“God has his crowd and the Devil has his,” she wrote, “and every man and woman is in one or the other.”34 Deeply religious, Nation believed God had chosen her path for her. She needed to fight for the downtrodden. If that meant rescuing prostitutes, preaching temperance, giving away her earnings, smashing saloons, and facing jail, the Kansan grandmother was up for the task.
Born in Kentucky in 1846, Carry’s family moved to Missouri, to Texas, and back to Missouri, in the turbulent years before and during the Civil War. At age 19, she fell in love with Charles Gloyd, a boarder at her parent’s home. Gloyd had been a captain in the Union army, studied medicine, and taught school. Her parents disapproved of Gloyd’s drinking, however, and forbid Carry to speak with him. But Carry craved affection and failed to resist the handsome man who read Shakespeare to her and spoke of his admiration and love for her. They exchanged secret letters, passed between them in a book.
Antialcohol crusader Carry Nation. Library of Congress
The circumstances left Carry torn between duty to her parents and love for Charles. Finally, with “heart burnings and scalding tears,” she implored him to establish himself and prove to her parents he could support a family. Gloyd moved away, and the courtship continued via letters for the next two years. Carry’s mother did her best to drive her daughter from the relationship, but the couple wed in November 1867.
Troubles burdened the marriage almost immediately. Gloyd turned distant or stayed out late, leaving his bride “hungry for his caresses and love.”35 The drinking problem she’d ignored during courtship robbed them of happiness. Her husband staggered home drunk and shut himself away. Gloyd drank too much to work and spent what money they had on liquor.
Six months into the marriage, knowing she was pregnant, Carry returned to her parents’ home. “I do love my mother and father so much,” she wrote Charles, “but there is no one half so dear as my husband.”36 Her mother threatened to turn her out if she continued writing Gloyd. In September 1868, Carry gave birth to her daughter, Charlien. Her parents forbid her to tell Gloyd the child had been born.
She saw Charles once more, her mother’s threat ringing in her ears: she could never return home again if she decided to stay with her husband. Gloyd died on March 20, 1869, a young man riddled by alcohol. Carry would always regret leaving him, and she kept his romantic letters for the rest of her life. At age 22, she faced widowhood with a baby and no money.
She felt anger at herself and her parents, and the months ahead filled her with doubts and remorse and worries. She isolated herself, felt lonely, and questioned whether God loved her and would help her. Years later, she viewed these dark years as a test that created her future role as activist. “Had I married a man I could have loved, God never could have used me…. The very thing (a happy marriage) I was denied caused me to have a desire to secure it for others.”37
Carry moved in with Charles’s mother and eventually earned a teacher’s certificate to support herself. But she lost her job after losing her temper with the district superintendent, and she vowed in her diary to control her thoughts and make no harsh retorts. The path to happiness, she decided, lay in conforming and keeping to a woman’s role in life. In December 1874, she did what many widows did to secure their future—she married a widower named David Nation, a man of 47 with five children, in need of a wife and homemaker.
David Nation worked as a lawyer, farmer, and minister, sometimes with little success. The family moved to Texas. At one point, David abandoned Carry to deal alone with their failing farm. The heavy workload on top of financial worries left her ill. Money soon caused a rift in the marriage, and Carry again felt she could not secure her husband’s love. But she created a place for herself, starting two successful boardinghouses, which provided income as well as a sense of independence.
Religion became her comfort, especially when Charlien developed a jaw disease in 1880 that would eventually cause her to lose her teeth and destroy her health. Carry borrowed money to take her daughter for treatments. Fearing Charlien would never marry, Carry hustled the 20-year-old into marriage with Alex McNabb, a reaction that haunted Carry in years to come. She wondered if the seed of Charlien’s poor health sprang from her father’s drunkenness.
In 1884, Carry Nation experienced a “baptism of the Holy Ghost,” a spiritual awakening. She began having visions where God laid out the path she should follow. She embraced the emotional side of religion, shouting, clapping, and falling to her knees. Instead of loyalty to one church, she saw the whole world as the mission for her good works. She preached, she corrected—and in a time when males dominated church leadership—Carry seemed a threatening figure to the status quo. She never apologized for her religious fervor, taming critics this way: “I like to go just as far as the farthest. I like my religion like my oysters and beefsteak—piping hot!”38
In 1890, David and Carry moved to Kansas; the state was a hotbed of activism—Populist politics, woman’s suffrage, and temperance issues that attracted Carry. After six years they moved again, this time to Oklahoma. Here Carry trained as an osteopathic healer and continued her organizations to help the needy. But she could not help her daughter when Charlien arrived to visit in 1897 with her own children. Her daughter’s unhappiness in her marriage, her health broken by the jaw disease and repeated pregnancies, left Carry at a loss.
Back in Kansas in 1899, Carry joined the antialcohol crusade, which politicized more women than any other issue. When men drank, women and children suffered physical abuse and loss of home and security. A wife’s wages belonged to her husband; he could drink them away, and she had no right to protect her family’s finances. Saloons offered male-only retreats; a man abandoned his wife to go drink and maybe even to cavort with prostitutes who also inhabited saloons. Women feared not only for their health and homes, they feared also for their children, who might be lured into bars to smoke and drink.
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in Ohio in 1874 and then established across the country, served as a political training ground for thousands of women. The group’s methods involved praying and singing outside bars and saloons, what Carry called “moral suasion.” In 1881, Kansas banned the sale and manufacture of alcohol, but barkeepers paid off politicians and police who ignored the law and protected the saloons. Without the right to vote, women had little real power to change laws or kick out corrupt elected officials.
Within a year of returning to Kansas, Carry Nation, who’d lost her first husband and home to alcohol, undertook a stronger approach than singing and praying. Her method required smashing. In a quote from the Kansas City Star in January 1901, she defended her violent methods: “Moral suasion! If there’s anything that’s weak and worse than useless it’s this moral suasion…. These hell traps of Kansas have fattened for twenty years on moral suasion. The saloon man loves moral suasion…. If a snake came into your house to kill your boy you would not use moral suasion you would look for a poker!”39
Carry Nation was not the first to smash barrels of whiskey, but she soon became a symbol of the radical prohibition movement. She took the first plunge in June 1900 at Kiowa, Kansas, following God’s orders to smash up the “joints.” She entered several saloons that day, using bricks to smash anything that would shatter and then delivering a sermon to surprised gawkers. The mayor, sheriff, and town attorney debated what to do—and then let her go. The news of her raid spread quickly. Newspapers just as quickly labeled her an old lady “of unsound mind,” who should be “kept at home by her people.”40
But Mrs. Nation did not stay home. In late December, she boarded a train for Wichita, where she destroyed property at several establishments, most notably smashing up the elegant Carey Hotel bar to the tune of $3,000 worth of damage, shattering mirrors, bottles, and crystal glasses, and destroying a large nude painting, “Cleopatra at the Bath.” This time police threw Carry in jail, where officers quarantined her in the basement to keep her quiet, leaving her to lie on the floor
. She viewed it all as a tribulation to overcome and remained confident that God would deliver her from her troubles.
Released after nine days in jail, an unrepentant Nation returned to smashing, this time with a small group of like-minded women. On January 21, 1901, armed for the first time with a hatchet, she led her followers on a smashing expedition through Wichita. Thousands gathered in the streets for the entertainment value. One saloon worker shoved a gun against her head, and a policeman knocked her down. All the women were hauled off to jail but were released after promising no more joint smashing in Wichita for 24 hours.
Carry left immediately for Enterprise, Kansas, where she delivered a temperance talk and led a crowd to a nearby saloon where she demolished the interior and broke windows. The saloon owner hired prostitutes to beat and whip Carry; she left town bruised and battered. A month later, she stormed the Kansas legislature and scolded the members, ending with, “A good solid vote is the best thing in the world with which to smash the saloons. You wouldn’t give me the vote, so I had to use a rock!”41
Her constant travel and devotion to her cause strained Carry’s already unhappy marriage. In 1901, David Nation filed for divorce, charging that Carry was “unmindful of her duties as a housewife,” had grown bossy, and subjected him to “gross neglect.”42 The scandalous divorce hurt a woman who saw herself as trying to save American families. But Carry’s embarrassment proved good fun for her detractors, including Thomas Edison, who made a film titled Why Mr. Nation Wants a Divorce. In the silent movie, Mr. Nation feebly attempts to care for several children, before giving up and crawling into bed with a bottle of whiskey. Mrs. Nation, portrayed by a robust actor in a black dress, barges into the room, snatches the bottle from her husband’s lips, beats him, and then spanks him.
Carry’s actions sparked saloon smashings across the country and as far away as France. From 1901 on, Carry Nation lived in a whirlwind of celebrity and travel. She continued smashing illegal saloons in Kansas—calling her assaults “hatchetations”—and sometimes leading an army of several thousand through the streets. As one supporter noted, “It’s a wonder there are not millions of Mrs. Nations in the world, after the suffering which women have endured from husbands or sons who are drunkards…. She is in the right … enforcing the law.”43
In states without prohibition laws, she shoved her way in to shake hands and preach to the sinners. She did not shy away from invading the worst sort of joints, filled with drunkards and prostitutes. “If Jesus ate with publicans and sinners I can talk to them,” she wrote.44 She played off her name, Carry Amelia Nation, for she would “carry a nation” from its abuse of alcohol and nicotine.
She was a sensation, an oddity, a prophet for change, and even people who decried her violent methods and thought her a lunatic wanted a piece of her notoriety. She attracted crowds and sold newspapers. And if Carry wasn’t interesting enough just as she was, papers fabricated tidbits about her, even claiming she wielded her hatchet as a six-foot Amazon would and required extra-large policemen to wrestle her to the ground.
Nation traveled into hostile territory when she took on big cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, where one letter writer assured her “there are a good many saloon keepers here itching for your coming … awaiting you with a great big club.”45 The merciless Eastern press dubbed her ugly, savage, revolting, unsexed or sexually perverted, manly, and “wild and westernly.” She was dangerous, a woman outside her place. Many journalists branded her insane. Nation took it all in stride. “They tell me I am unlady-like; that I’m out of my sphere, or ought to work in a different way. But when I’m doing God’s work I don’t go to the devil for methods!” she told the Topeka Daily Capital.46
Clearly Carry Nation was different from the refined wives who worked for causes in the East. She wasn’t pale and tightly laced in a corset; she was stout, tanned, and plainly dressed. Her free use of “hell” and “damnation” in her lectures shocked Eastern sensibilities, but she treated everyone as equals and talked to people like a mother would. She was witty, funny, if a bit rough, and her plain speech usually brought people around to at least listen. She’d proved too radical for the WCTU, though, which distanced itself from Carry’s smashing, claiming Mrs. Nation “has a method all her own, and one which is not found in the plan or the work of WCTU.”47
Between 1901 and 1909, police carted Carry off to jail more than 30 times, and she was hauled before judges and fined for destruction of property and inciting riots. During one smashing spree, she was arrested and let go four times in one day. To help pay her court fines, Carry sold little pewter hatchet pins and water bottles; most of her other earnings went to charity. She also published and sold subscriptions to two newspapers, the Smasher’s Mail and the Hatchet. In 1904, she self-published an autobiography explaining her life and actions: The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation.
She appeared anywhere she could to reach her audience, performing onstage in a Broadway play, lecturing in vaudeville and burlesque houses, and spending the summer months on the Chautauqua touring circuit. “I am fishing,” she wrote. “I go where the fish are … I found the theatres stocked with the boys of our country. They are not found in churches.”48
In 1905, Carry moved to Oklahoma where she successfully worked to put prohibition into the new state constitution. She next moved to Washington, DC, agitating for a national prohibition law. In 1908, her fame carried her to Scotland and England, where she was touted as the American Saloon Smasher. At age 63 in December 1909, Carry Nation carried out her last joint smashing at Union Station in Washington, DC. Exhausted from all her work and travels, she finally settled down in Arkansas. She purchased a home in Eureka Springs, christened it Hatchet Hall, and turned it into a safe haven for the wives of alcoholics. Carry herself often cooked the meals there. She also established a school and a home to assist the elderly.
Carry continued her summer speaking tours but now spent more time with her family. Charlien, her health drastically deteriorated, arrived from Texas with her children and lived under Carry’s care. In 1910, Carry fought to prevent Charlien’s husband, who had physically abused his wife, from committing her daughter to an insane asylum—a battle Carry lost. It broke Carry’s heart and robbed her of hope; her niece noted this last act ”was more than she could live with.”49 Carry Nation died June 9, 1911, of heart failure.
Carry Nation galvanized thousands of women and men to activism in the temperance movement. She also fought for women’s rights and against tobacco and never turned away from helping those in need. Her headstone bears the epitaph she wished: SHE HATH DONE WHAT SHE COULD. More to the point, however, may be the way she sometimes signed her name: “Carry Nation, widow and prophet of God, friend of mankind and enemy of alcohol,” written boldly across the paper.
6
CLASH OF CULTURES
“My People talked fearfully that winter about those they called our white brothers.”
—Sarah Winnemucca
Where white pioneer women often saw an unforgiving wilderness, Native American women saw a loved and familiar home. From the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains to the Southwestern desert and the forests of the Pacific Northwest, Native American women lived very differently from the white newcomers. But they also lived differently from one another—with different languages, beliefs, homes, clothing, and food.
Though Indian men hunted and fished for food and protected their tribes from enemies, a village’s well-being depended heavily on women’s work. As with white women, Indian women’s lives chiefly revolved around home and children, food, clothing, and shelter. Life was difficult and food sometimes scarce, especially in winter or for tribes living in desert areas. Generosity with food, a symbol of welcome and nurturing, earned a woman respect, and in many Indian societies, women held the keys to food distribution.
A woman’s knowledge of edible plants helped her gather fruits, nuts, seeds, roots, bulbs, and herbs. In farming tribes, women tended and harves
ted crops and preserved food for winter. Among the Hopi and Zuni people of the Southwest, women owned the fields, and men often worked them. At harvest time, women took charge, drying and grinding vast amounts of corn into meal. Kneeling before the grinding stone for hours at a time, women murmured prayers and songs of thanks for the good harvest. A woman considered grinding 25 pounds of cornmeal a good day’s work and shared her bounty with relatives who had no daughters to help them.
This Edward Curtis photo shows Hopi women grinding corn. legendsofamerica.com
After a buffalo hunt, a Plains woman joined in a day of feasting and listening to stories of the hunters’ bravery. She faced hours of hard and bloody work as she butchered the 1,500-pound animals, cutting the meat into long, thin spirals to hang over drying racks. Sun and the plains wind dried and blackened the strips into jerky. Then it would be ready to store or grind into pemmican, a protein-rich mixture of dried meat, berries, and fat.
An Apsaroke (Crow) woman works on a buffalo hide in this Edward Curtis photo. Library of Congress
Outside the camp lay rafts of buffalo skins, the raw hides stretched and pegged to the ground. Women scraped away the fat and tissue, applying chemicals extracted from the animal’s brain, liver, and fat, and slowly working the skin into a soft usable material. Some hides, left to harden, were turned into storage cases called parfleches. Sinews became thread; bones became needles and tools. Indian women wasted nothing of the great animal, thousands of pounds of meat, skin, organs, and bone, all used and appreciated as a gift from the Creator.
Plains women sewed their homes from buffalo skins; a large teepee needed about 22 hides. Like white settlers, Indian women often called on one another for assistance in building their homes, preparing a feast for those who helped. The finished teepee, and all the furnishings and equipment inside, belonged to the woman. Whenever the tribe moved, she took down, packed, unpacked, and set up her family’s teepee at the new location. Women in other regions also built the family home: the Navajo hogan, the Apache wickiup, and the mud bricks and adobe apartments of the Pueblo people.
Women of the Frontier Page 15