“I THOUGHT WHERE HE COULD GO I COULD GO”
In 1841, when Nancy Kelsey was seventeen years old, she became the first woman to travel to California on a wagon train, in a party that included her husband, their infant daughter, and about thirty other men. They left Missouri with great expectations and a stunning lack of preparation. The group had no guides or maps or particularly clear idea about how one got to California. It was a wonder they made it to Wyoming before they got lost, but once they did, they wandered around so long they were forced to abandon their wagons and try to outrun the winter weather. Nancy celebrated her eighteenth birthday on the summit of the Sierra Nevadas, worrying about snow and Indians. Several of the pack animals fell over a cliff, and when the last of the cattle had been killed, the party continued on without any food. “My husband came very near dying with the cramps and it was suggested to leave him but I said I would never do that,” Nancy told a reporter in her old age. Amazingly, she and the others all made it to California. Of Nancy, a fellow emigrant said, “She bore the fatigues of the journey with so much heroism, patience and kindness that there still exists a warmth in every heart for the mother and the child.” Baby Ann, the others noted, was never sick a day during the trip. After the Kelseys arrived in California, Nancy rested only a few months before her husband, who was obviously all pioneer and no settler, decided to try Oregon. She followed him from place to place throughout the West, giving birth to eleven children. Looking back, she remembered the adventures. “I have enjoyed riches and suffered the pangs of poverty,” she said. “I have seen U.S. Grant when he was little known. I have baked bread for General Fremont and talked to Kit Carson. I have run from bear and killed most all other kinds of smaller game.”
Americans had been going west—or dreaming about it—since the early colonial days, with the definition of “west” changing in each era. But it was not until the 1840s that American families began emigrating to the actual West Coast, heading for California or the rich, heavily timbered land of the Pacific Northwest. They studied manuals like The National Wagon Road Guide, which provided detailed but optimistic descriptions of what the trip would entail—the books generally estimated it would take three months, when in real life the trip was at least six. (The Daily Missouri Republican advised readers that the trek west would be “little else than a pleasure excursion.”) The manuals suggested what to pack, what livestock to buy, and how to organize a wagon train. But they said little or nothing about how to cook dinner over a campfire, what to do about diapers for the babies, or how to keep small children occupied for ten hours a day in a crowded, jolting wagon.
The idea of going west almost always seemed to come from husbands, and although wives were consulted, not many had actual veto power. In their diaries and letters, when pioneer women describe arguments with their spouses about migration, they were generally fighting to be included on a trip the man was planning to make solo. “I would not be left behind,” wrote Luzena Wilson. “I thought where he could go I could go, and where I went I could take my two little toddling babies…. I little realized then the task I had undertaken.” Wilson wound up gaining and losing several small fortunes in the West, where her skills as a cook turned out to be much more valuable than her husband’s talent as a gold miner.
Although most of the women who went west came from farm families, they were not necessarily used to lives of great hardship. Poor people rarely migrated. Buying and outfitting a wagon cost between $600 and $1,000, at a time when a factory worker might make $300 a year, so pioneer wives were generally middle class. They certainly thought of themselves as ladies. Most rode sidesaddle during the trip, with one leg hooked over the pommel and their long skirts covering their legs. It might have been more decorous, but it was difficult to keep one’s balance. (Bethenia Owens-Adair, one of the early female doctors in the West, expanded the crusade for simpler dress into a call for simpler saddles. She urged women to ride as men did, not with “the right limb twisted around a horn and the left foot in a stirrup 12 or 15 inches above where it ought to be.”) Pioneer women urged their daughters to wear sunbonnets to protect their skin, and some prescribed gloves to keep the hands smooth and soft. If they did a great many things that would normally be considered unladylike, there is no evidence they were trying to break out of the Victorian female mold. They saw chores like pushing wagons out of the mire, driving teams of oxen, pitching tents, and even handling guns as temporary emergencies.
As usual, the emergency only worked one way. The wives and daughters took on new, masculine duties, but the husbands and sons saw no necessity to repay the favor. “Some women have very little help about the camp, being obliged to get the wood and water (as far as possible) make camp fires, unpack at night and pack up in the morning and…have the milking to do, if they are fortunate enough to have cows,” wrote Helen Carpenter, who was grateful that her husband was among the minority who pitched in. Many women were pregnant, but they still yoked loaded wagons and coped with morning sickness during the jostling ride. They crossed raging rivers on rafts and helped drag their children up the sides of mountains. One pioneer recounted assisting in a birth during a thunderstorm when the pregnant woman was placed on two chairs in the leaky wagon, with “the nurses wading around” to assist in her delivery.
The wagons stopped only at nightfall and started rolling again at dawn, and women learned how to do their domestic chores on the move. Some could roll a piecrust on the wagon seat while driving a team of oxen. But there weren’t many chances to do laundry, and families went for a month or longer between clean clothes. Diapers were a particular problem, and many women wound up scraping and drying the used diapers and putting them back on the baby. One wrote that she washed the diapers out every night and made her husband hold them over the campfire until they dried. Nobody discussed menstruation, but if the women relied on rags, keeping them laundered must have been extremely difficult. Perhaps some of them followed the Indian custom of using grass or moss.
As the trains moved into the plains, where there were few trees and no firewood, the only fuel for the campfires was buffalo chips—the dried dung left behind by the herds, which the more playful pioneers referred to as “meadow muffins.” Except for the smell, the chips made relatively good fires. But some wives never got used to the idea of cooking over dried manure and worried that the smoke was contaminating the food. Others had trouble learning how to make meals over an open fire. But most adapted. James Clyman wrote that he had watched a woman cooking next to a wagon on a rainy night in 1844: “After having kneaded her dough she watched and nursed the fire and held an umbrella over the fire and her skillet with the greatest composure for near 2 hours and baked bread enough to give us a very plentiful supper.”
The rigors of the trail convinced at least a few women to adopt the bloomer uniform. But most stuck to the traditional long skirts and aprons, even though they were always in danger of catching their clothes on fire during the dinner preparation. (One migrant near the end of her trip described her frequently seared skirt as “a piece of wide fringe hanging from belt to hem.”) Finding a private place to answer the call of nature was a continuous problem. On the plains, where there was no brush to crouch behind, women sometimes stood in a circle, their skirts fanned out to shield the person in the middle. Frances Grummond was traveling with an army wagon train through hostile Sioux country when she went off to find a concealed place to relieve herself. When she came back, the column had gone on without her. “In my haste to reach the road or trail I had the dreadful misfortune to run into a cactus clump,” she recalled. “My cloth slippers were instantly punctured with innumerable needles. There was no time to stop even for an initial attempt to extricate them, as fear of some unseen enemy possessed my mind as cactus needles possessed my feet.” She ran nearly a mile in that crippled state before she caught up with the column.
“WE SAW LONG BRAIDS OF GOLDEN HAIR”
The wagon trains left in the spring, so they could get across the Sierras before snow fell. The early part of the trip was often marked by drenching thunderstorms, with winds that tore through the canvas and rain that soaked the wagon interiors. In their diaries, women complained constantly that they had no time to dry out the bedding. Then the wet springs gave way to hot, dry summers. “Very dusty roads,” reported Elizabeth Dixon Smith. “You in the states know nothing about dust. It will fly so that you can hardly see the horns of your [oxen]. It often seems the cattle must die for want of breath, and then in our wagon such a spectacle—beds, clothes, victuals and children all completely covered.” When autumn arrived, the trains were generally headed toward the mountains, where they were vulnerable to cold and snow. “I carry my babe and lead or rather carry another through snow and mud and water almost to my knees,” said Smith. Two days later she wrote: “I froze or chilled my feet so that I cannot wear a shoe so I have to go round in the cold water barefooted.”
As the trail got tougher and the animals got weaker, many families lightened their load and got rid of everything other than the most crucial possessions, leaving future pioneers to pass by their abandoned furniture and precious keepsakes. “Boxes and trunks of clothing were thrown out, chests of costly medicine…cooking utensils, cooking stoves, vessels of every description…table ware of every description, and in fact you can name nothing that was not lost on this road,” wrote one woman. To relieve the animals, people got out of the wagons and walked. Toddlers invariably wandered off and headed straight into a patch of cactus. “Days passed before all could be picked out of the skin,” wrote one mother. Inevitably, women wound up carrying the smaller children. Juliette Brier walked 100 miles through the sand and rocks when her wagon train was lost in Death Valley. She carried one child on her back and another in her arms, while she led the third by a hand. Mrs. Samuel Young, who had just given birth, climbed the cliffs of the Sierra Nevadas with her newborn baby in her arms.
The possibility of sudden death was omnipresent. Cholera struck wagon trains that left Missouri in 1849 and swiftly killed 5,000 people. Children fell into campfires, or under the wheels of the wagons; men drowned in the rivers. Travelers who were alive and laughing one moment were dead the next, from a horse’s kick or a rattlesnake’s bite. When the wagon train stopped for the night at an established campsite, the pioneers often saw the remains of someone who had died from disease or accident on an earlier train. “If there were any graves near camp we would visit them and read the inscriptions,” said Martha Gay Masterson, who traveled west as a child. “Sometimes we would see where wolves had dug into the graves after the dead bodies, and we saw long braids of golden hair telling of some young girl’s burying place.” Eventually, the children became used to the skeletons. They wrote verses on the skulls and left them behind for other youngsters to read and add a line or two.
The trains also passed stranded families who had come to desperate straits, many because of the sudden loss of a father. One pioneer remembered seeing “an open bleak prairie, the cold wind howling overhead…a new-made grave, a woman and three children sitting near by, a girl of 14 summers walking round and round in a circle, wringing her hands and calling upon her dead parent.” Janette Riker was only a young girl when she headed for Oregon with her father and two brothers in 1849. Late in September they camped in a valley in Montana, and the men went out to hunt. They never returned. While she waited, Janette built a small shelter, moved the wagon stove in with all the provisions and blankets, and hunkered down. She killed the fattest ox from her family’s herd, salted down the meat, and lived alone through the winter, amid howling wolves and mountain lions. She was discovered in April by Indians who were so impressed by her story that they took her to a fort in Washington. She never found out what happened to her family.
“HE WAS IN GREAT HASTE TO MARRY
TO SAVE A HALF SECTION OF LAND”
Once they reached the West, the early female pioneers enjoyed all the advantages that come with being scarce. “Even I have had men come forty miles over the mountains just to look at me, and I never was called a handsome woman, in my best days, even by my most ardent admirers,” said Luzena Wilson. Irwin, Colorado, had only one respectable unmarried woman in a town that was filled with ambitious young men. A mining engineer noted in his diary that forty men were paying court to the eligible female, the sister of Mrs. Reed, the camp doctor’s wife. The Reeds set up a system, limiting the parlor to six callers at a time and the callers to a maximum of “4 minutes on sofa with girl.”
Although the gender balance evened out fairly quickly, single women who were willing to get married remained in great demand. The wife of an army officer seeking a nurse for her children deliberately picked out a very homely candidate. But, she reported in despair, the girl “had not been in the fort three days before the man who laid our carpets proposed to her.” The matches made under such circumstances tended to be more economic than romantic bargains. Martha Gay Masterson recalled that as soon as her family set up camp in Oregon, a well-dressed man galloped up and begged her father to present him to the oldest daughter. “He was in great haste to marry to save a half section of land, as the law stated that all married men were entitled to a certain amount of land if married before a set date,” she said. Although Martha’s father angrily announced that he had “no daughter to barter for land,” the man found a willing girl before the deadline.
Despite the rough manners of the early western men, a woman with any claim to respectability could expect to be treated with great deference, if not outright awe. (When Elizabeth Gunn went to church with her children in Sonora, the men sitting along the street stood up and saluted as she passed by.) But the women desperately missed female friendships, and having so many single men in one place inevitably led to the kind of behavior that they found unpleasant. They complained in their letters about widespread drinking, gambling, swearing, and violence. “In the short space of 24 days,” wrote Louise Clappe, the wife of a mining camp doctor, to her sister, “we have had murders, fearful accidents, bloody deaths, a mob, whippings, a hanging, an attempted suicide and a fatal duel.”
Before they went west, most pioneer women had lived in houses that had heat, soft beds, and other comforts. But in the crowded cities and gold mining camps of California, they slept in leaky tents, sat on crates, and cooked over campfires. They slogged through mud and dust to get to Sunday services and gave birth to their children alone. Nevertheless, a lot of them seemed to enjoy themselves. “I like this wild and barbarous life,” wrote Louise Clappe, who on another occasion had told her sister, “everybody ought to go to the mines, just to see how little it takes to make people comfortable in the world.”
“MORE ACTIVE AND INDUSTRIOUS THAN THE MEN”
The women in the far West before the settlers arrived included both Native Americans and the Mexicans, who had been living in the area for centuries. White Americans generally had a low opinion of Mexicans—as they did about any people they were trying to displace. Nonetheless, they were impressed by the warmth of Mexican families. “Their manners toward one and another is engaging and that of the children and the parents most affectionate,” wrote Frederick Olmstead. But Americans also believed that the men were indolent and the women made to do all the work. “Riding on horseback and lounging lazily is the gamut of their days and the women bear all the responsibility of the house,” wrote another observer in 1828. “These beautiful creatures are without a doubt more active and industrious than the men.”
Ironically, the Mexicans said the same thing about the Indians. Indian women, wrote one Mexican missionary in 1801, “are slaves to the men, obliged to maintain them with the sweat of their brow.” (Visitors to frontier towns said the same thing about white men, who often went off hunting or drinking while the women stayed home and worked.) Once the Americans became a growing economic presence in the West, many wealthy Mexicans wanted their daughters to intermarry and extend the family’s political influence. The children of these marriages tended to adopt the language and manners of Americans. If their skin was light and they were wealthy, they were accepted and thenceforth referred to as “Spanish.” Otherwise, they were still subject to discrimination.
Both the Mexicans and white Americans saw the Indians as enemies or targets for conversion. When Mexican priests built a mission, there was always a dormitory for the unmarried Indian girls, where they were cloistered off under the guard of an elderly Indian matron. “She never let them out of her sight. In the afternoon, after dinner, she locked them up and gave the key to the Priest,” said a woman who had been brought to a mission as a foundling. The girls must have been hot, uncomfortable, and bored, but shutting them away was not totally irrational. Mexican soldiers had no compunctions about raping native women, sometimes lassoing them like cattle and shooting any male Indian who tried to intervene. After the women were raped, they were often considered “contaminated” by their own people, and “every white child born among them for a long period was secretly strangled and buried,” said a Scotsman who had married into an Indian family.
Neither the Mexican nor the American missionaries went to the trouble of trying to look at the world from the Indians’ point of view. One of the first white women to reach Oregon was a missionary, Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, who came out with her doctor husband, Marcus, to work among the Cayuse tribe. The Indians were eager to hear about farming techniques, but they weren’t interested in becoming Christians. The Cayuse women didn’t like the idea of giving up the status that came with farming so that they could emulate white housewives and stay indoors. Narcissa’s opinion of the Indians went downhill rapidly, and she began worrying that her family might “suffer ourselves to sink down to their standards.” The Cayuse, meanwhile, saw the number of white people moving into their territory and realized, far more clearly than the missionaries, what it would mean for their own futures. After an outbreak of measles killed their children while passing over those of the white interlopers, the Cayuse held the mission responsible and killed the Whitmans, along with a dozen others.
“I WENT INTO THE SPORTING LIFE
FOR BUSINESS REASONS”
The Home Missionary, which was published in early San Francisco, estimated that half the women in frontier California were of “the loose element.” That may have been an exaggeration, but the anecdotal evidence suggested that prostitutes were extremely well represented among the white women who first settled in early western cities. The “fair but frail,” as prostitutes were called, often chose their profession with their eyes open. “I went into the sporting life for business reasons and for no other,” said Mattie Silks, a Denver madam. “It was a way in those days for a woman to make money and I made it.” In addition to providing lonely men with company, western prostitutes allegedly made hygienic history by becoming the first American women to shave under their armpits. It was a way of demonstrating to their customers that they were free of lice.
Prostitution could certainly be profitable. A Frenchman named Albert Bernard was shocked to discover his countrywomen charged $16 an evening for simply sitting at a man’s table. “Nearly all these women at home were streetwalkers of the cheapest sort,” he complained. “But out here for only a few minutes, they ask a hundred times as much as they were used to getting in Paris.” Still, prostitutes who made enough money to retire in comfort were probably about as common as miners who struck it rich and managed to hang on to the profits. The women who worked in high-end bordellos were perpetually in debt to the madam, who paid for their clothing, jewelry, and perfume. And few western prostitutes made it to a bordello. Almost every town had a “line”—a row of one-room wooden shacks or cribs, where the whores lived and plied their trade. These women covered the bottom half of their beds with oilcloth, to protect the blanket from men who never bothered to take off their dirty boots. On paydays, the demand was so heavy they sometimes serviced eighty men in a single night. An even lower step was one of the “hog ranches” operating along the trails where muleskinners, stagecoach drivers, and teamsters stopped briefly to take their pleasure. “In my experience I have never seen a lower, more beastly set of people of both sexes,” wrote a soldier who visited one of these establishments.
The most desperate stories involved Chinese women, who were brought to California as virtual slaves. Some were recruited—or simply kidnapped—from the streets of Canton; others were deluded by men who pretended to marry them and promised to take them off to a better life in the West. Some were sold by their parents. Lilac Chen recalled bitterly that she was only six years old when “that worthless father, my own father, imagine…sold me on the ferry boat. Locked me in the cabin while he was negotiating my sale.” Girls who were purchased for $50 in China were resold for $1,000 in San Francisco. In the American brothels, Chinese girls were famous for their cleanliness, shaving their bodies and bathing frequently. Almost all of them, however, contracted venereal diseases from their clients. Some girls were chained to their beds and drugged to keep them from lashing out at their customers. By the time they were twenty years old, most had died, committed suicide, or been murdered by their employers. Toward the end of the century, a twenty-five-year-old missionary named Donaldina Cameron began a crusade against the trade in Chinese women. Working on tips that often came from the prostitutes, she led the police to the cribs and opium dens, sometimes chopping down the doors herself. Many of the girls she rescued found jobs or married, and in 1928 one of them, Yoke Keen, became the first Chinese woman to graduate from Stanford University.
“A SMART WOMAN CAN DO VERY WELL
IN THIS COUNTRY”
Luzena Wilson was cooking biscuits for her family over a campfire in a mining town near Sacramento when a man came up and offered her five dollars for the food. When she stared at him in silence, he doubled the offer and handed her a ten-dollar gold piece. Like many newly arrived pioneer wives, Luzena suddenly realized that the household skills that had been taken for granted in the East might win her a fortune in the West. While her husband, Mason, was off panning for gold, Luzena bought two boards, made them into a table, “and when my husband came back at night he found, mid the weird light of the pine torches, 20 miners eating at my table. Each man as he rose put a dollar in my hand and said I might count on him as a permanent customer.” Within six months Luzena had made $20,000, which the Wilsons invested in a wooden hotel and store. But the city caught fire, and the family lost everything. They moved again and started a new establishment with Mrs. Wilson serving dinner on her plank table under a canvas roof, and the guests retiring for the night to a nearby haystack.
For women, the gold in the California hills came from biscuits and flapjacks. A woman wrote from California to a Boston newspaper, reporting that in less than a year she had made $11,000 baking bread and cakes “in one little iron skillet.” Black women, who had a reputation for being good cooks, went west with the same dreams. One pioneer recalled seeing a crowd of people crossing the desert on foot and noted that one of them was “a negro woman…carrying a cast-iron bake oven on her head, with her provisions and blankets piled on top—all she possessed in the world—bravely pushing on for California.”
With only a few dollars, grubstake, a woman could open a makeshift boardinghouse and earn a comfortable income. It didn’t make sense to invest much in the houses, since the miners moved on at the first news of a gold strike someplace else. Martha Gay Masterson, who followed her husband through gold rush territory, moved twenty times in twenty years, operating hotels, boardinghouses, grocery stores, and dry goods shops along the way. And though the men’s standards were far from demanding, the boardinghouse owner’s work was difficult, and full of unusual challenges. One woman was troubled by animals, which took advantage of the shortage of doors. “Sometimes I am up all night scaring the Hogs and mules out of the House,” she said.
The labor shortage in the early West wiped out the normal rules about what jobs were appropriate for women. They worked as barbers and advertised their services as doctors, lawyers, and real estate agents. Nellie Pooler Chapman took over her husband’s dental practice in Nevada City, California. Although a very small woman, Mrs. Chapman was apparently skilled in the era’s dental arts, which leaned heavily in the direction of extraction. In Wyoming, Martha Maxwell supported herself and her daughter by working as a taxidermist. “A smart woman can do very well in this country,” wrote one young woman to a friend back east. “It is the only country I was ever in where woman received anything like a just compensation for work.”
Women also occasionally took up rough jobs like stagecoach driving, delivering the mail by pony express, and even, in a few cases, riding with outlaw gangs. Charley Parkhurst ran a stagecoach through dangerous territory for years and no one knew Charley was actually a woman until she died in 1879. “He was in his day one of the most dexterous and celebrated of the California drivers…and it was an honor to be striven for to occupy the spare end of the driver’s seat when the fearless Charley Parkhurst held the reins,” wrote the San Francisco Morning Call before Charley’s sex was discovered.
Being a success as an entertainer was easy. An actress didn’t need talent; she just needed to show up. The tolerance for any kind of performance by a female was so great that a girl of ten was said to have played Hamlet. Lotta Crabtree, who began her career as a child performer, made a fortune dancing and singing for the miners. She was the protégée of Lola Montez, who wowed western audiences with her “Spider Dance” in which she impersonated a woman trying to shake off tarantulas that are crawling around her underclothing. (The dance was a Spanish classic, but only Montez’s version featured genuine fake spiders.) Legend has it that the first entertainer to appear in Virginia City, Nevada, was Antoinette Adams, a very tall, not very attractive blond who sang in a cracked voice to resounding cheers and a shower of silver dollars. The cheering covered up Antoinette’s singing, and she left town with two sacks of money.
“STANDING ERECT UPON THE BACK OF
HER UNSADDLED HORSE”
Post–Civil War Americans were fascinated by cowboys and Indians, cattle drives and buffalo hunts. They loved western romances and adventure novels, and Wild West shows that reenacted runaway stagecoaches, Indian war dances, and pony express rides. It was hard to figure out exactly where women fit into the picture, except as victims in constant need of rescue. But gradually cowgirls were introduced to the eastern audiences through nineteenth-century pulp fiction. Hurricane Nell avenged her parents’ death by disguising herself as a man and killing the villains. Wild Edna led a band of outlaws. Dauntless Dell of the Double D ranch amazed Buffalo Bill with her riding and shooting. These girls of the golden West existed mainly in books. But there were a few well-known real-life cowgirls, and the most famous by far were Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane. They were America’s first action heroines, amalgams of femininity and fighting spirit. Not since Hannah Dustan scalped her Indian captors in 1697 had the country been so enamored with the idea of a woman warrior.
Far and away, Annie Oakley most successfully embodied the cowgirl myth, although she did not cross the Mississippi until 1885, when she joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. She was born Phoebe Ann Moses in Ohio in 1860. When she was six years old, her father, a postman, died of pneumonia, leaving a wife and seven small children. Annie taught herself to shoot her father’s rifle and helped support the family by selling game to the Cincinnati hotels. Her birds were said to be particularly desirable because they were always neatly shot in the head. Frank Butler, a famous trick shot, arrived in town and met fifteen-year-old Annie at a shooting club, where she beat him in a match. They were married the next year, and she joined his act. She quickly became a sensation, and Butler, who taught his semi-illiterate wife to read and to speak like a lady, gradually became her manager rather than a costar. (The Butlers had what appeared to be an exceedingly successful marriage and partnership that lasted till their deaths a half century later. But movie versions of Annie’s life always had to wrestle with the phenomenon of a man who put his wife’s career ahead of his own. One had Frank losing his vision, and in the original Annie Get Your Gun the unbeatable Miss Oakley learns how to get a man when she realizes the importance of pretending to let Frank outshoot her.)
Unlike most touring sharpshooters, Annie never had to fake her act. She broke crockery, snuffed out candles, and drilled holes in playing cards with her rifle, standing, running, or riding at a gallop. In 1894 she starred in a ninety-second “movie” for Thomas Edison, and when it was released, crowds lined up in front of New York nickelodeons to watch her shatter glass balls with her shotgun. When she traveled with the Buffalo Bill show she became close to Sitting Bull, the Indian leader of the battle of Little Big Horn who had joined the troupe after his people were defeated and confined to a reservation. Annie was said to be the only person who could cheer him up during his frequent and understandable depressions. After his death, she was billed as “Sitting Bull’s Adopted Daughter,” and if that was hype, their regard for each other had been real.
Annie, with her tiny figure, long skirts, and gentle demeanor, embodied the kind of strong but feminine cowgirl easterners wanted to believe in. To maintain her image, she set firm boundaries. She refused to wear trousers and always rode sidesaddle. Frank told reporters that although Annie was able to hit targets while standing on her head, she considered it “not proper to do” in public. No one was permitted to curse or drink in her presence. She thought the idea of women voting was unladylike. At the turn of the century Oakley took to the stage, in plays that always featured her as the western cowgirl who defeats evil in a genteel manner. In the course of her long career, she made it acceptable for women to shoot, hunt, and even compete with men—as long as they kept both legs on the same side of the saddle.
Calamity Jane, unlike Annie, was a real westerner. She was born Martha Canary, the oldest child of an unsuccessful farmer and a mother who often rode into town to drink with men of questionable background. The family left their farm in Missouri during the Civil War to escape creditors and wound up in Montana, where her father became a gambler and her mother a prostitute, and the little girls were forced to beg for food. By the time she was a teenager, Martha’s parents were dead, and she was homeless and illiterate. She may have turned to prostitution to support herself and her siblings. When the younger children were sent off to live with a Mormon couple in Salt Lake City, Martha struck out on her own, ending up in Piedmont, Wyoming, a small, wild railroad town where she was, at age thirteen, the only unattached female. Although nobody knows precisely what happened to her next, she most likely wound up in a brothel and may have made her way to the Dakotas as an army camp follower. By 1875, she had been dubbed Calamity Jane—“jane” was a western word for any female—and was known as a hard-drinking drifter who hung around with Wild Bill Hickok and his crowd. She seemed most comfortable wandering from one town to another, taking temporary lovers who she always referred to as “husbands” and occasionally running afoul of the law for stealing or getting drunk. Ultimately, she was a sad outsider, a woman who behaved like a man in places where men tended to behave very badly. But she was also well liked by people who could tolerate her antics. (Despite rumors that she and Hickok were married, he was not among her more patient acquaintances.) She was a good friend when she was sober, and a caring woman who reportedly dared to nurse smallpox victims during an outbreak in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1878.
Calamity had a knack for telling tall tales, and she manufactured stories about having scouted for General Custer and ridden for the pony express that may have helped inspire her tabloid legends. But the real creator of the Calamity Jane known to most of America was Ned Wheeler, a writer of dime novels, a popular form of turn-of-the-century literature. Wheeler created a popular series of books featuring the ongoing adventures of Calamity Jane and her platonic friend, the totally fictional Deadwood Dick. The Jane in Wheeler’s novels smoked cigars, wore buckskin trousers, and rode astride, but she never swore or drank. There were hints that she was the daughter of a good family who came west after she was betrayed in love. Above all she was beautiful, graceful, and daring. In one episode, intent on averting a mine explosion, Calamity “dashed madly down through the gulch, standing erect upon the back of her unsaddled horse and the animal running at the top of its speed…. her hair flowing wildly from beneath the brim of her slouch hat, her eyes dancing occasionally with excitement, every now and then her lips giving vent to a ringing whoop, which was creditable imitation…of a full-blown Comanche warrior.”
The real Calamity, who was a great rider but neither beautiful nor particularly graceful, tried unsuccessfully on a few occasions to take advantage of her fame and published an extremely imaginative autobiography. But she was no entertainer, and her attempts to perform in Wild West shows were failures. “Her sorrows seemed to need a good deal of drowning,” Bill Cody told a Montana newspaper after Jane decamped from an exposition in Buffalo. She died in her forties, of the effects of drinking, hard living, and poverty.
“SHE PUT HER ARMS AROUND A TREE
AND HUGGED IT”
Most women who went west intended to be farm wives, not cowgirls. They rarely encountered cattle stampedes or mine explosions, but they did fight prairie fires, grasshopper invasions, tornadoes, and killer droughts. Their journeys west often ended not in California but Kansas or Nebraska, and the fact that the trip was shorter did not necessarily make it less grueling. Julia Lovejoy, traveling with two of her children to meet her minister husband in Kansas, took a riverboat to Kansas City. Her small daughter, Edith, caught the measles on board, and when one of the male passengers offered Julia his cabin, she found it was so filthy that a dead cat was in one of the bureau drawers. After she cleaned the room as best she could, the original owner decided to reclaim it and evicted her and the children. After landing, they wound up staying in a falling-down shack, in the home of a woman who turned out to be a violent alcoholic, and later in a hotel where they had to pass dead bodies in the hallway to get to their room. When the little family finally got on the wagon to Lawrence, the driver, a “drunken rowdy,” took four days to make the trip, instead of the usual two. There were no beds at night, and Edith slept moaning on the dirty floor of an Indian tepee. On the final night, the driver stole all their belongings, and Edith died.
Many settlers made their first homes in dugouts, glorified caves carved from the side of hills. One girl who lived in a dugout wrote that when it rained “we carried the water out with buckets, then waded around in the mud until it dried up. Then to keep us nerved up, sometimes the bull snakes would get in the roof and now and then one would lose his hold and fall down on the bed, and then off on the floor. Mother would grab the hoe and there was something doing and after the fight was over Mr. Bull Snake was dragged outside.” Pioneer diaries mentioned snakes a lot, particularly the ones that fell from the ceiling into people’s beds at night. One woman in Gaines County, Texas, reported killing 186 in one year. Julia Lovejoy found a rattlesnake under her bed, and another in a cupboard above her baby’s cradle. “We have never enjoyed a walk in the garden, or gathering plums, or indeed sleeping in our unfinished cabin in warm weather on account of these intruders,” she wrote.
The soddy, a somewhat superior shelter, was made out of bricks of sod, weighing up to 50 pounds apiece. It took an acre of prairie sod to build a one-room house. Soddies were sturdier than dugouts and many families lived in them for years. Wives may have yearned for a solid wood home, but if the family made money on the farm, the first priority for investment was to buy new equipment for the fields or better stock for the barn. One female pioneer said she and her neighbors grew so accustomed to gravel floors that they asked each other, “Have you done your house raking today?”
The flat, empty landscape of the prairies, the perpetual winds, and the dirt houses were enough to dispirit anyone, but some of the wives loved the challenge. “The wind whistled through the walls in winter and the dust blew in summer, but we papered the walls with newspapers and made rag carpets for the floor and thought we were living well, very enthusiastic over the new country we intended to conquer,” said Lydia Lyons. But not every woman was that cheerful. “When our covered wagon drew up beside the door of the one-room sod house that father had provided, he helped mother down and I remember how her face looked as she gazed about that barren farm, then threw her arms around his neck and gave way to the only fit of weeping I ever remember seeing her indulge in,” one girl recalled. Another woman begged her husband to take her along when he went to a town called Little River to purchase wood: “She hadn’t seen a tree for two years, and when they arrived at Little River she put her arms around a tree and hugged it until she was hysterical.”
Prairie fires were a threat from late summer through autumn, when a spark from lightning or a campfire could set the tall grass blazing. “Many a time my mother stayed up all night, watching the red glare of the prairie fires in more than one direction, in fear and trembling that they might come swooping down on us asleep in our little log cabin,” said Lillian Smith. When that danger faded, the winter arrived, with winds reaching over fifty miles an hour. In a blizzard, a family could be cut off from the outside world for weeks, snowed in so effectively that they were unable to reach the woodpile. The wind was a force to be reckoned with year-round, shredding clothing on the line, blowing dust into houses through closed doors and windows.
One of the most bizarre and terrifying assaults of nature involved grasshoppers. Swarms would appear suddenly, in huge clouds, and devour everything in sight. “They commenced on a 40 acre field of corn about ten o’clock and before night there was not an ear of corn or green leaf to be seen,” said Elizabeth Roe. Another woman remembered that the grasshoppers “struck the ground so hard it sounded almost like hail.” If a housewife tried covering her garden with gunnysacks, the bugs simply went under, or ate their way through them. They ate the peaches off the trees and left the pits hanging. After they ate the crops the grasshoppers moved into the barns and houses. They ate all the food, and some women said they devoured furniture, fence boards, and cabin siding. They ate the clothing and left window curtains hanging in shreds.
In the summer, flies or gnats swarmed over everything. In a desperate attempt to drive away mosquitoes, plains women burned buffalo chips—they could stand the smell longer than the bugs could. A visitor to frontier Illinois looked through a cabin window and saw a woman and her children dancing around in what he presumed was the ceremony of a religious cult. But on entering, he discovered “they were all busy in warring with the mosquitoes.” In the Southwest, women were instructed to place their beds at least two feet away from the walls, lest they wake up covered with scorpions. Fleas were a terrible problem. Indian wives made houses that were easy to replace and simply burned them down when the fleas became too bothersome. But American settlers had a yen for permanence, and a sturdy house that lasted forever was also a permanent abode for vermin.
Most white women were terrified of Indians, even though relatively few settlers ever had a violent encounter with them. But they had read the captivity literature, which featured stories of gang rapes, mass murders, and disfigurements like that of Matilda Lockhart, who was taken by the Comanches and returned in 1840 with much of her nose burnt off—“all the fleshy end gone and a great scab formed on the end of the bone.” George Custer instructed his men to shoot Mrs. Custer rather than let her be captured by hostile Indians. In reality, the range of experiences of women captives varied, depending on the tribe, the personality of the woman, and that of the Indian who claimed her. Some women were taken as slaves, others as wives. Susan Parrish, a pioneer, told the story of the Oatman family, who were attacked by Apaches while Mrs. Oatman was giving birth. The Indians murdered the parents and smaller children and carried away two older girls. Many years later one of the girls, Olive, was found by settlers while she was sitting on a riverbank, perhaps preparing to bathe. She had been sold to the Mohave Indians, and among them had married and raised a family. She desperately wished to return to them. “For four years she lived with us, but she was a grieving, unsatisfied woman who somehow shook one’s belief in civilization,” wrote Parrish.
While the white women were worried about Indians, the Indian women were absolutely frantic about the white settlers, and they often buried their babies in the dirt to conceal them from pale strangers. The Indians were incredulous at the disasters that the whites brought along with them, particularly the disease. The Lakota called 1844, the year of a measles epidemic, “The Rash Breaks Out on Babies Winter.” In 1849, almost half the Cheyenne tribe died from cholera. By the time the first settlers made it to the West Coast, early contacts with whites had already left many of the California tribes well on the way to extinction. The Indians knew that white people were responsible for these terrible plagues and assumed, generally incorrectly, that the whites had done it deliberately.
But the whites were deliberately killing the buffalo. White women traveling across the plains saw buffalo hunting as merely something their men wasted time on when they should be pushing the train forward. However, Indian women were keenly aware the slaughter would doom their way of life. Pretty Shield, a Crow woman, said, “My heart fell down when I began to see dead buffalo all over our beautiful country, killed and skinned and left to rot by white men, many many hundred of buffalo.” In the culture of the Plains Indians, women were responsible for butchering and drying meat after a buffalo hunt, processing and tanning the hides with a preparation made from the animal’s brain and liver. It took about twenty-two hides to make a tepee, which the women sewed. They then owned the finished home. But as the buffalo vanished, the women’s place in the tribe did, too.
Sarah Winnemucca, a Paiute who remembered being buried in the earth by her terrified mother when white men approached their camp, became a popular lecturer on the abuses suffered by her people. Winnemucca had great faith in women’s capacity to bridge racial gulfs. “If women could go into your Congress,” she wrote, “I think justice would soon be done to the Indians.” Actually, white women had a range of emotions about Indians, many of them decidedly unsympathetic. A Mrs. Miller, writing from Oregon in 1852, explained cheerfully that the Indians were “dying here as elsewhere, where they are in contact with civilization…. I used to be sorry that there was so much prospect of their annihilation…. Now I do not think it is to be much regretted. If they all die, their place will be occupied by a superior race.” Some white women did sometimes express pity for the Indians’ plight, and a few developed friendships with Native American women. But almost no one expressed regret for taking their lands.
“I CANNOT MAKE A FRIEND
LIKE MOTHER OUT OF HENRY”
Life in the West was generally devoid of anything women regarded as fun. In Topeka in the 1890s, Martha Farnsworth, a young Kansas housewife, was so desperate for entertainment that she went to see the Wizard Oil Medicine show troupe thirteen times during its two-month run. In Wyoming, the chances for socializing were so rare that girls would ride forty miles on horseback to go to a dance. A Texas woman became so lonely she began going out to the watering hole to have conversations with the cattle. Women particularly missed talking with other women. “I have been very blue,” wrote Nellie Wetherbee in her journal, “for I cannot make a friend like mother out of Henry.” Margaret Armstrong, a teenager on the Texas frontier in 1872, wrote that she and her mother hardly saw an outsider once every six months. “If we did not have a lot of house work to do we would be at a loss how to kill time,” she said. Armstrong, who clearly had a talent for seeing the glass half-full, eventually found happiness in marriage to a local teacher.
Women must have missed the company of their own sex most when they were pregnant. Annette Botkin said her mother, a Kansas pioneer, was expecting her third child and caring for toddlers four and eighteen months, when her husband left on a seventeen-mile journey to get wood. As soon as he was gone, she began feeling contractions. She got the baby clothes together on a chair, along with scissors, drew a bucket of fresh water, made some bread-and-butter sandwiches, and set out milk for the babies. The family’s faithful dog, which protected the children from snakes and other danger, was left on guard. When her husband arrived home, he discovered he had a baby boy. “My mother having fainted a number of times in her attempt to dress the baby, had succeeded at last; and when my father came in he found a very uncomfortable but brave and thankful mother.”
Like the colonials, the pioneers lived in small, dark houses bereft of luxury. Jessie Hill Rowland of Kansas once told the story of the time her father, a justice of the peace, officiated at the wedding of a local farm family. Her parents were ushered into a dugout—one room, furnished with two chairs, a bed, a small table, a bench, and a stove. A small sheet had been stretched across one corner of the room, and the bride and groom stood behind it, attempting to look inconspicuous. The mother of the bride was grinding dried carrots for a kind of pseudo-coffee. She seated Rowland’s parents on the two chairs until the neighbors arrived, and the couple emerged from behind the sheet to be officially married. “Soon after all sat down to the wedding supper. The sheet that hung across the corner of the room was taken down and spread over the table for a cloth.” Besides the carrot coffee, the newlyweds served their guests bread and butter, fried pork, and sauces made out of wild plums. “After supper the bridegroom took my father to one side and asked him to accept some potatoes in payment for performing the ceremony. He readily consented and returned home.”
Glass for windows was scarce, and many women had to do their chores by candlelight at noon. Susanna Townsend, the wife of a gold miner, theorized that the reason they didn’t have windows was because the husbands were home only after sundown. When she finally set aside some money for glass, she wrote to her sister Fanny triumphantly, “I have a window in my house…. All the passers by stare and gaze at the wonderful phenomenon.” Women tried to turn their surroundings into something pleasant. They papered the walls with newspapers and magazines, and a new tenant moving into a previously occupied house always got a kick out of “reading the walls.” Bertha Anderson, a Danish immigrant, was determined to make her first home in Montana nice, even though it was a former chicken house, measuring about twelve by twelve, occupied by five children and three adults. She covered the log walls with newspaper, then whitewashed them, and spent one entire winter making rag rugs, which she put on the floor of the front room so her children could play without getting splinters from the rough planks. Her pride in her refurbished nest lasted about a week, until it rained hard and the roof began to leak. The muslin she had tacked on the ceiling hung heavy with mud, the beds were wet, and, Anderson reported sadly, “the poor carpet which was supposed to be striped had now faded and the colors had gone, so that it was a dirty mess.”
The food was as spare as the land. At a luncheon at Fort Lincoln in the 1870s, the menu was tea, toasted hardtack, tart jelly made from buffalo berries, chokeberry pie, and lemonade. Elizabeth Custer said their post went so long without eggs, butter, and cream “the cook books were maddening to us.” In California, new arrivals discovered that eggs, which had cost a few cents apiece back home, were a dollar, and chickens, which they remembered as costing a dime, were suddenly $10. Louise Clappe’s remote mining village ran out of fresh meat over a long winter, and the residents were left with dried mackerel and “wagon loads of hard, dark hams…[that] nothing but the sharpest knife and stoutest heart can penetrate.” On the plains, farm families just starting out often lived on nothing but corn and corn flour.
For clothes, most women made do with a couple of gingham or calico dresses, a sunbonnet, and an apron. The Sunday clothes were the same, only newer and cleaner. If they could not get cloth for sewing, some women wove their own. (One pioneer claimed his aunt used the fleece of wolves to spin into yarn.) Others ransacked the trunks they had brought with them, and used blankets, shawls, the canvas from the covered wagon, or heavy grain sacks. “Someone had said that the real pioneer in Kansas didn’t wear any underwear, but this was not true of the Ellis County pioneer, and the clothes lines with undergarments advertising I. M. Yost’s High Patent Flour were the best evidence,” said one woman. Despite the sunbonnets, women’s complexions often became weathered, and they complained that the alkali in the water made their hair dull and dry.
“BESIEGED BY A CROWD OF MEN,
ALL ANXIOUS TO EMPLOY HER”
In 1879, thousands of ex-slaves left the Deep South, intent on resettling in Kansas. They were fleeing post-Reconstruction Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee, where the fury of ex-Confederates against the freed African Americans was bitter and frequently violent. They knew that if they could make their break from the South and farm 160 acres of Kansas land for five years, the law said it would be theirs. They were called Exodusters, and one of the main reasons for their migration was concern for the welfare of their women. “The white men here take our wives and daughters and serve them as they please, and we are shot if we say anything about it,” one member wrote to the governor of Kansas. The wives and mothers prodded them along. “These sable workwomen claim they are exposed to robbery, murder, swindling and all the other foibles and pleasantries. They have organized an emigration society and say they propose to move,” reported an unsympathetic white Tennessee paper. Thousands of African Americans took riverboats up the Mississippi or walked the Chisolm trail to Kansas. Armed whites, alarmed at losing their cheap labor, closed the Missisippi and threatened to sink boats that transported the Exodusters. The poorest ran out of money as they waited helpless on the riverbank for a boat with the courage to pick them up. Those who made it to Kansas arrived broke and exhausted. But within a few years most of the 15,000 Exodusters who stayed in Kansas were settled homeowners.
Black women who went west—particularly those who traveled on their own—were independent and fighters. They were usually better educated than the average white female pioneer, and less interested in farming. (“The scenery to me was not at all inviting and I began to cry,” said Williana Hickman, a black woman who found herself living in a plains dugout in 1889.) Isolated communities and army outposts had very little discrimination because there were so few blacks—or people in general. “In the earliest days…each family was grateful for the help of each other family and we were all on a level. However later differences arose and sentiment against Negroes developed,” recalled a black pioneer. Being the only black people in a thinly populated land was doubly lonely. “I ain’t got nobody and there ain’t no picnics nor church sociables nor buryings out here,” moaned Eliza, a cook on a frontier outpost.
Black women in western towns could only find work as servants, although those jobs paid two or three times as much as they did in the East. Even the wealthiest black woman in California, Mary Ann Pleasant, always encouraged the impression that she was working as a domestic for the white men with whom she did business. Pleasant had, indeed, gotten her start working as a cook. When she arrived at the San Francisco wharf, she was by one account “besieged by a crowd of men, all anxious to employ her.” She accepted one of the offers, for $500 a month, and invested her first earnings in an accounting firm.
Clara Brown, a freed slave, talked her way onto a wagon train to Pike’s Peak by promising to do the cooking and washing for the would-be prospectors. In Cherry Creek, the future city of Denver, she made a good deal of money running a laundry and became a well-loved citizen who, in the words of a local paper, turned her house “into a hospital, a hotel, and a general refuge for those who were sick and in poverty.” At the end of the Civil War, she took her savings and tried to find her husband and four children, who had been sold off to different owners before she was freed. Unsuccessful, she returned to Colorado instead with twenty-six former slaves, some of them orphaned, and helped them find homes and jobs. Her search for her family, her charity, and the duplicity of white businessmen drained her money. But thankfully, this story had a happy ending. In 1882, past eighty years old and impoverished, she received word from an old friend who had stumbled across Brown’s daughter, Eliza Jane, a widow living in Iowa. With money donated by neighbors, Brown went by train to meet her daughter in Council Bluffs. She arrived in a rainstorm, and Eliza Jane slipped in the mud, but the two women embraced so joyfully they were oblivious to the wet. Clara brought her granddaughter Cindy back to Denver, where they continued her work and charitable efforts. When she died in 1885, the mayor and governor of Colorado were among the mourners and the minister eulogized “one of the most unselfish lives on record.”
“WE NOW EXPECT QUITE AN IMMIGRATION
OF LADIES TO WYOMING”
In the summer of 1869, the suffragist Anna Dickinson was on her way to a speaking engagement in California when her train stopped briefly in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Venturing out on the platform for a breath of air, Dickinson was immediately surrounded by a crowd of local residents. When she retreated to the passenger car, they clustered around the windows, flattening their noses against the glass in an attempt to get a better look. It isn’t entirely clear if they were drawn by Dickinson’s celebrity, or simply her gender. (Wyoming was particularly short of women, with six adult men to every one female.) “Anna is good looking,” reported the Cheyenne Leader, whose twenty-seven-year-old editor, Nathan Baker, expressed the hope that Dickinson would return and favor Cheyenne with her oratory.
Whether she found the residents of Cheyenne enthusiastic or simply alarming, Dickinson did indeed return in September, addressing a crowd of 250, including the governor and territorial secretary. There is no record of exactly what she said—the Leader remained fixated on her figure (“well formed”). But Wyoming, which was gearing up for the first election of a territorial legislature, was definitely aware of the suffrage issue. On the eve of the voting in 1869, Esther McQuigg Morris invited some of the most prominent citizens of her hometown of South Pass City to tea. The guests included local candidates for the state legislature, and the hostess asked each whether he would introduce a bill to give women the right to vote.
Morris was a large woman, nearly six feet tall, and she had been a milliner and a nurse in Oswego, New York. She came west with her husband, John, who was bent on prospecting. The family located in South Pass, which despite its small size was the largest town in Wyoming Territory, and Esther quickly became a popular citizen. She was a longtime supporter of the suffrage cause, and both candidates promised her they would support giving the vote to women. William Bright, the Democratic candidate who won, may already have been an advocate in his own right. He was a saloonkeeper whose young wife was as ardent about suffrage as Esther Morris. Legend had it that as he left for the legislature he told her: “You are a great deal better than I am; you know a great deal more and you would make a better member of the Assembly than I. I have made up my mind that I will do everything in my power to give you the ballot.”
The Wyoming legislature, which had only twenty-one members in total, assembled for the first time on October 1, 1869, on the second floor of a dusty post office in Cheyenne. Bright was elected president of the all-Democratic Senate and proposed his suffrage bill, which some of his friends were convinced Mrs. Bright had written. “The favorite argument…and by far the most effective was this: it would prove a great advertisement, would make a great deal of talk and attract attention to the legislature, and the territory, more effectively than anything else,” recalled one man. Other participants remembered that the whole issue was treated as a joke, but if so the legislature must have stayed in a frolicsome mood for a long time, because it also passed legislation to protect married women’s property rights and require equal pay for female schoolteachers.
It made sense that a place like Wyoming would embrace women’s rights. With very few women around, there was no danger that they could impose their will on the male majority. And the territory very much wanted to attract more women to come, so anything that served to distinguish Wyoming as a place that was friendly to feminine concerns was good. “We now expect quite an immigration of ladies to Wyoming,” said the Cheyenne Leader after both the House and Senate voted in favor of the suffrage bill. Esther Morris’s son, Robert, sent a report on the passage to The Revolution, a suffrage newspaper, that ended with a call for “the girls to come to this higher plain of Human Rights, as well as to have a home in our high, clear mountain atmosphere.”
The bill was signed into law by Governor John Campbell on December 10, 1869. “Won’t the irrepressible ‘Anne D’ come out here and make her home?” demanded the still-smitten Leader. “We’ll even give her more than the right to vote—she can run for Congress.” On September 6, 1870, led by Louisa Ann Swain, a seventy-year-old Laramie housewife, Wyoming women became the first ever to take part in a public election. “Many ladies have voted and without molestation or interference,” the Leader reported that evening. Observers noted that the presence of women at the polls made election days far more decorous than had previously been the custom: “There was plenty of drinking and noise at the saloons, but the men would not remain, after voting, around the polls. It seemed more like Sunday than election day.” Nevertheless, a Wyoming resident felt compelled to write to the Ladies’ Home Journal and assure the nation that voting had not made the local women lose their femininity.
When Wyoming applied for statehood, members of the House of Representatives objected to women there having the ballot, and the territory delegate in Washington telegraphed home that it would be easier to get congressional approval if only men were permitted to vote. The state legislature telegraphed back: “We will remain out of the union a hundred years, rather than come in without our women.” The statehood bill passed Congress by a narrow margin anyway. On July 23, 1890, Wyoming celebrated its official statehood in Cheyenne, with a two-mile-long parade. Mrs. Theresa Jenkins led off the speeches with a review of the struggle for suffrage. Her delivery was so forceful that her words could be heard at the back of the crowd, four blocks away. (Mrs. Jenkins had been practicing on an open prairie, orating while her husband rode farther and farther away in his buggy, shouting back, “Louder!”) Esther Morris presented the governor with a new flag bearing forty-four stars. Back east, women who had been fighting for the ballot since before the Civil War gloried in the realization that they would live to see the day when at least some American women would be able to vote for president. Suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, made pilgrimages to Wyoming. “Neither is handsome,” reported the disappointed editor of the Cheyenne Leader. Grace Greenwood, the famous writer, also arrived, expecting a great deal of the state capital. “I should rejoice to find it a very Eden, a vale of Cashmere—which it isn’t,” she reported.
The first dozen states to give women the right to vote were all in the West. Wyoming just managed to beat out Utah, which passed a suffrage law in February 1870. Colorado and Idaho followed suit before 1900. Westerners did not have any different ideology about women’s role, but they had different needs. Wyoming was not the only state passing laws in hopes that more women might want to emigrate. When the California legislature was debating a married woman’s property act, one bachelor argued that the proposal was “the very best provision to get us wives that we can introduce into the Constitution.”
Not long after Wyoming gave women the right to vote and hold office, Esther Morris was appointed to fill out a vacated seat as justice of the peace, making her the first woman judge anywhere in the country. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper reported that on her first day in court, Morris “wore a calico gown, worsted breakfast-shawl, green ribbons in her hair and a green neck-tie.” Despite the newspaper’s amusement, and the fact that her predecessor refused to turn over his docket and records to a woman, she apparently fulfilled her duties firmly and impartially. Discussing her service later, she said she felt she had done a satisfactory job and that she had not neglected her family any more than if she had spent the time shopping.