While the Wilsons pondered their next step, they took over an abandoned hotel, a place infested with hundreds of rats. The rodents scurried over the floors and raced from room to room through holes gnawed into the wood. The brazen creatures snapped at Luzena’s heels and chewed the legs of the chairs as the family sat in them. At night, Luzena lay their bedding atop tables but couldn’t sleep for fear of attacking rodents.
Sacramento had risen from the flood—a host of new brick buildings replaced ramshackle wooden dwellings and tents. Sidewalks protected against mud; actual stores, not just boards plopped across barrels, carried all manner of dry goods, food, and hardware. Civilized Sacramento had a bank, a photographer’s shop, and mail delivery by pony express while stagecoaches and steamer ships constantly spewed forth new people. Luzena even attended the theater for a production of Julius Caesar at which a singer entertained the crowd during intermissions.
But the undercurrents of gambling, drunkenness, and violence remained, and only a month after the fire, Luzena and her family moved on from Sacramento. They traveled into the foothills, past wild oats and antelopes and elk. After several days, they set up camp near a stream under a canopy of an old oak tree. They slept in a tent made from tree boughs and the canvas covering from their wagon. The area belonged to a Spaniard, a rancher named Manuel Vaca.
Almost penniless again, Mason began cutting the oats and making hay to sell in San Francisco. Luzena once more dug in and began a hotel business, setting up her stove and camp kettle beneath a tree and making a sign that read WILSON’S HOTEL. She crafted a table from the wagon boards and used stumps and logs for chairs. Guests slept rolled up in bedding beneath a haystack, and for one dollar Luzena provided breakfast.
Once more her hotel prospered, and when the grass got stomped down to dust, she merely moved her stove. A row of nails hammered into tree trunks held her utensils, cups, and a shelf for plates. Her hotel earned a reputation as the best stop between Sacramento and Benicia.
Living amidst Spanish cowboys, Luzena thought nothing of traveling 12 miles on horseback to visit her nearest English-speaking female neighbor. The Wilsons also attended dances and feasts with their Spanish neighbors. The brilliant colors worn by the Spanish ladies amazed Luzena, who delighted in savory stews, piles of tortillas, hot chilies, and “tolerable whisky.”
As fall approached, just as the family began building a house, rains and swollen rivers destroyed the hay crop they’d planned to use as partial payment for their land. The only answer was harder work at the hotel and attempts at farming for the next year. Then another blow fell, when a meeting of land commissioners in San Francisco declared that, “among the disputed boundary lines were those of the grant upon which we had bought,” Luzena reported. Suddenly, surveyors and squatters staked out pieces of the Wilsons’ land, even throwing up a crude cabin to mark their claims. Mason chased the squatters off with a rifle while Luzena waited, terrified he’d be killed by the squatters. It took years before the title of land was established in their favor; meanwhile, the Wilsons fought a continual battle with squatters.
As the years passed, Luzena gave birth to a daughter and helped establish a school for area children. With no local doctor, she also served as both physician and apothecary for neighbors, using a medicine chest left her by a physician who’d passed through. She dosed patients with calomel and quinine, felt pulses, and checked tongues. “I grew so familiar with the business that I almost fancied myself a genuine doctor,” she noted, adding, “I don’t think I ever killed anybody, and I am quite sure I cured a good many of my patients.”
Like other Western women, Luzena Wilson, forty-niner, worked incredibly hard and persevered to keep her family financially secure, starting over with nothing more at hand than her own hard work and gumption. She rose from flood and fire to begin again, her story yet another tale of the fortunes won and lost in the early gold rush days of California.
Clara Brown
African American Pioneer
In early Colorado, pioneer Clara Brown’s hard work, patience, and generosity turned the former slave into a beloved figure.
Clara, born around 1800 in Virginia, was taken by her master, Ambrose Smith, into Kentucky, at that time part of America’s frontier. On Smith’s farm, teenage Clara “married” a fellow slave named Richard and over the next few years gave birth to four children. One daughter drowned, and tragedy marked the family again when Smith died in 1835. In a cruel blow that shattered so many enslaved families, Clara’s entire family was sold at auction to settle Smith’s estate. On one horrendous day, she lost her husband; her son, Richard; and her daughters, Margaret and Eliza Jane. Clara herself was purchased by George Brown.
For the next 20 years, Clara served the Brown family, all the time seeking information about what had happened to her husband and children. She learned that her daughter, Margaret, had died. Her husband vanished from the records; her son was sold so many times that his trail ended too. Clara’s life quest became finding Eliza Jane, a nearly impossible task.
George Brown’s children granted Clara her freedom upon his death in 1857. Per Kentucky law, she had to leave the state within a year. Even with manumission papers, a former slave’s freedom was never guaranteed—if caught in a slave state Clara could have been sold back into slavery.
At age 57, having known nothing of life but slavery, Clara headed to Missouri where she worked as a maid for a family that eventually moved west to Leavenworth, Kansas. Clara went with them, nurturing the slim hope that, with so many people heading west, Eliza Jane or someone who knew of her would be among them. Clara remained in Leavenworth for a year, staying behind and starting a laundry business when the family she worked for ventured on to California.
But news of gold strikes in Colorado pushed Clara into a decision of her own. At age 59, elderly by the day’s standard, she would test her dreams against the wild and golden times in Colorado.
Clara Brown, Colorado businesswoman. Western History Collection, Denver Public Library
Clara bartered her passage to Colorado in exchange for work. The only African American in the wagon train, she cooked and cared for 26 men (out of 60) during the difficult journey of nearly 700 miles. After eight weeks, the party reached the tiny town of Auraria, a ramshackle collection of buildings, tents, and mud on Cherry Creek, a setup mirrored in the neighboring village of Denver.
Clara quickly found work in a German bakery. A religious and compassionate woman, she plunged into the community’s church life and opened her one-bedroom home to prayer meetings. Clara never belonged to any one church but supported the work of all denominations. She began the habit of cooking enough food to feed the hungry and any others down on their luck.
When the bakery owners parted ways, Clara took her washtubs and scrubboard into the mountains to Central City, seeking an even better job opportunity. The mountains’ rugged beauty looming against bright blue skies contrasted with the scene below of hacked-down trees, filthy streets, and buildings tottering on stilts meant to keep them from tumbling into the gulches.
Once again, Clara established a laundry business. And oh, did the miners swarming the mountainsides yearn for a handy woman to do their scrubbing and rinsing for them! At fifty cents a shirt—paid in gold dust—and with a thriving business, Brown’s earnings grew spectacularly. Ever frugal, she saved every penny not spent on helping others. She also earned income as a midwife. Clara astutely invested her earnings in property and mining shares, amassing a fortune of nearly $10,000—a regal sum. She eventually owned about 16 parcels of land in several places including Central City, Boulder, and Idaho Springs.
Just six months after the end of the Civil War, Clara sold some of these assets to finance a greater project: finding Eliza Jane. She could now safely return to Kentucky and search for her daughter. She made the trip east in October 1865, but the journey of her heart’s desire ended in disappointment. Clara, however, made the most of her situation—she paid the costs of bringing 16 former
slaves back with her to Colorado. The venture cost a great deal of money, and together with losses suffered during fires and floods, and her generosity to others, Brown’s fortune dwindled.
But that spirit of charity earned her the respect and gratitude of many in Colorado, a newly minted state of the union in 1876. In the spring of 1879, Clara traveled to Kansas to help African Americans, most of whom were former slaves, who’d flocked west in hopes of a better future. Many were starving, sick, and without resources to begin a new life. Seventy-nine-year-old Clara remained in Kansas through the summer. Central City’s newspaper, the Register, noted Clara’s return in the September 23 issue:
Aunt Clara Brown, whom everybody in Central knows, returned from a visit to Kansas some few days since, wither she went to look into the condition of the colored refuges and in the interest of the sufferers generally. There are about 5,000 all told…. Aunt Clara says they are an industrious and sober class of people who only ask an opportunity to make an honest living.14
As Clara entered her 80s, her health began to fail, and she suffered the swellings and shortened breath of congestive heart disease. After Clara’s 20 years in Central City, her doctor advised she seek a lower altitude for her health—she should move down the mountains to Denver. The people of Central City and Denver rallied around Clara Brown, raising funds and finding a donated Denver home for her to live in. Then, in the spring of 1881, the Society of Colorado Pioneers, once open only to white men but now expanded to include women, named Clara—a pioneer of 1859—a member.
But the most amazing reward of Clara’s long life came in 1882, when she miraculously discovered that her daughter Eliza Jane, lost to Clara at the slave auction 50 years before, was living in Council Bluffs, Iowa. It is unclear how Clara discovered her daughter’s whereabouts, but the two reunited in March 1882. Local newspapers reported the amazing story.
Clara died a few years later in October 1885. The Society of Colorado Pioneers summed up Clara’s Brown’s achievements in a eulogy: “the kind old friend whose heart always responded to the cry of distress, and who, rising from the humble position of slave to the angelic type of a noble woman, won our sympathy and commanded our respect.”15
Bethenia Owens-Adair
Female Physician
“The regret of my life up to the age of thirty-five,” wrote Bethenia Owens-Adair, “was that I had not been born a boy, for I realized very early in life that a girl was hampered and hemmed in on all sides simply by the accident of sex.”16 Over the course of her life, Bethenia challenged her family and neighbors’ notions about the proper place of a woman and carved her own path to success.
Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair. Oregon Historical Society
One of nine children, Bethenia traveled to Oregon with her parents as a toddler in 1843. She spent her girlhood helping her mother raise the younger children, “for children did not remain babies long when other babies came along so fast and crowded them out of the cradle.” Small and mighty, Bethenia worked hard at her chores, craved the outdoors, and with a rebellious streak, earned a reputation as a “tom-boy.”
By age 14, in 1854, she’d had only a smattering of education, attending “three months’ school in our neighborhood.” That year, Bethenia married Legrand Hill, and with help from her parents, the young couple set up housekeeping in a 12-by-14-foot log cabin, stocked with quilts and sheets she’d sewn herself.
Even before the April 1856 birth of their son, George, Bethenia’s practical nature recognized Legrand’s “want of industry and perseverance.” Her husband frittered away time, often delving into trading and speculating, and losing money. The marriage eroded, hastened by Legrand’s treatment of George, whom he spanked “unmercifully.” When her angry husband threw the little boy on the bed one day, Bethenia left him. At 18, she returned to her parents’ home, broken in spirit and health, marked by the disgrace of her failed marriage. “It seemed to me now that I should never be happy or strong again,” she wrote. The stigma of divorce “would cling to me all my future life, and sickly babe of two years in my arms, all rose darkly before me.”
Barely able to read and write, Bethenia plunged into a whirlwind of self-improvement. While her mother watched George, Bethenia rose early to milk cows and help with washing, ironing, and housework before heading to school with her younger siblings. She progressed quickly in her reading and studies, and in the fall of 1859, with her divorce decree final and her maiden name restored, she “felt like a free woman,” she confided. “The world began to look bright once more.”
Bethenia turned down her father’s offers to help. She worked any job—sewing, nursing, and washing—to support herself and her son. She made arrangements to teach school at a little church over a summer. Out of her 16 students, three were more advanced than Bethenia. She smuggled their books home at night, preparing the next day’s lessons with the help of her brother-in-law, “and they never suspected my incompetency,” she noted.
Bethenia used her savings to further her own education in Astoria, settling into a hotel with George and a nephew, her board paid by her sister in exchange for six months of work. But her entrance exams placed her in the primary classes—a great embarrassment to Bethenia, as she recited lessons with children as young as eight. By the end of nine months, she’d passed into the advanced classes, mostly by hard work, poring over her books until the small hours of the morning. “Nothing was permitted,” she wrote, “to come between me and this, the greatest opportunity of my life.”
The next few years brought Bethenia success as a milliner and dressmaker. When a new business threatened her livelihood, she traveled to San Francisco and trained with the best milliner in town, and then returned home to booming business with the latest fashions at her fingertips. Her hard work paved the way for financial freedom and the chance to continue her dream of furthering her education. When she placed George in college in 1870 at the University of California, Berkeley, she expanded her business to include nursing—and found she possessed a gift for doctoring. Studying a borrowed a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, a medical book, Bethenia spun a new dream, a new goal to chase: Bethenia Owens, doctor.
Spurred by her quest, Bethenia spent an entire year planning and saving before traveling to Philadelphia to enter the Eclectic School of Medicine. Only eclectic and homeopathic schools routinely allowed women students. Eclectic medicine offered treatments based on gentler remedies and plant-based medicines; they were alternatives to the harsh medical practices of bleeding, purging, and dosing patients with dangerous ingredients like mercury. Bethenia settled in, hired a tutor, attended clinics and lectures at a nearby hospital, and studied like a woman possessed.
After graduation, Bethenia returned to her hometown of Roseburg, Oregon, and found people viewed her as an oddity, or worse—a pushy woman not content to stay near home and hearth. The six male physicians in town tried to embarrass her with an invitation to an autopsy. The autopsy involved male genital organs, and any modest female would decline the viewing. Bethenia answered their stares by stating that one part of the human body should be as sacred to the physician as another. She stayed put. One doctor threatened to leave if a female remained present at a male autopsy. Bethenia countered that it was no different than a male doctor overseeing the autopsy of a woman. With a last stab at sending her from the room, the physicians asked Bethenia to perform the dissection. Bethenia stepped up to the table and began the autopsy. Afterward, as news of the event spread, people treated her with disgust, shock, and a sense that something scandalous had occurred. Public reaction and hostility drove Bethenia to leave Roseburg and, with her sister, move to Portland.
In Portland, Bethenia ran a practice that offered traditional treatment alongside new ones—such as electrical and medicated baths. George entered medical school, and Bethenia made good money in her practice. But she longed for further education at a regular medical college. In September 1878, she again made the long journey to Philadelphia, hoping to enter the Jefferson Medical College
. But the school would not admit female students. Bethenia was advised to try the University of Michigan’s medical school; she earned acceptance and studied 16 hours a day for the next nine months. In June 1880, Bethenia Owens graduated, a “full-fledged University Physician of the old school.”
For the next six months, Bethenia worked in Chicago, immersing herself in hospital and clinic work. She then gave herself a gift—a trip to Europe, traveling with her son and two fellow female physicians, where they toured the great cities and Bethenia bought state-of-the-art medical instruments to use in her new practice back in Oregon.
For years, Bethenia claimed she was married to her work, and that was fine by her. But at an Oregon’s women’s suffrage meeting, she met an old friend, John Adair. The two married in July 1884 and later shared a great joy when, at age 47, Bethenia had a baby daughter. But the baby died a few days after birth, leaving Bethenia inconsolable. She agreed to move to a more remote farm where she soon began providing medical care for her far-flung neighbors. Called out day or night, she traveled to patients on foot and horseback, through mud and swollen streams and howling winds. In 1891, she and John adopted a boy and named him after his father.
After 11 years of farm work and doctoring, the couple moved to North Yakima, Washington. But Bethenia felt her skills had languished buried on the farm, a move she came to regret. Soon she returned to school, earning a postgraduate degree at the Chicago Clinical School.
As Bethenia grew older, she tired of balancing her medical practice with the wifely demands of her household duties. Her solution proved simple—she gave up the housework. Hitting her stride again, Bethenia kept to her busy schedule, rising early for a cold bath and exercise. She retained the satisfaction of having a large medical practice until her retirement in 1905.
Women of the Frontier Page 9