Women of the Frontier

by Brandon Marie Miller

  Mason saved money working as a nurse and midwife, and within 10 years she bought her first plots of land in downtown Los Angeles, making her one of the first African American women in the United States to buy property. Over the years, Mason purchased and sold real estate and built commercial buildings on her lots, renting out space and earning a large fortune. She turned her blessings into generosity by donating land and money for churches, grocery stores, and schools. In 1872, she helped found the Los Angeles branch of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, the city’s first black church. When she died in January 1891, Biddy Mason left behind a fortune in real estate and the goodwill of her city.

  Another African American woman, Sallie Fingers, owned a popular restaurant in Dodge City, Kansas. In this rough-and-tumble cattle town, Fingers dared to forbid swearing, drinking, and fighting in her establishment. The Dodge City census recorded Fingers’ business as the only one in town owned by a woman.6

  Working on the Land

  The majority of Western women made their living from the land, on their own or alongside their husbands. On a ranch, a woman usually ran the dairy side of the business. But sometimes women performed other ranch chores, from herding, branding, and running cattle drives to keeping the account books. “I have tried every kind of work this ranch affords and I can do any of it,” wrote a female rancher. “I just love to experiment, to prove out things, so ranch life and ‘roughing it’ just suits me.”7

  Farmwomen lent a hand with plowing and planting and tended the farm animals. Homesteading families on the plains faced tremendous hardships in earning a living from the land. The sod’s tangle of thick, long roots snapped plow blades. Wind and heat withered crops. From June 1859 until November 1860, Kansas and Nebraska suffered a devastating drought that dried soil to dust.

  As the prairie grass browned under the blazing sun each summer, people lived in dread of fire. Huge walls of flame and smoke would blacken the prairie sky, surging over the plains, fanned by the winds. Besides plowing a trench and lighting backfires to meet the blaze, farmers had little chance to fight back and often lost everything.

  Millions of grasshoppers destroyed the hopes of plains farmers in the 1870s. The mighty swarms blocked the sun as they fell from the sky, thudding onto the ground like hail. A writhing mass four inches deep covered everything, while deeper drifts of the insects had to be shoveled from doorways. Families watched helplessly as grasshoppers devoured crops down to the ground, ate stored grain, and stripped trees of every leaf and twig. Worst of all, the unstoppable insects attacked settlers’ homes, clinging to people’s clothes and crawling inside where they gobbled curtains, bedding, furniture, and food in the cupboards. No means could fight the scourge, and the eggs the insects laid hatched the following summer to continue the devastation. No wonder many families gave up and retreated east.

  “Have Not Spent an Idle Minute”

  The main responsibility of every woman lay in the never-ending cycle of caring for her family. This vital role, carried out with few labor-saving devices, safeguarded her family’s survival. Chores on a given day included an exhausting round of milking cows and feeding chickens, caring for children, collecting fuel and water, washing dishes, cooking, baking, churning, mending, and housecleaning. “There was always something early and late,” noted a pioneer woman from Texas.8 “When I find so much that needs to be done, I can spare very little time to sleep,” wrote another.9

  Preparing food and preserving more for winter proved a constant labor. Especially in the early days of settlement, women turned raw resources into meals without the help of store-bought provisions. They milled grain for bread, milked cows, skimmed cream, churned butter, and made cheese. They grew vegetables and gathered wild fruit, ground raw meat, and stuffed their own sausages.

  Laundry day in North Dakota, complete with copper boiler, washtub, and scrubboard. Fred Hultstrand History in Pictures Collection, NDIRS-NDSU-Fargo

  As with food, women often created clothing from scratch, too. Sheep yielded wool to be carded, spun, woven, sewn, or knitted. The most hated, backbreaking chore included buckets and a washtub, scrubboard, and battling stick. On laundry day, women simmered batches of lye soap, hauled and boiled water in huge tubs several times over, scrubbed, rinsed, and ironed. Flatirons for pressing clothes—made of a wedge of solid iron—heated on the stove or fire. One woman’s recipe for laundry day included this 11-step routine that’s exhausting even to read:

  bild fire in back yard to het kettle of rain water.

  set tubs so smoke won’t blow in eyes if wind is peart.

  shave 1 hole cake lie sope in bilin water.

  sort things. make 3 piles. 1 pile white, 1 pile cullord, 1 pile work briches and rags.

  stur flour in cold water to smooth then thin down with bilin water [for starch].

  rub dirty spots on board. scrub hard. then bile. rub cullord but don’t bile just rench [rinse] and starch.

  take white things out of kettle with broom stick handle then rench, blew [whitener] and starch.

  pore rench water in flower bed.

  scrub porch with hot sopy water

  turn tubs upside down

  go put on a cleen dress, smooth hair with side combs, brew cup of tee, set and rest and rock a spell and count blessings.10

  No wonder one woman claimed laundry day left her feeling like a “stewed witch!” And, as usual, even on laundry day, meals still needed to be cooked, children cared for, animals tended to, and so much more.

  Women also worked at seasonal chores like drying fruit and vegetables and boiling batches of jams, candles, and soaps. They stuffed sausages and dried and smoked meats. Women helped bring in the crop and cooked huge meals for extra hands hired at harvest time. They sheared sheep in spring and prepared cloth during long winter nights. Women devoted weekly hours to sewing, mending, and darning worn clothes, their fingers flying as they plied needles and thread. They pitched in to build houses, dig wells and cellars, and defend their homes against Indians and outlaws. They worked in the fields, hunted and fished, and drove teams of horses into town.

  A woman’s work included doctoring her family through injury and illness—treating everything from broken bones to fever and snakebite—armed with common sense, homebrewed medicines, and prayer. Like other aspects of Western life, doctoring required ingenuity. A Kansas woman stitched a partially scalped man with fiddle string and her sewing needle. Another time, she removed a bullet with a knitting needle and a pair of pincers.

  Child care in the West presented its own set of worries. Poor sanitation, limited knowledge of how disease spread, and no antibiotics allowed illness to claim young lives in horrifying numbers. The West also delivered a high rate of accidents when rattlesnakes, stinging insects, and wild animals lurked where children played. The plains’ vastness could swallow up a wandering child. In mining towns, children tumbled down mine shafts and were run over in crowded streets. Mothers also feared the corruption of their young ones, exposed to unsavory saloons and gambling halls. An Idaho woman worried, “This is the hardest place to live upon principle I ever saw, and the young are almost sure to be led away.”11

  Few families escaped the loss of a child. A popular song of the time recalled listening for the little footsteps of a child now buried. One of a mother’s most treasured possessions might be a photograph of her dead child, lying sleeplike on a bed. A whole family, grieving in their clothes of mourning black, might gather for a photograph around a deceased child displayed in his or her coffin. Perhaps they had no picture of their child taken in life.

  Isolation from a midwife or even a neighbor woman caused some Western women to dread childbirth and made the recovery after giving birth more difficult. Frequently, mother or child—or sometimes both—died during the delivery. Martha Summerhayes, a young army wife in Arizona, felt especially isolated from the comfort of other women. “I knew nothing,” she wrote, “of the care of a young infant, and depended entirely upon the advice of a Post sur
geon … much better versed in the sawing off of soldier’s legs than in the treatment of young mothers and babies.”12

  Overall, frontier women stretched, conserved, and made do to help their families survive. In the book The Long Winter, Laura Ingalls Wilder describes how her mother made a lamp from a button, a rag, and a small plate of grease. Women managed to cook custard without eggs or milk, bake apple pie without apples, brew coffee without coffee beans. Almost everyone knew what hunger was.

  In the face of difficult conditions, frontier women worked hard, at home and at paying jobs, to insure the very survival of their families. No wonder then that, when the time came, everyone was ready for some fun and diversion.

  Luzena Stanley Wilson

  California Gold Fever

  After four months on the road, Luzena Wilson, her husband, Mason, and their two small boys, Jay and Thomas, pulled into Sacramento, California, on the evening of September 30, 1849. Sacramento hummed with the activity of several thousand people, nearly all male. Traffic jams of mules and horses blocked muddy roads to and from the mines and river gullies. Hundreds of tents served as makeshift homes, while even more campfires illuminated where men slept on the ground, rolled up in blankets like so many cocoons.

  Shopkeepers bartered and sold behind counters of boards slapped across barrels—each armed with scales to weigh the gold dust men used for currency. Coins were rare; people accepted a pinch of gold dust as a dollar, and everything cost at least one dollar. Luzena purchased a few supplies, including molasses and a slice of salt pork, for the dear price of one dollar each. The pork fizzled down to nothing, old and rotten after traveling around the tip of South America to the California coast. Her flour crawled with black worms, a disheartening sight at the end of the trail.

  Luzena quickly learned she could make more money off the gold hopefuls than by mining alongside them. One morning, a man stopped at her outdoor fire. “Madame,” he said to Luzena, “I want a good substantial breakfast, cooked by a woman.” For five dollars, what seemed a princely sum, she fried two onions, two eggs, and a beefsteak, and boiled a cup of coffee. Afterward she reckoned, “If I had asked ten dollars he would have paid it.”13

  Businesses in the raw mining towns appeared and vanished in a flash. The Wilsons acted quickly. They sold their oxen within a few days and invested in a “hotel,” one of the few wooden buildings in town. The place boasted a long living room, the walls stacked floor to ceiling with bunk beds. Here, men lay sick or sleeping, and one man lay dead, forgotten and overlooked. For her own brood, Luzena set up housekeeping in a tent with a dirt floor.

  Women were so scarce—Luzena saw only two other women during six months in Sacramento—that men crowded her table, starved for homemade, female cooking. “It was hard work,” she wrote, “from daylight till dark … hurried all day, and tired out,” but her efforts paid off. After a few months, the Wilsons sold their interest in the hotel for $1,000 in golden dust.

  Mason Wilson invested the money in barley, a commodity earning great profits, but misfortune began dogging the family when heavy rains caused the river to flood. Luzena was standing over her fire cooking when she first noticed rivulets trickling across the ground. Then a rush of water swooshed over her feet. She threw Tom and Jay onto the bed and grabbed all the things she could to keep them off the floor.

  As the water rose, Luzena carried her boys to the hotel they’d just sold, a structure built three or four feet above the ground. She dumped them inside and hurried to gather more of the family’s possessions, including their bedding and the dinner she’d just cooked. She struggled back to the hotel against swirling, knee-deep waters, the force nearly knocking her off her feet.

  Within the hour, the whole town was afloat. By midnight, rising water forced the 40 people sheltering in the hotel to the upper floor. There they lived for the next 17 days, in the midst of rain, wind, and water, eating onions and anything they could snag floating by the windows. “Those were days of terror and fear,” Luzena later recalled. They expected the quaking building to tumble into the torrent at any moment.

  Sacramento, the Wilson’s city of hope, lay in shambles. Sludge, debris, mold, and dead animals covered the town in a shroud of filth. “Our little fortune of barley gone,” she wrote, “and I felt that I should never again be safe.” The Wilson’s tent had vanished, but their stove remained; they set up in the mud, walking over planks to reach the bed. Luzena awoke often during the night and reached down to feel if the water had risen.

  With news of a new gold strike at Nevada City, the family decided to try their luck in another place. Without wagon, oxen, or money, they struck a bargain with a teamster to take Luzena, the children, and their few supplies to Nevada City for $700—Luzena herself was security for the “loan.” She promised the man that if she lived, he’d get his pay. The trip of 60 miles took 12 days for there was no road, and the land had soaked up the winter rains and melting snows like a sponge. The little group spent hours digging the mules and wagon out of the mud. The miserable journey ended with a steep descent down a slippery rock face; the oxen locked their forelegs, and the animals and wagon slid a quarter mile down the mountain.

  The ravines around Nevada City crawled with men armed with pickaxes and shovels or bent over in the knee-deep icy streams, washing soil from panned bits of gold. The Wilsons arrived covered in mud and too poor to afford a tent. Luzena and Mason cut pine branches and built a shelter. She set up the bedding and placed her stove under a pine tree. “I was established,” she recorded, “without further preparation, in my new home.”

  When Mason left to split wood for a better structure, Luzena set about recouping the family finances. Down the road, she spied a tent with a sign that called the place a hotel, and Luzena determined to set up a rival establishment. With a few boards and a few stakes, she set up a table, bought provisions, and set to cooking. By the time Mason returned, 20 miners had chowed down at Luzena’s makeshift table, each sprinkling a one-dollar pinch of gold dust in her hand as they left.

  It seemed everybody around her had money, and the gold dust flowed like water from pockets. Rare fresh fruits and vegetables, even of miserable quality, sold as luxury items. A peach went for $2, and a watermelon might fetch $16! Again, miners willingly paid for home-cooked fare, and Luzena’s efforts prospered once more. After six weeks, she paid back the $700 debt for her transportation from Sacramento.

  Luzena’s business expanded. She’d taken Mason “into partnership,” and as the money rolled in, he’d built a house around the brush home and stove. They gradually added on rooms and took in renters who paid $25 a week. “I became luxurious,” recalled Luzena, “and hired a cook and waiters. Maintaining only my position as managing housekeeper, I retired from active business in the kitchen.”

  The population of Nevada City, also called Coyote Diggins, exploded almost overnight. Luzena’s hard work and never-say-die attitude amassed her family nearly $20,000 invested in the hotel and a small store. With no banks in town, men trusted her with their bags of gold dust, which she stored in milk pans, sometimes going to bed with more than $200,000 beneath her bed. She also kept a bag for storing money she made doing odd sewing jobs for the miners—a sideline that earned her hundreds of dollars in just a few months.

  Luzena’s business success paled, however, next to the professional gamblers who preyed on the restless miners always eager to risk their coins or bags of golden dust on a single bet. Thousands of men unleashed in a town filled with saloons and gambling tables—”they were possessed of the demon of recklessness,” recalled Luzena—meant pistols and knives settled disputes and, one night, brought the danger to Luzena’s front door.

  With Mason away attending court, Luzena sat in her kitchen alone. Suddenly, fists pounded against the walls all around her house and contorted faces pressed against the windows. Cries of “Burn the house!” rent the darkness. Terrified and confused, Luzena opened the door and peaked out at the mob gathered around her hotel. Men shouted, �
�Search for him!” and “Burn him out!” The sheriff tried to explain that one of her boarders had murdered a gambler in the midst of a card game. Luzena had no choice but to let the mob search her place. The murderer remained undiscovered, and Luzena later learned he’d hidden in plain sight, disguised and standing not 10 feet away from her as part of the mob, watching her terror.

  The good days in Nevada City ended abruptly for Luzena after 18 months. Instead of flood, this time fire consumed the town and the Wilsons’ security. Warning cries and clanging bells in the night awoke the family, who escaped with nothing but their nightclothes. With everyone else, they stood helplessly while the town burned—the pine buildings were perfect tinder—turning the skies and surrounding forest into a blazing inferno. The imprint of that night, the buildings burning and crashing to the ground, the fire moaning “like a giant in an agony of pain,” the smoldering ashes, the stricken faces of the homeless, the realization that her family had lost everything again, overwhelmed Luzena. For the first time her strength failed, “and I fell sick.”

  The Wilsons turned their backs on Nevada City and returned to the valley near Sacramento once again. They arrived to find a bloody dispute brewing—a squatters war. John Sutter had claimed much of the valley under Spanish land grants, and then Sutter or his agents had sold off parcels under his grant titles. But the flood of newcomers to California ignored Sutter’s grants and often squatted on the lands. The disputes between rival land claimants often turned bloody.