
142 From being a landmass the size of half a continent at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the US terrain designated Indian Territory—still indicated on some contemporary maps as “Unorganized Territory”—had been shrunk to a mere fraction of that size. By 1868 it had been reduced to the area known today as Oklahoma.
143 One of these women had become pregnant by her captors. Elizabeth Custer noted that two years after her rescue, she had been spotted on a ranch, together with “her little Indian boy.” Her white husband, despite the fact that she was thought to have married him after her rescue, now “often recalled her year of captivity with bitterness, and was disposed to upbraid her, as if she had been in the least responsible for the smallest of her misfortunes” (Elizabeth Custer, Following the Guidon).
144 Some historians believe that Yellow Swallow was in fact the child of Custer’s brother, Thomas Custer. George Armstrong Custer, the theory goes, had contracted gonorrhea at West Point and was infertile. He and Elizabeth had no children.
145 California’s early political leadership included some men of African American ancestry—a legacy of the greater racial mix that had existed when California was still part of Mexico. See Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier.
146 Her plot of land was on a block between Spring Street and Fort Street (later Broadway), an area then slightly out of town, and “interspersed with vineyards, groves and vegetable gardens.” See Dolores Hayden, “Biddy Mason’s Los Angeles.”
147 The census of 1860 gives her birthplace as Mississippi. This is contradicted by the 1870 and 1880 versions, both of which give her birthplace as Georgia, as does her obituary in the Los Angeles Times. See Dolores Hayden, “Biddy Mason’s Los Angeles.”
148 The Mormons had outlined their prospective state, which they called Deseret, which was to include large portions of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern California. See Dolores Hayden, Seven American Utopias.
149 Their intention was to make San Bernardino a way station for Mormons traveling the sea route via either Cape Horn or Panama to San Pedro and then making the overland trek, west to east, to Salt Lake City.
150 If Biddy Mason’s case had come to trial just a year later, she would have lost her case. In 1857, in the now-notorious Dred Scott decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that a slave was not a person, but property, and that a slave’s residence in free territory, or in a free state, did not make that slave free.
151 These were part of a massive exodus of between ten and thirteen million people who emigrated from China at this time.
152 The first voyage by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s China line was in 1867.
153 Census takers in 1870, instructed for the first time to describe as accurately as possible the occupations of all inhabitants, identified approximately 72 percent of the Chinese female population as prostitutes. (The historian Benson Tong [Unsubmissive Women, p. 97] believes it was closer to 63 percent.) The Chinese population as a whole had more than tripled in the years between 1860 and 1870, boom times for the vice industry. A Chinese official, visiting California in 1876, estimated that of the six thousand Chinese women he believed were living in the US, between 80 and 90 percent were involved in the sex trade.
154 People v. Hall, 1854. See Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women.
155 In an admirable feat of literary detective work, author Ruthanne Lum McCunn has traced Polly Bemis’s signature to a legal document of 1896. The Chinese characters (which may not have been written by her) translate as Gung Heung, meaning “a woman provided for public enjoyment.” See Ruthanne Lum McCunn, “Reclaiming Polly Bemis.”
156 Much of this settlement was on land that had been given to the railway companies as part of a government subsidy and was then sold on.
157 As Senator William Stewart of Nevada would write in a Congressional report in 1869: “[Native Americans] can only be permanently conquered by railroads. . . . The railroads will settle the country as they progress. The water stations and freight stations built on the lines immediately become the germs of towns and centers of military operations. Farms follow the roads and a column-front of self-sustaining settlements moves slowly but surely toward the Rocky Mountains. . . . As a thorough and final solution of the Indian Question, by taking the buffalo range out from under the savage, and putting a vast stock and grain farm in its place, the railroads to the Pacific surely are a military necessity. As avenues of sudden approach to Indians on the war-path, and of cheap and quick movement of supplies to troops, they are surely a military necessity.” See Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America.
158 African American troops of the Ninth and Nineteenth Cavalries.
159 In the southern part of present-day Oklahoma.
160 As Josephine Waggoner would describe them, these were the “western Indians,” who still repelled all outsiders from their world, and “who would not take issues or rations from the government.”
161 Itˇhatéwiŋ was a relatively mature woman of about thirty when she married Charles McCarthy, who was her third husband. Her first was a Hunkpapa warrior, the second a man named Ben Arnold.
162 Josephine Waggoner’s daughter believed that Itˇhatéwiŋ gave most of her money to a Catholic priest at Bismarck for safekeeping but that it was never returned.
163 Josephine had a half-sister, Marcella, from her mother’s previous marriage.
164 The Yellowstone Expedition of 1873 amounted to a small army. It included 79 officers, 1,451 men, 353 civilian engineers, 27 Indian scouts, 275 wagons and ambulances, and more than 2,000 horses and mules. Although the Lakota were a formidable fighting force, part of the reason the expedition had retreated was because that same year the financiers of the Northern Pacific, Jay Cooke and Company, had defaulted on its loans, causing a financial crisis. “Fifty-eight railroads went bankrupt, and half of the nation’s iron foundries failed . . . the Northern Pacific Railroad lay dead on the Missouri near Bismarck, its untouched, pointless rails covered in grass.” See Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America.
165 The Lakota would try for decades to receive compensation for their stolen horses. “Pony claims” from Standing Rock, among other agencies, lasted until 1944. See Emily Levine’s notes in Witness.
166 In 1875, the largest swarm of grasshoppers in recorded human history, comprising an estimated three and a half trillion insects, ravaged the Great Plains. It was 110 miles wide, 1,800 miles long and a quarter to half a mile deep. In one of the most dramatic scenes in On the Banks of Plum Creek, Laura Ingalls Wilder describes how it ravaged her family’s wheat crop.