Bethenia also nurtured her health and political interests through her efforts for women’s voting rights, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and her push for more exercise and shorter skirts for women. She refuted the notion that woman should only ride a horse sidesaddle, instead of astride, the way a man rode. “Nothing will preserve a woman’s grace … so much as vigorous … exercise, and horse-back riding stands at the head of the list, provided,” Bethenia urged, a woman have “a foot in each stirrup, instead of having the right limb twisted around a [saddle] horn, and the left foot in a stirrup twelve or fifteen inches above where it ought to be.”
Bethenia Owens-Adair died on September 11, 1926, at a fine old age that had seen her blaze her own trail. She went from an illiterate girl, married at 14, to a well-educated and respected female physician in the Old West, and she’d earned every bit of that respect through her own hard work and determination.
4
AND NOW THE FUN BEGINS
“Buffalo Gals won’t you come out tonight and dance by the light of the moon.”
—Lyrics from “Buffalo Gals,” a popular 19th-century song
For decades, the West suffered from a great female shortage. In the first years of western expansion, explorers, mountain men, and fur traders contentedly married Native American, Mexican, and Spanish women. A fur trader found his Indian wife’s wilderness know-how and tanning skills, as well as the help of her family, invaluable to his business. In California, New Mexico, and Texas, American businessmen and merchants often married into Spanish families. Some men married women from well-to-do families, acquiring citizenship, thousands of acres of land, and business contacts. But the majority of males wed Mexican women from less affluent families; the white husband often raised his wife’s family’s status and prosperity.
One man waxed poetic on the charms of Mexican women for “their small feet, finely turned ankles, well-developed busts, small and classically formed hands, dark and lustrous eyes, teeth of beautiful shape and dazzling whiteness, and hair of that rich and jetty blackness … they are joyous, sociable, kind-hearted creatures.”1 An English visitor arrogantly assured his fellows that Mexican women despised “their own countrymen” and would not hesitate to share their lives with “the dashing white hunters who swagger in all their towns.”2
Mexican women in California, 1850s. Library of Congress
But as increasing numbers of white women arrived west, racial prejudices influenced white men to reject Indian and Hispanic women as suitable wives. Though in high demand, white females arrived in low numbers compared to the eager multitude of single men. A mining camp woman recalled that in two years she’d seen only one other white woman. “Men on all sides,” she reported, “but none but Indian women.”3
Male settlers in Oregon and Washington territories advertised for brides in Eastern newspapers. In Oregon a man and his wife could each claim 320 acres of free land. The demand for brides rose dramatically. Widows remarried within months. Wealthy women hired homely female servants, hoping they wouldn’t attract husbands of their own. But they still saw their maids and cooks snatched up on the marriage market at great speed.
For women stuck in unhappy marriages, the odds of finding a better spouse seemed bright. One mining camp woman wrote news which probably shocked her sister back east:
I tell you the women are in great demand in this country no matter whether they are married or not. You need not think strange if you see me coming home with some good looking man some of these times … it is all the go here for Ladys to leave their Husbands two out of three do it there is a first rate chance for a single woman she can have her choice of thousands.4
A few women commented that the scarcity of “proper females” forced men to behave in a more chivalrous manner. “A woman on the frontier,” claimed Elizabeth Custer, “is so cherished and appreciated, because she has the courage to live out there.”5 Luzena Wilson recalled with humor:
Every man thought every woman in that day a beauty. 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.6
Kick Up Your Heels
Dancing, a beloved entertainment on the frontier, suffered during the female shortage. Three hundred men and a mere 12 women attended the first dance held in Nevada City, California. A few of the men tied bandanas around their arms and assumed the role of “ball-room belles” for the evening.
Dances in towns, large settlements, and army posts featured bands, decorations, and ball gowns. But people also kicked up their heels at dances held in schools, barns, livery stables, courthouses, and on cleared patches of land. In more intimate settings, people might shove furniture against the walls and dance in a home, with a single fiddle player providing music. Sometimes, without any instrumental music, folks danced, clapped, and sang popular tunes like “Skip to My Lou.” A good dance lasted till morning light, with refreshments served at midnight, before weary revelers trekked as many as 30 or 40 miles back home after breakfast.
Theater proved another popular form of Western entertainment—a female onstage usually guaranteed a packed house. Cities like San Francisco and Denver boasted glittering theaters and famous talent. Fights among the customers might be more interesting than the performances, however, if the stage meant a few boards and a blanket for a curtain hung up at the back of a saloon.
Actresses willing to travel to the mining camps earned bags of gold and silver for their troubles. Miners showed up in droves to watch their favorites. Mysterious Lola Montez performed her notorious spider dance, an excuse to “kick high and shake her petticoats” claimed one observer. Caroline Chapman’s repertoire included Shakespearean drama and musical comedy, as well as a spoof of Montez. A petite redhead named Lotta Crabtree charmed audiences as a child with her spirited mandolin playing, singing, and dancing. She later conquered fans in the East and Europe.
Known as the Frenzy of Frisco, Adah Isaacs Menken thrilled audiences with her hit play Mazeppa. The scandalous climactic scene featured Menken strapped to the back of a horse wearing a flesh-colored body suit and tights. Menken earned more than $100,000 worth of gold, silver, and jewels for a single performance before the miners of Virginia City, Nevada. “A magnificent spectacle dazzled my vision,” wrote young reporter Sam Clemens (later known as Mark Twain) when Menken appeared in San Francisco in 1863. “The whole constellation of the Great Menken came flaming out of the heavens,” he wrote, “and shed a glory abroad as it fell! I have used the term ‘Great Menken’ because I regard it as a more modest expression than the ‘Great Bare.’”7
Adah Isaacs Menken in a series of daring photographs. Library of Congress
The details of Menken’s early life remain murky, but she was most likely born in Louisiana as Ada Bertha Theodore to a mixed-race mother and a Jewish father in 1835. Her five marriages, including one to a heavyweight boxing champion, and numerous lovers added to her mystique. As a follower of Rabbi Isaac Wise, father of Reform Judaism, Menken learned Hebrew (she spoke several other languages, as well) and wrote poetry and essays for the Israelite, a newspaper. When questioned if she’d been born a Jew, Menken told a reporter, she was “born in that faith [ Judaism], and have adhered to it through all my erratic career. Through that pure and simple religion I have found greatest comfort and blessing.”8
Menken died in Paris in 1868, at age 33, probably of tuberculosis. The disease killed many and carried the more genteel 19th-century label of “consumption,” as it was a disease that consumed the lungs.
“Got Me a New Calico Dress”
With their lives requiring simple work clothes sewn from durable fabrics, Western women often claimed they cared not a bit for fashion. Living so far from big Eastern cities, everyone wore out-of-date dresses. But in truth, Western ladies appreciated a bit of finery and saved it for special occasions. Even women buried on remote homesteads devoured Eastern magazines like Godey’s Lady’s Book from
cover to cover, seeking new ideas to update their wardrobe in the latest styles. “Because I must wear calico,” asked one Kansas woman, “must I also be deprived of the pleasure of admiring the beautiful attire of my more fortunate sisters?”9
Another Kansas woman defended the image of Western women. “People are generally … not half so heathenish as many imagine,” she penned to her local paper. “People expect taste and tidiness in dress, at least in ladies, just as much as in the East.”10 Mail-order businesses shipped yards of ribbons, lace, and braid to Western homesteads, and a woman might transform a dress by adding a bit of trim or refashioning the sleeves. And a new Chinese silk shawl or scarf arriving at California ports instantly brightened an old outfit.
The era of Western settlement coincided with the age of hoop skirts, wire-cage bustles, heavy petticoats, and waist-pinching corsets that encased women from armpits to hips. Helen Carpenter wrote from the California Trail in June 1857 about the hoop skirt fashion pushing west:
There is a bride & groom in the Inman party. The bride wears hoops. We have read of hoops being worn, but they had not reached Kansas before we left so these are the first we’ve seen and would not recommend them for this mode of traveling. In asides the bride is called “Miss Hoopy.”11
Elizabeth Custer’s hoop skirts measured five yards around the bottom, and the plains wind, gusting beneath the huge bell of her skirt, caused a few embarrassing moments. To outwit the elements, she sewed strips of lead into her dress hems, and “thus loaded down, we took our constitutional [walk] about the post.”12
Susan Magoffin found Mexican women’s dress rather shocking. Writing from New Mexico in 1846, she noted “the women were clad in chemises and petticoats only,”13 which Susan wore as undergarments. Martha Summerhayes, an army wife, however, soon admired the sensible clothing of Mexican women who left their arms bare and wore scooped necklines and ankle-exposing skirts in the Southwestern heat. But at her husband’s insistence, Martha sweltered in high-necked, long-sleeved dresses, like any well-bred woman back east in the 1870s. And no white woman, laced into her steel- or whale-boned corset beneath pounds of clothing, would dream of donning the loose-fitting, though quite modest, dresses of Native American women.
Some women experimented with feminist Amelia Bloomer’s new costume—a below-the-knee-length dress worn over baggy, ankle-length pants that were quickly dubbed bloomers. Miriam Colt found the Bloomer dress,
well suited to a wild life like mine. Can bound over the prairies like an antelope, and am not in so much danger of setting my clothes on fire while cooking when these prairie winds blow…. I would not submit myself to wearing long dresses, when I can go so nimbly around … to bring water, pick up chips, bring in wood, milk.14
But even with the danger of setting oneself on fire, most women said “no thanks” to the bold Bloomer costume, which many scorned as unfeminine. When one girl wore her father’s pants to do chores, her brothers hooted with laughter, but her mother was angry. Had her daughter lost her last shred of dignity in the Western wilds?
A ranch woman described the evolution of her riding wear. For ten years she politely rode sidesaddle, dressed in a feminine riding habit with fitted bodice and long flowing skirt. Slowly, her outfit changed. She added a blue flannel shirt, followed by blue denim knickers under a shorter split blue denim skirt. “Decadence having set in,” she reported, “the descent from the existing standards of female modesty to purely human comfort and convenience was swift.”15
For the most part, frontier women clung to fashion tradition, even if a year or two outdated, as a means of validating their womanhood and adding a quiet sheen of civilization to their rough lives.
“The Neighborhood All Turns Out”
No matter their lack of high-fashion identity, Western women created busy social lives for themselves as soon as possible. Women living in towns, large or small, accomplished this with more ease than isolated females. Town ladies even kept up such social graces as formal visits and afternoon tea. People gathered for card parties, cribbage, and evenings of music.
Women on farms and ranches created reasons to visit far-flung neighbors, helping one another with chores, joining in quilting bees and wool-carding parties, or establishing sewing circles. Keturah Belknap hated to pick over her wool alone, so she invited over a dozen ladies and finished the job off in a day. “I have had my party,” she wrote. “They seemed to enjoy themselves fine. [We] had a fine chicken dinner. For cake I made a regular old fashioned pound cake like my mother used to make … and now my name is out as a good cook so I am alright, for good cooking makes good friends.”16
Bachelors, on their best behavior, congregated at women’s houses to dine, listen to music, and play games—they lapped up the comforts of a female-kept home. One mining-town woman reported, “Had a spirited evening. It was exciting to meet two new gentlemen both good looking and interesting…. Talked of books.”17 On a different night, at a different house, “The jest ran high and the laughter loud. Had some good refreshments and returned home.”18
Neighbors gathered at barn raisings, harvest parties, or corn-husking bees to share work and then dancing and good food. In the Pacific Northwest, people met for clamming parties at the shore. Winter snow called plains pioneers outdoors for sleighing and skating. Spring and summer brought berry picking, croquet, and picnics.
Folks trekked many miles for special celebrations. The Fourth of July was a favorite holiday in the West, crammed with horse races, picnics, speeches, parades, dances, and fireworks. Depending on the customs and traditions of a settler’s heritage, a wedding might be a small gathering at home or a full-blown, several-day party with suppers, songs, and dancing. Crowds assembled for yearly events like Court Day or political meetings. Women often spent days baking hundreds of pies and cakes for these occasions.
Churches offered Westerners a chance to socialize and feel part of a community. “I can see all the neighbors twice a week,” confided one woman, “for we have prayer meeting Thursday evenings.” People longed for the familiar habits of life back east, and building a church represented an important step. Many Western settlements, however, did not have enough families or money to support churches; instead settlers looked forward to the arrival of a traveling preacher.
Camp meetings, which lasted for days, involved preaching, singing, and conversions to the faith. People traveled from miles around and camped out to be part of the worship and social excitement. One Oregon woman hosted a 10-day prayer meeting at her house. “Our one room,” she wrote, “served for church, kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and study for the preachers, sometimes we had three or four as they came from adjoining circuits to help us through the week.”19 Wrote another woman, “We looked forward to the camp meeting in June…. I think they were pretty nearly our only salvation from entire stagnation.”20
A picnic beneath a cactus in Arizona, 1886. National Archives
Quiet Moments
With so much daily work, women also enjoyed quiet pastimes, meditative moments to themselves. Writing letters, scribbling in diaries, playing instruments, singing, and embroidering all offered solace and relaxation. Women read and reread, loaned and borrowed books, magazines, and newspapers. All across the frontier, book-hungry women joined literary societies to share books and ideas and listen to guest speakers. With few books available, women set aside money to order reading materials through the mail. Army wives commented on their “precious books,” while a South Dakota woman confided, “Seeing the end of my book approaching was like eating the last bit of food on my plate, still hungry, and no more food in sight.”21
Most Western women embraced the climate and Western winds. They enjoyed horseback riding, fishing, and hunting. Some even tackled mountain climbing. Women studied plants and animals and recorded their findings through photographs and drawings. During the 1870s, Colorado’s Martha Maxwell gained a national reputation as a taxidermist and zoologist.
In all areas of the West, women sought
joy in life to match their hard work. They often discovered fun in simple things and nothing more than friendly company.
Martha Dartt Maxwell
Colorado Naturalist
In May 1860, after a monotonous month “journeying over a sea of land,” Martha Maxwell caught her first faint glimpse of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains far in the distance. “We saw them looming up silvery and beautiful,” she wrote, “in the robes of eternal white…. They appear more & more magnificent each day.”22 Martha’s love affair with the natural world—plants and animals and science—turned passionate in the Colorado beauty.
Hoping to recoup the family finances in Colorado’s gold mines, Martha and her husband, James, had left their home and young daughter, Mabel, in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and migrated to Colorado. Like many hopefuls, they passed through Denver and headed into the surrounding mining camps, typically places of squalor surrounded by majestic peaks and open blue skies. And like many women, Martha buckled down to the hard work of running a laundry and hotel to keep the family afloat.
Martha’s independent streak had been born and bred in Pennsylvania and then Wisconsin by a family that encouraged learning. Martha attended one year of college at Oberlin in Ohio before a lack of money shut down her education. But she’d loved the atmosphere of learning, singing in the choir, and attending lectures on social issues like temperance and abolition. Reluctantly back in Wisconsin, she turned to teaching—one of the few professions open to women—despairing that she would never be able to continue her own education.
Then, in August 1853, local businessman James Maxwell offered Martha an opportunity to return to college. A widower with six children, Maxwell asked Martha to serve as a chaper-one—while taking classes—for his daughter, Emma, and son, James, at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Martha spent a busy year at Lawrence tending to the Maxwell children, studying, working on the university’s literary journal, and joining the Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association.
Women of the Frontier Page 10
