Many opinions denying women admission to state and federal courts were couched in patronizing distinctions of sex and divine, irrefutable law.
Judge Ryan additionally notes: "The peculiar qualities of womanhood, its gentle graces, its quick sensibility, its tender susceptibility, its purity, its delicacy, its emotional impulses, its subordination of hard reason to sympathetic feeling, are surely not qualifications for forensic strife. Nature has tempered women as little for the judicial conflicts of the court-room as for the physical conflicts of the battle-field. Womanhood is modeled for gentler and better things…"
The U.S. Supreme Court in its 1873 decision ruling against Myra Bradwell, used the same hypocritical arguments at a time when women were settling the frontier, working twelve-hour days in mills, practicing as doctors and lawyers, toiling in sweatshops and sculleries: "The civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman's protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator…"
4 . In Pretty Shield's memoirs, she describes the practice: "… we were given a reservation, a fine one, long ago. We had many, many horses, and even cattle that the Government had given us. We might have managed to get along if the White Chief in Washington had not leased our lands to white stockmen. These men, some of them, shot down our horses on our own lands, because they wanted all the grass for themselves… these white men shot down our horses so that their cows and sheep might have the grass. They even paid three dollars for each pair of horse's ears, to get our horses killed. I wonder if the lease money that is paid to the Government in Washington by the white stockmen will be given to my grandchildren when it is paid in, or if they will have to wear out their moccasins going to the Agency office to ask for it, as I do."
5 . The bark of the pussy willow (salix discolor) contains tannin and salinigrin, a glucoside with tonic, sedative, and aphrodisiac properties. Mrs. Grieve's Modern Herbal recommends half a teaspoon of the fluid extract.
6 . During the nineteenth century there was considerable debate in France by those concerned with banquets and formal dinners on the respective merits of service à la française and service à la russe. The former method involved placing on the tables all the dishes that were to be served in each service. Guests were thus allowed the pleasure of viewing the food in all its decorative splendor. The dishes would then be taken away to be carved or otherwise prepared for distribution. In the time elapsed before serving, many dishes suffered.
Service à la russe was introduced about 1860. This style of serving had the carving and preparation done in advance so the food was brought in in relays, ready for immediate distribution.
Food intended to be eaten hot was hot, dishes which needed to be served as soon as they came from the oven, such as souffles, were properly served, and ices didn't melt beforetime.
7 . According to Alexandre Dumas père's Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, the baba in France originated with King Stanislas Leczinski, father-in-law to Louis XV. When babas were served in his household, they were always accompanied by a sauceboat that contained sweet Malaga wine mixed with a sixth part of eau de tanaisie, the oil obtained by distillation from the tansy plant. Stanislas's Polish court had been transferred to Lunéville in France after his defeat in the War of Polish Succession in 1735. Stanislas adored The Thousand and One Nights; hence the name.
The other dishes served by the Duc de Vec's chefs that night after the opera were all taken from Dumas's cookbook, a fascinating assortment of recipes, anecdotes, personal experiences, and miscellaneous information he'd gathered during a Gulliverian and peripatetic lifetime.
8 . Until the Standing Bear decision in May 1879, the U.S. policy concerning citizenship for Native Americans had been handled on a case-by-case basis either by treaty, individual legislation, or in conjunction with land allotment. Theory, too, apropos Indian rights, had fluctuated often in the course of the previous two hundred years with equal-nation status, assimilation, segregation, and paternalism utilized in a variety of forms. All unfortunately, in the end, exploitive of native cultures.
In 1879 with the U.S. district court's judgment in the Standing Bear case pronouncing, "Means should be devised by which an Indian, when he has attained the necessary degree of civilization, shall be released from the arbitrary control of the Indian Bureau and allowed all the rights and immunities of a free man," the legal basis for confining tribes to reservations and forcing "civilization" on them was dealt a severe blow. Additionally, Standing Bear's extensive tour of the East Coast (although not the first instance of a Native American leader arguing his case before crowds of eastern sympathizers) galvanized criticism of the government's programs, and Indian policy reform became a national issue. Politically powerful reform groups rose articulating the assimilation argument.
Thus the central issue of the 1880s was not whether the reservations system would be changed, but when and how. The popular total assimilation policy was also conveniently advantageous to a wide range of political and economic factions interested in the development of the West. Self-interest opportunely meshed with idealism and between 1880 and 1896, tribes were dispossessed of sixty percent of their remaining land. The Dawes Act of 1887, the first federal program encompassing all Native Americans, while offering the promise of citizenship and a pathway to social integration, proved more often to be a means of encroaching further on Indian lands.
The successful disfranchisement of blacks in the South (upheld by the Supreme Court decisions in civil rights cases and Plessy v. Ferguson) during the 1890s confirmed the power of the state authorities to control access to the voting booth. And if individual states were as eager to exclude Indians from the polls as they were to exclude blacks, they were legally capable of accomplishing their objective. Every state with a significant Indian population had voting regulations that limited Native American participation in elections. With the initiation of the "Jim Crow" laws, by 1919 it was estimated that only 25,000 of the nation's 336,000 Indians cast ballots.
In the case of Montana, the sole restriction to voting was that the elector be a citizen. However, in contrast to tribes like the Oregon Umatillas and the Omahas of Nebraska who had been admitted to citizenship en masse when their reservations were allotted, most Indians in Montana remained on undivided reservations or were allotted after the Burke Act of 1906 had delayed the granting of citizenship.
When Louis Reale attempted to organize the Montana Metis in 1883-84 for the purpose of voting, a Republican judge at Fort Benton jailed him in order to keep him out of the field during the election. When the Metis attempted to vote, many were turned away at the polls, and those who were allowed to vote in certain localities found their votes disqualified by the Secretary of the Territory. Supported by the Democrats who would benefit by the Metis vote, Reale's case was moved to a more amenable Democratic judge in Helena who freed him. Shortly after, however, the Canadian authorities transported Reale back to Canada.
9 . Although women had been discouraged from pursuing a professional education well into the twentieth century, it's estimated that by 1870, more than 11,000 women were enrolled in some 582 institutions of higher learning. Most women were earning degrees in education, but the opening of law schools in the Midwest and West and in the major cities in the East gave women the opportunity to study law, even though opportunities to practice were severely limited. The prestigious Ivy League law schools, such as Yale, Columbia, and Harvard, however, resisted enrolling women law students longer than most. Yale first admi
tted women to their law school in 1918, Columbia in 1927, and Harvard not until 1950.
Roscoe Pound, Dean of Harvard Law School from 1916-36, and a professor there well into the forties, is said to have greatly influenced attitudes at the law school. A graduate of the all-male Harvard Law School class of 1948 relates an anecdote significant of Pound's bias. "One morning in 1945, Pound was presiding over his first-year property class. Pound was quite old by then, a big husky man who in fifty years of New England weather never wore an overcoat, but always had on green eyeshades. His eyesight and hearing were failing but his mind was as sharp as ever. It was customary for students to invite friends to sit in on classes, and this day one of the men brought a girlfriend with him. They sat all the way in the back and probably would have gone unnoticed but her broad-brimmed hat gave her away. Pound stopped the class, squinted, then asked, 'Is that a woman back there?' The student answered, 'Yes, sir, this is my fiancee.' With that Pound thundered back, 'I don't permit women in my classes, get out.' "
At Columbia's law school, Dean Harlan Fiske Stone had exerted similar influence to keep women out of the school. He was known to have promised women would be admitted to Columbia over his dead body. When he left in 1925 to join the U.S. Supreme Court, a motion was introduced the next year at Columbia to allow women applicants for the fall 1927 semester. Several women lawyers who had been denied admission to Columbia but had gone on to graduate from other law schools sent a telegram to Chief Justice Stone the day Columbia's first women took their seats in class, saying: "We suppose you are lying prone on the steps of the Court today."
10. Divorce in France, first enacted by the Code Napoleon in 1804, was repealed in 1816 and reenacted by a law of July 27, 1884, completed and simplified by a law of April 20, 1886.
Divorce by consent, the basis of Napoleon's code, which�according to the powerful religious and conservative factions in France—aimed a blow at the very foundation of the institution of marriage, was no longer permitted under the new law of 1884-6.
In terms of adultery, too, conservative principles held sway. Male rights were predominant as they had been through the centuries. The adultery of a wife was punishable upon the information of a husband by three months to two years imprisonment; that of the husband only by a fine of from one hundred to three thousand francs (at the time, twenty to six hundred American dollars), and then only in case the husband had harbored his concubine under the conjugal roof. Further, the murder of a wife and her paramour taken in flagrante delicto by a husband was excusable; not so the murder of a husband or his concubine by a wife under similar circumstances.
11 . Miles City had the first phone exchange in Montana in 1881. Both Butte and Helena had central telephone exchanges in 1882 and long distance service between the two cities was operating by 1884. Crank phones were used for outlying areas with a range of up to thirty-five miles if the lines were well grounded. Electric street lights first appeared in use in Helena in August of 1882 with businesses swift to take advantage of the new technology.
12 . In 1879 George Eastman invented a machine that could manufacture dry plates of uniform quality and eight years later he produced a flexible, transparent base for film to replace the rigid glass plate. His idea was to sell the film in rolls loaded in a holder that could be used with existing cameras, but photographers of that period weren't ready to give up their glass plates. So Eastman turned to popularizing photography. In 1888 he introduced the Kodak, the world's first "snapshot" camera. It was loaded with enough film to record one hundred images. When all the images were exposed, the camera was returned to Rochester, N.Y. The film was processed and printed, the camera reloaded, and the prints were returned to the photographer.
13 . So great was the influx of foreign capital on the northern range that by 1885, the territorial legislature of Montana passed restrictive legislation. The law denied the privilege of owning property in the territory to any corporation of foreigners, or to corporations of which more than twenty percent of the stock was owned by foreigners. After a report of the House Committee on Public Lands, submitted to Congress in 1886, purported to show that up to fifty million acres were already owned by foreigners, a federal law was passed prohibiting alien land ownership in the territories by individuals or corporations more than ten percent foreign controlled. (The railroad companies were thoughtfully ex-empted from the law so as to preserve their access to foreign money.)
But neither the state nor federal laws were more than an annoyance to those foreigners possessed of the resources to evade them. The citizenship requirement was commonly avoided by having employees who were citizens make the necessary filings and then take title from them. Or—since the federal law allowed a noncitizen to simply signify his intention of becoming a naturalized citizen, a buyer could swear to that intention and file in his own name.
The alien land law prohibition was more difficult to circumvent, but it was normally accomplished by having title taken in the name of a domestic entity (such as a corporation or trust), with the benefits flowing to the foreign beneficiary. Many foreign-owned cattle companies made their ranch manager president of the corporation to avoid the restriction. In a typical example of the circumvention prevalent at the time, one foreign-owned corporation simply reorganized, changing the corporation title from its foreign name to The Vermont Cattle Company. The same people and same money continued to operate the corporation.
* * *
Dear Reader,
I began my first story Blaze with no intention of writing any future books about Hazard Black's family. Without rational explanation, however, as I was finishing Blaze, Trey Braddock-Black appeared, very near death, in a stormy winter scene that figures in the early pages of Silver Flame, and I was impelled to tell his story. In a similar fashion, the Duc de Vec simply walked out of the anonymous crowd of men surrounding Empress in her drawing room in a late scene from Silver Flame. There was no logical reason; an anonymous crowd of suitors was perfectly acceptable to the scene, and with the exception of having numerous gypsy ancestors in my Finnish heritage, I don't know why he stepped forward or how he made his presence so powerfully known. Even then… I wasn't planning on writing a book about the Duc de Vec until I was adding the last few lines of my epilogue to Silver Flame. At that point, I saw Daisy in vivid, startling imagery, standing across from the Duc de Vec… their instant antipathy palpable.
In writing the Braddock-Black books, beyond the portrayals of love and relationships, of emotion and feeling, I hope in some small way to indicate, through one family's evolution, the exceptional achievements of many others of Native American heritage. Like women's history, Native American history is essentially undocumented, but Native Americans, during the course of America's development, contributed doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, businessmen, sheriffs, stockmen, all manner of educated and successful pursuits to the advancement of not only their people but of this country. The Indian way of life has evoked sympathy and interest, fascinated scholars and laymen, inspired poets and roused reformers… and left a lasting imprint on our history. In the images of their spiritual, and at times, idyllic cultures, in their brave defense against overwhelming odds, in their concepts of man and nature as one, the Native American heritage remains so powerful and evocative that stories continue to be told…
A salute from the Braddock-Blacks to you all.
Best wishes,
P.S. I enjoy hearing from readers. If you have any questions or comments, I'd be pleased to answer them.
13499-400 Street
North Branch, MN 55056
* * *
The magnificent Braddock dynasty from the national bestsellers BLAZE
and SILVER FLAME returns in
Susan Johnson's next spectacular historical romance.
BRAZEN
Look for it in October 1995 from
Bantam Books.
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Johnson, award-winning author of nationally bests
elling novels, lives in the country near North Branch, Minnesota. A former art historian, she considers the life of a writer the best of all possible worlds.
Researching her novels takes her to past and distant places, and bringing characters to life allows her imagination full rein, while the creative process offers occasional fascinating glimpses into complicated machinery of the mind.
But perhaps most important… writing stories is fun.
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