America's Women

by Gail Collins

  “HE WAS IN GREAT HASTE TO MARRY

  TO SAVE A HALF SECTION OF LAND”

  Once they reached the West, the early female pioneers enjoyed all the advantages that come with being scarce. “Even I have had men come forty miles over the mountains just to look at me, and I never was called a handsome woman, in my best days, even by my most ardent admirers,” said Luzena Wilson. Irwin, Colorado, had only one respectable unmarried woman in a town that was filled with ambitious young men. A mining engineer noted in his diary that forty men were paying court to the eligible female, the sister of Mrs. Reed, the camp doctor’s wife. The Reeds set up a system, limiting the parlor to six callers at a time and the callers to a maximum of “4 minutes on sofa with girl.”

  Although the gender balance evened out fairly quickly, single women who were willing to get married remained in great demand. The wife of an army officer seeking a nurse for her children deliberately picked out a very homely candidate. But, she reported in despair, the girl “had not been in the fort three days before the man who laid our carpets proposed to her.” The matches made under such circumstances tended to be more economic than romantic bargains. Martha Gay Masterson recalled that as soon as her family set up camp in Oregon, a well-dressed man galloped up and begged her father to present him to the oldest daughter. “He was in great haste to marry to save a half section of land, as the law stated that all married men were entitled to a certain amount of land if married before a set date,” she said. Although Martha’s father angrily announced that he had “no daughter to barter for land,” the man found a willing girl before the deadline.

  Despite the rough manners of the early western men, a woman with any claim to respectability could expect to be treated with great deference, if not outright awe. (When Elizabeth Gunn went to church with her children in Sonora, the men sitting along the street stood up and saluted as she passed by.) But the women desperately missed female friendships, and having so many single men in one place inevitably led to the kind of behavior that they found unpleasant. They complained in their letters about widespread drinking, gambling, swearing, and violence. “In the short space of 24 days,” wrote Louise Clappe, the wife of a mining camp doctor, to her sister, “we have had murders, fearful accidents, bloody deaths, a mob, whippings, a hanging, an attempted suicide and a fatal duel.”

  Before they went west, most pioneer women had lived in houses that had heat, soft beds, and other comforts. But in the crowded cities and gold mining camps of California, they slept in leaky tents, sat on crates, and cooked over campfires. They slogged through mud and dust to get to Sunday services and gave birth to their children alone. Nevertheless, a lot of them seemed to enjoy themselves. “I like this wild and barbarous life,” wrote Louise Clappe, who on another occasion had told her sister, “everybody ought to go to the mines, just to see how little it takes to make people comfortable in the world.”

  “MORE ACTIVE AND INDUSTRIOUS THAN THE MEN”

  The women in the far West before the settlers arrived included both Native Americans and the Mexicans, who had been living in the area for centuries. White Americans generally had a low opinion of Mexicans—as they did about any people they were trying to displace. Nonetheless, they were impressed by the warmth of Mexican families. “Their manners toward one and another is engaging and that of the children and the parents most affectionate,” wrote Frederick Olmstead. But Americans also believed that the men were indolent and the women made to do all the work. “Riding on horseback and lounging lazily is the gamut of their days and the women bear all the responsibility of the house,” wrote another observer in 1828. “These beautiful creatures are without a doubt more active and industrious than the men.”

  Ironically, the Mexicans said the same thing about the Indians. Indian women, wrote one Mexican missionary in 1801, “are slaves to the men, obliged to maintain them with the sweat of their brow.” (Visitors to frontier towns said the same thing about white men, who often went off hunting or drinking while the women stayed home and worked.) Once the Americans became a growing economic presence in the West, many wealthy Mexicans wanted their daughters to intermarry and extend the family’s political influence. The children of these marriages tended to adopt the language and manners of Americans. If their skin was light and they were wealthy, they were accepted and thenceforth referred to as “Spanish.” Otherwise, they were still subject to discrimination.

  Both the Mexicans and white Americans saw the Indians as enemies or targets for conversion. When Mexican priests built a mission, there was always a dormitory for the unmarried Indian girls, where they were cloistered off under the guard of an elderly Indian matron. “She never let them out of her sight. In the afternoon, after dinner, she locked them up and gave the key to the Priest,” said a woman who had been brought to a mission as a foundling. The girls must have been hot, uncomfortable, and bored, but shutting them away was not totally irrational. Mexican soldiers had no compunctions about raping native women, sometimes lassoing them like cattle and shooting any male Indian who tried to intervene. After the women were raped, they were often considered “contaminated” by their own people, and “every white child born among them for a long period was secretly strangled and buried,” said a Scotsman who had married into an Indian family.

  Neither the Mexican nor the American missionaries went to the trouble of trying to look at the world from the Indians’ point of view. One of the first white women to reach Oregon was a missionary, Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, who came out with her doctor husband, Marcus, to work among the Cayuse tribe. The Indians were eager to hear about farming techniques, but they weren’t interested in becoming Christians. The Cayuse women didn’t like the idea of giving up the status that came with farming so that they could emulate white housewives and stay indoors. Narcissa’s opinion of the Indians went downhill rapidly, and she began worrying that her family might “suffer ourselves to sink down to their standards.” The Cayuse, meanwhile, saw the number of white people moving into their territory and realized, far more clearly than the missionaries, what it would mean for their own futures. After an outbreak of measles killed their children while passing over those of the white interlopers, the Cayuse held the mission responsible and killed the Whitmans, along with a dozen others.

  “I WENT INTO THE SPORTING LIFE

  FOR BUSINESS REASONS”

  The Home Missionary, which was published in early San Francisco, estimated that half the women in frontier California were of “the loose element.” That may have been an exaggeration, but the anecdotal evidence suggested that prostitutes were extremely well represented among the white women who first settled in early western cities. The “fair but frail,” as prostitutes were called, often chose their profession with their eyes open. “I went into the sporting life for business reasons and for no other,” said Mattie Silks, a Denver madam. “It was a way in those days for a woman to make money and I made it.” In addition to providing lonely men with company, western prostitutes allegedly made hygienic history by becoming the first American women to shave under their armpits. It was a way of demonstrating to their customers that they were free of lice.

  Prostitution could certainly be profitable. A Frenchman named Albert Bernard was shocked to discover his countrywomen charged $16 an evening for simply sitting at a man’s table. “Nearly all these women at home were streetwalkers of the cheapest sort,” he complained. “But out here for only a few minutes, they ask a hundred times as much as they were used to getting in Paris.” Still, prostitutes who made enough money to retire in comfort were probably about as common as miners who struck it rich and managed to hang on to the profits. The women who worked in high-end bordellos were perpetually in debt to the madam, who paid for their clothing, jewelry, and perfume. And few western prostitutes made it to a bordello. Almost every town had a “line”—a row of one-room wooden shacks or cribs, where the whores lived and plied their trade. These women covered the bottom half of their beds with oilcloth, to protect
the blanket from men who never bothered to take off their dirty boots. On paydays, the demand was so heavy they sometimes serviced eighty men in a single night. An even lower step was one of the “hog ranches” operating along the trails where muleskinners, stagecoach drivers, and teamsters stopped briefly to take their pleasure. “In my experience I have never seen a lower, more beastly set of people of both sexes,” wrote a soldier who visited one of these establishments.

  The most desperate stories involved Chinese women, who were brought to California as virtual slaves. Some were recruited—or simply kidnapped—from the streets of Canton; others were deluded by men who pretended to marry them and promised to take them off to a better life in the West. Some were sold by their parents. Lilac Chen recalled bitterly that she was only six years old when “that worthless father, my own father, imagine…sold me on the ferry boat. Locked me in the cabin while he was negotiating my sale.” Girls who were purchased for $50 in China were resold for $1,000 in San Francisco. In the American brothels, Chinese girls were famous for their cleanliness, shaving their bodies and bathing frequently. Almost all of them, however, contracted venereal diseases from their clients. Some girls were chained to their beds and drugged to keep them from lashing out at their customers. By the time they were twenty years old, most had died, committed suicide, or been murdered by their employers. Toward the end of the century, a twenty-five-year-old missionary named Donaldina Cameron began a crusade against the trade in Chinese women. Working on tips that often came from the prostitutes, she led the police to the cribs and opium dens, sometimes chopping down the doors herself. Many of the girls she rescued found jobs or married, and in 1928 one of them, Yoke Keen, became the first Chinese woman to graduate from Stanford University.

  “A SMART WOMAN CAN DO VERY WELL

  IN THIS COUNTRY”

  Luzena Wilson was cooking biscuits for her family over a campfire in a mining town near Sacramento when a man came up and offered her five dollars for the food. When she stared at him in silence, he doubled the offer and handed her a ten-dollar gold piece. Like many newly arrived pioneer wives, Luzena suddenly realized that the household skills that had been taken for granted in the East might win her a fortune in the West. While her husband, Mason, was off panning for gold, Luzena bought two boards, made them into a table, “and when my husband came back at night he found, mid the weird light of the pine torches, 20 miners eating at my table. Each man as he rose put a dollar in my hand and said I might count on him as a permanent customer.” Within six months Luzena had made $20,000, which the Wilsons invested in a wooden hotel and store. But the city caught fire, and the family lost everything. They moved again and started a new establishment with Mrs. Wilson serving dinner on her plank table under a canvas roof, and the guests retiring for the night to a nearby haystack.

  For women, the gold in the California hills came from biscuits and flapjacks. A woman wrote from California to a Boston newspaper, reporting that in less than a year she had made $11,000 baking bread and cakes “in one little iron skillet.” Black women, who had a reputation for being good cooks, went west with the same dreams. One pioneer recalled seeing a crowd of people crossing the desert on foot and noted that one of them was “a negro woman…carrying a cast-iron bake oven on her head, with her provisions and blankets piled on top—all she possessed in the world—bravely pushing on for California.”

  With only a few dollars, grubstake, a woman could open a makeshift boardinghouse and earn a comfortable income. It didn’t make sense to invest much in the houses, since the miners moved on at the first news of a gold strike someplace else. Martha Gay Masterson, who followed her husband through gold rush territory, moved twenty times in twenty years, operating hotels, boardinghouses, grocery stores, and dry goods shops along the way. And though the men’s standards were far from demanding, the boardinghouse owner’s work was difficult, and full of unusual challenges. One woman was troubled by animals, which took advantage of the shortage of doors. “Sometimes I am up all night scaring the Hogs and mules out of the House,” she said.

  The labor shortage in the early West wiped out the normal rules about what jobs were appropriate for women. They worked as barbers and advertised their services as doctors, lawyers, and real estate agents. Nellie Pooler Chapman took over her husband’s dental practice in Nevada City, California. Although a very small woman, Mrs. Chapman was apparently skilled in the era’s dental arts, which leaned heavily in the direction of extraction. In Wyoming, Martha Maxwell supported herself and her daughter by working as a taxidermist. “A smart woman can do very well in this country,” wrote one young woman to a friend back east. “It is the only country I was ever in where woman received anything like a just compensation for work.”

  Women also occasionally took up rough jobs like stagecoach driving, delivering the mail by pony express, and even, in a few cases, riding with outlaw gangs. Charley Parkhurst ran a stagecoach through dangerous territory for years and no one knew Charley was actually a woman until she died in 1879. “He was in his day one of the most dexterous and celebrated of the California drivers…and it was an honor to be striven for to occupy the spare end of the driver’s seat when the fearless Charley Parkhurst held the reins,” wrote the San Francisco Morning Call before Charley’s sex was discovered.

  Being a success as an entertainer was easy. An actress didn’t need talent; she just needed to show up. The tolerance for any kind of performance by a female was so great that a girl of ten was said to have played Hamlet. Lotta Crabtree, who began her career as a child performer, made a fortune dancing and singing for the miners. She was the protégée of Lola Montez, who wowed western audiences with her “Spider Dance” in which she impersonated a woman trying to shake off tarantulas that are crawling around her underclothing. (The dance was a Spanish classic, but only Montez’s version featured genuine fake spiders.) Legend has it that the first entertainer to appear in Virginia City, Nevada, was Antoinette Adams, a very tall, not very attractive blond who sang in a cracked voice to resounding cheers and a shower of silver dollars. The cheering covered up Antoinette’s singing, and she left town with two sacks of money.

  “STANDING ERECT UPON THE BACK OF

  HER UNSADDLED HORSE”

  Post–Civil War Americans were fascinated by cowboys and Indians, cattle drives and buffalo hunts. They loved western romances and adventure novels, and Wild West shows that reenacted runaway stagecoaches, Indian war dances, and pony express rides. It was hard to figure out exactly where women fit into the picture, except as victims in constant need of rescue. But gradually cowgirls were introduced to the eastern audiences through nineteenth-century pulp fiction. Hurricane Nell avenged her parents’ death by disguising herself as a man and killing the villains. Wild Edna led a band of outlaws. Dauntless Dell of the Double D ranch amazed Buffalo Bill with her riding and shooting. These girls of the golden West existed mainly in books. But there were a few well-known real-life cowgirls, and the most famous by far were Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane. They were America’s first action heroines, amalgams of femininity and fighting spirit. Not since Hannah Dustan scalped her Indian captors in 1697 had the country been so enamored with the idea of a woman warrior.

  Far and away, Annie Oakley most successfully embodied the cowgirl myth, although she did not cross the Mississippi until 1885, when she joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. She was born Phoebe Ann Moses in Ohio in 1860. When she was six years old, her father, a postman, died of pneumonia, leaving a wife and seven small children. Annie taught herself to shoot her father’s rifle and helped support the family by selling game to the Cincinnati hotels. Her birds were said to be particularly desirable because they were always neatly shot in the head. Frank Butler, a famous trick shot, arrived in town and met fifteen-year-old Annie at a shooting club, where she beat him in a match. They were married the next year, and she joined his act. She quickly became a sensation, and Butler, who taught his semi-illiterate wife to read and to speak like a lady, gradually be
came her manager rather than a costar. (The Butlers had what appeared to be an exceedingly successful marriage and partnership that lasted till their deaths a half century later. But movie versions of Annie’s life always had to wrestle with the phenomenon of a man who put his wife’s career ahead of his own. One had Frank losing his vision, and in the original Annie Get Your Gun the unbeatable Miss Oakley learns how to get a man when she realizes the importance of pretending to let Frank outshoot her.)

  Unlike most touring sharpshooters, Annie never had to fake her act. She broke crockery, snuffed out candles, and drilled holes in playing cards with her rifle, standing, running, or riding at a gallop. In 1894 she starred in a ninety-second “movie” for Thomas Edison, and when it was released, crowds lined up in front of New York nickelodeons to watch her shatter glass balls with her shotgun. When she traveled with the Buffalo Bill show she became close to Sitting Bull, the Indian leader of the battle of Little Big Horn who had joined the troupe after his people were defeated and confined to a reservation. Annie was said to be the only person who could cheer him up during his frequent and understandable depressions. After his death, she was billed as “Sitting Bull’s Adopted Daughter,” and if that was hype, their regard for each other had been real.