Women of the Frontier

by Brandon Marie Miller

  As the Grummonds’ quarters were still unfinished, Frances set up housekeeping in two tents drawn together, the first for storage and the other holding two hospital bunks and a small heating stove. A few feet away, a tarpaulin covered a cook stove. That first night, snow drifted into the tents, covering Frances’s face and her and her husband’s bedding and clothes.

  In the morning, after shaking snow from her shoes and stockings, she tackled breakfast. A soldier had brought wood and fired up the cook stove. Frances bravely fried bacon, boiled coffee, and whipped up a batch of rock-hard biscuits mixed from flour, salt, and water. But when she grabbed a butcher knife to chop the biscuits, she nearly severed her thumb instead.

  Another morning, she started a brisk fire with some wood shavings, an abundant fuel due to the fact that the fort lay under construction. But the wind blew sparks from her fire under the commanding officer’s quarters, setting ablaze accumulated carpentry debris. The fire was quickly extinguished, but the Grummonds were moved to a large hospital tent where Frances’s cooking stove had more room. “My cooking experiments were never a great success,” she confided. Further failures included pies that oozed out all the filling and a soup made with dried, compressed vegetables, which swelled and swelled in the simmering water, while Frances frantically ladled the growing mess out of the pot.

  Throughout the fall, Frances felt the constant stress of alarms as Indians attacked the wood train, ran off horses and cattle, and cut off any person venturing too far from the stockade gates. Her world “revolved in a very small space,” and she feared the Lakota would climb over the stockade wall under cover of darkness. Sometimes Indians galloped along the ridges in full view of the fort, waving blankets and taunting the soldiers with whooping war calls. She felt a bit safer when they traded the tents for their new quarters of pine logs and a real roof.

  Fort life also brought comforts and cheer. The post’s band and string section uplifted spirits with marital tunes, dance music, and hymns. With five ladies at the fort, “each had four places to visit,” noted Frances, where they compared notes on life and played games of cards. The dedication of the fort’s flagpole on October 31, a glorious blue-sky day, brought tears to Frances’s eyes as the soldiers in full dress uniforms passed for review, and the huge flag rose above the fort accompanied by the golden notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hail Columbia.” That evening, Margaret Carrington, the commander’s wife, hosted dancing, singing, and “general merrymaking” at headquarters.

  Frances felt more secure when a long-awaited group of reinforcements—mostly raw recruits—reached Fort Phil Kearny. Her husband joined several of the newly arrived officers in expressing the opinion that a more aggressive stance was necessary toward the Lakota. The men, including George Grummond and newly arrived Captain William Fetterman, soon got their wish.

  Flags signaling another attack on the wood train sent the fort into action on the morning of December 6. Frances’s husband rode with the group sent to relieve the wood train. Two men were killed that day, and George Grummond barely escaped with his life. “A sense of apprehension,” Frances wrote, “that I seemed to have been conscious of ever since my arrival at the Post, deepened from that hour. No sleep came to my weary eyes, except fitfully, for many nights, and even then in my dreams I could see him riding madly from me with the Indians in pursuit.”

  All remained quiet until the successful December 19 rescue of the wood train from attack. But hundreds of Indians had been sighted, and no one knew how many Lakota and their allies had amassed in the vicinity of Fort Phil Kearny. The fort had only 350 men, including soldiers, civilians, teamsters, and other employees. To make matters more desperate, ammunition had run low, with long-expected supplies never arriving.

  Two days later, on December 21, the wood train departed, heavily armed and with a guard of 90 men. When the attack came, 81 men, including George Grummond, rode to the rescue. Colonel Carrington ordered Captain Fetterman, in charge of the relief, to support the wood train and report back, and under no conditions was he to chase the Lakota beyond Lodge Trail Ridge.

  Standing in the doorway of their house, Frances was “filled with dread and horror at the thought that after my husband’s hairbreadth escape scarcely three weeks before he could be so eager to fight the Indians again.” A fellow officer, reminding Grummond of his wife’s advancing pregnancy, urged him not to do anything rash.

  Word soon came back that the wood train had made it safely to the pinery, but Fetterman had charged on with his men, including George Grummond, beyond the crest of Lodge Trail Ridge. Carrington ordered out the infantry to aid Fetterman. When volleys of rapid shots shattered the cold December air, everyone recognized the sounds of a desperate fight—and then, dead silence. “Less than half an hour had passed,” recorded Frances, “and the silence was dreadful.” Fetterman and the 81 men under his command had chased several hundred Lakota decoys over the ridge and into the midst of Red Cloud’s warriors.

  Frances gathered with the other women for the painful wait. By nightfall, wagons carrying the stripped and mutilated bodies of 49 men rolled into the fort, “with the heart-rending news … that probably not a man of Fetterman’s command survived.” Margaret Carrington took Frances into her arms and then into her home, “where in silence we awaited the unfolding of this deadly sorrow.” Everyone feared that at any moment the weakened fort would come under attack.

  Colonel Carrington promised Frances he’d retrieve her husband’s body from the field of battle. Before the rescue detail left, Carrington ordered that, in case of an attack, the women and children must go into the powder magazine with supplies of food. But, in a last desperate struggle, they should be blown up with the ammunition and guns rather than be captured alive.

  During those long hours of waiting, Frances sat at her window. Finally, more wagons rumbled into the fort, and Carrington entered the room and handed her an envelope containing a lock of George Grummond’s hair. Her husband had also worn a miniature painting of Frances, and she wondered which Lakota warrior wore this as a trophy of victory. Christmas arrived to the sad sound of hammers and saws preparing coffins. Frozen men dug 10-foot deep trenches in the snow so the Indians could not scale the stockade walls.

  January 1867 brought fresh orders when a command of new soldiers finally arrived at Fort Phil Kearny. The Carringtons would transfer to new command headquarters, and Frances, who planned to return home with her husband’s body, prepared to leave, too. Frances outfitted herself for below-freezing temperatures with buffalo-fur boots, fur robes, shawls, and cloaks. Carpenters fit the wagons with small stoves and smoke holes, while bins of pine blocks and knots were readied for the journey. Frances also took a mattress and a chair, and the remaining women at the fort purchased her minimal furniture and dishes, “paying double their value” so she might have money for the journey. The wagons, with an escort of 60 men, rolled out of the fort on January 23 and floundered through the deep snow, covering only six miles in eight hours.

  Bitter cold turned the journey into a march of misery. At one point, Margaret Carrington’s thermometer gave up, the mercury congealed in the bulb. Carrington ordered the soldiers’ legs whipped to keep the circulation moving, but many later lost ears, fingers, feet, and limbs to frostbite. Cooking proved nearly impossible, hatchets broke off chunks of frozen food, and the snow melting around the campfire quickly froze into rings of ice. The mules seemed driven crazy by the cold—breaking loose, kicking, biting, and, in their hunger, trying to eat wagon spokes and canvas covers. At one point, the command had to descend a 60-foot river embankment. “When my turn came,” wrote Frances, “I rolled over on my bed, clung for dear life to the sides of the wagon, with eyes shut and jaws clamped … for it all depended upon those mules.” Fortunately, a few Indian scares turned out to be nothing.

  Frances found her brother William waiting for her at Fort Laramie; her family had received a telegram telling of the Fetterman disaster, and he’d left right away to reac
h Frances. Here she parted company with the Carringtons. The journey continued with a dangerous crossing of the iced-over Platte River. Finally, near Fort McPherson, Nebraska, they reached the Union Pacific Railroad and could continue the journey by train and then boat. After seven weeks, Frances Grummond reached her Tennessee home in March 1867. A month later, she gave birth to a baby boy.

  Two strange twists of fate awaited Frances. She discovered that George Grummond had been married at the time he married her. George was not yet divorced from his first wife, the mother of his two children. Then, in 1870, Frances learned that Margaret Carrington had died, and she penned a note of sympathy to Henry Carrington. “Correspondence ensued that resulted in our marriage in 1871,” she wrote in her memoirs. Their marriage lasted 40 years, and the couple had three children.

  In 1908, Frances and Henry traveled to the site of Fort Phil Kearny, long since burned by Red Cloud’s warriors. They went for the dedication of a monument marking “Massacre Hill,” the spot where gentle Frances Grummond had lost her husband on that icy December day in 1866.

  3

  A WOMAN THAT CAN WORK

  “Was I ever thrilled, seventeen years old and earning so much! I earned it all right.”

  —Montana schoolteacher, 1886

  Women who rolled up their sleeves and provided lonesome miners or cowboys with tasty home cooking, clean clothes, sewing, and friendly company could earn a purse full of cash. Fifteen to twenty dollars a week could be had for scrubbing clothes. Luzena Wilson, newly arrived in Sacramento, earned five dollars for cooking a single breakfast and could have asked twice the price and been paid. Farmwomen turned rare but longed-for items like eggs, butter, and fresh-grown vegetables or sewn goods such as shirts, vests, and gloves into money. During the early days in a new Western home, women often supported their families while husbands tackled mining or began farming.

  Primitive conditions, however, made this backbreaking work all the harder. Mollie Sandford traveled to a California silver mine with her husband and agreed to cook for the men. “My heart sinks within me,” she wrote, “when I see eighteen or twenty [men], and no conveniences at all.”1 Another woman in 1851 listed her chores at a boardinghouse: washing, ironing, baking, cooking, setting and clearing a 30-foot-long table, feeding chickens, making soap and candles, and sewing sheets. She also babysat and nursed the sick. “But I would not advise any Lady to come out here and suffer the toil and fatigue that I have suffered for the sake of a little gold,” she wrote a friend back home.2 Another California woman, proud of her hard labor, claimed, “Had I not the constitution of six horses I should have been dead long ago.”3

  Fallen Women

  Women with names like Irish Queen, Peg-Leg Annie, Squirrel Tooth Alice, and Contrary Mary earned livings as prostitutes, working mining, cattle, and railroad towns and military forts. White, African American, Mexican, Native American, and Asian women, mostly young and impoverished, worked this shady and dangerous life on the fringes of society.

  Between 1865 and 1886, prostitution was the largest source of paid employment for women in Helena, Montana, with similar situations in many other towns. For some women, poor and uneducated and often used to lives of abuse, prostitution was the only way to survive.

  Most prostitutes made little money, seldom earning enough to leave the profession. With payments to madams, room rent, and court fines, the women had little cash and few possessions. Prostitutes worked in dance halls and saloons; brothel workers claimed the most status, while the lowliest prostitutes walked the streets seeking clients.

  Thousands of immigrant Chinese women were sold by their poor families into prostitution and virtual slavery in the West. The problem was especially bad in San Francisco, a mining boomtown, and in areas of the Rocky Mountain West. A number of Chinese and American women tried to end the practice by rescuing young women from their “owners.”

  At military posts near Indian reservations, some Native American women traded sexual favors for goods. A Montana Indian agent wrote, “The Indian maiden’s favor had a money value, and what wonder is it that, half clad and half starved, they bartered their honor … for something to cover their limbs and for food for themselves and their kin.”4 Sexually transmitted diseases spread among the Indian populations. Other women at military forts, working as laundresses or in the sutler’s store as “servants,” were also prostitutes. The military mostly turned a blind eye to what went on inside the forts or in towns just outside.

  Squirrel Tooth Alice, a “fallen woman” who worked in Kansas and Texas. www.legendsofAmerica.com

  Crime and prostitution blended in a vortex of violence. Belle Warden, an African American madam in Denver, and her employee Mattie Lemmon went to prison for slitting a customer’s throat. In Idaho, Fannie Clark participated in a murder committed by three customers. Seventeen-year-old Maggie Moss of Denver took part in an armed robbery. Prostitutes stole from one another and from clients. They verbally abused each other and fought. “One-Arm” Annie Ferguson stole Emma Hal-bring’s scarf and towels. The incident forced Ferguson to leave Laramie, Wyoming, for Cheyenne, where another prostitute, Fanny Brown, beat Ferguson to death. The 19th century treasured its notions of ideal womanhood, where virtuous women protected society’s moral values. Prostitutes broke the rules, so it was believed the women deserved what they got and the lives they led.

  Some prostitutes married, their choice of mates coming from the dregs of society whom they encountered in their jobs. The men lived by crime and often lived off their wives. A prostitute’s marriage sometimes ended in her murder by her husband. Children of prostitutes led lives of poverty and uncertainty, and teenage daughters often followed their mothers into the profession.

  Prostitutes faced dangers from themselves as well as clients, husbands, and other prostitutes. Women suffered from alcoholism and drug use and were frequently arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct. Many died from overdoses of morphine, laudanum, chloroform, opium, and even strychnine. The most common means of leaving prostitution was suicide, a sad comment on the lives of women who worked this unforgiving trade on the American frontier.

  A Paying Job

  Of course more respectable forms of paid employment also existed for women. Jobs outside the home reflected what 19th-century society considered proper for a woman. Nurturing occupations, such as teaching and domestic work, earned the most approval. The sphere of suitable jobs ranged from seamstress and milliner to servant, cook, waitress, and nurse. As childbirth neared, many women trusted the services of a midwife, a fellow female, over a male doctor.

  Unmarried women, many still teenagers, made up the majority of teachers in the West. Teaching offered a paying job outside a woman’s typical role of housework. Paid little, teachers often boarded with the families of their students. These young women taught in one-room schoolhouses built from sod or logs, or in no school at all, just a meeting space outdoors. Equipped with few supplies, teachers relied on whatever books and slates children brought from home. In some cases, the teacher possessed little more education than her students. Pupils ranged in age from five to 18 years, and sometimes older boys weren’t about to behave for a female teacher younger than themselves.

  A young teacher surrounded by her students, Oklahoma Territory. National Archives

  One Kansas teacher’s new schoolhouse had a cellar, but no door had yet been built to reach it. When a tornado twisted to earth and headed for her school, the teacher grabbed a firewood hatchet and chopped through the floor so her students could crawl down into the cellar. Luckily, the tornado veered off in another direction. Folks teased the schoolmarm about scaring the tornado away with her hatchet. Discipline, they said, should come easy to her after that.

  Catholic and Protestant female missionaries headed west to convert Native Americans to Christianity, white culture, and white values. The earliest missionaries, however committed to their calling, faced enough of a struggle just to survive. One Oregon woman wrote, “I sometimes feel disc
ouraged and fear I shall never do anything to benefit the heathen and might as well have stayed at home…. Last week I went four times to teach the Indians. But it is all I can do to get along, do my work, and take care of my children.”5 Many missionaries feared Native Americans had little interest in embracing the Bible, and living in the midst of an alien “savage” culture proved too much for most 19th-century white Americans. In the case of Narcissa Whitman, missionary life ended in tragedy and death.

  Many Western women earned their living at less traditional jobs. Helen MacKnight Doyle and Bethenia Owens-Adair became doctors. Wives took charge of all sorts of family businesses after the deaths of their husbands. Some women worked as reporters, typesetters, printers, artists, telegraphers, photographers, and even miners. Gender roles blurred more in the West than back east. And in towns with only a handful of adult citizens, everyone was needed—male and female—to keep the post office, newspaper, and general store running.

  Newspaperwomen setting type in Kansas, 1880s. Notice the ruffled, feminine lampshade. Kansas State Historical Society

  While many African American women in the West worked as maids or cooks, several earned reputations in business. Bridget “Biddy” Mason, a slave, and her three daughters trudged from Mississippi to Utah in 1847 with her master, Robert Smith, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (or Mormonism). In 1851, Smith moved his family and slaves to a new Mormon settlement in Southern California. California had entered the nation as a free state, and when Smith prepared to move again in 1854, this time to slave-holding Texas, Biddy secured the help of a Los Angeles sheriff to remain in California. Through the courts she won her right to freedom—and the freedom of her daughters and several other black women and children—in 1856.