Martha Maxwell poses with some of her taxidermy specimens. Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
Then James Maxwell threw Martha a curveball: he desired a suitable person to marry. Would Martha be interested? “I like you,” he wrote, “not because I think you handsome, above many, neither because I think you have gifts or graces, natural or acquired above many, but because I think you have good, warm, affections, with a sound judgment and discretion.”23 Hardly the proposal a young woman hoped for. He hoped the 20-year difference in their ages would not matter.
For more than a month, a blanket of silence greeted James’s letter. He wrote again, and this time Martha answered, questioning whether she could manage the responsibility of mothering his six children. She also did not want to repay his kindness to her by joining into a relationship, “which might, I fear, secure to you misery instead of happiness.”24 In the end, however, 22-year-old Martha Dartt relented and married James Maxwell on March 30, 1854.
Throughout the 1850s, Martha managed the family home and crusaded for causes. Just a few months after her marriage, she joined a temperance raid on local taverns, pouring bottles of liquor onto the floor in an event dubbed the Whiskey War of 1854. A justice of the peace let Martha go after her husband agreed to pay for damages. Martha also worked to support the free-state faction in Kansas, those opposed to allowing slavery to enter the territory.
In November 1857, Martha gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Mabel. But during these years, a bad economy, coupled with poor money decisions, eroded the family finances. News headlines heralding the 1859 gold strikes in Colorado spurred the Maxwells, along with thousands of others, west to the Rockies.
The rough conditions in the mining camps allowed Martha a degree of independence. And she had something to prove. “You know some of my Baraboo friends were inclined to laugh at me for coming out here,” she wrote her sisters, “saying that it was no place for a woman and that I would be only a bill of expense & a bother.”25
During the years moving about Colorado, Martha ran a boardinghouse and restaurant, baked, mended and scrubbed clothes, sold pies, and hosted dances and theatricals in the hall she had built. Martha invested in mining claims and eventually bought a small ranch with a one-room log cabin. She also became a founding member of the Nevada City temperance group. The work proved hard and the reward steady (but never very much), and at one point her hard work vanished in a wall of flames that swept through the mining town.
After two and half years, Martha returned to Baraboo—and her long-neglected daughter. Mabel, now five, did not recognize her mother. It set the stage for a lifetime of misunderstanding and tension between Mabel and Martha.
While back in Wisconsin, Martha received an offer of work that changed the path of her life. A professor at the Baraboo Collegiate Institute wanted a collection of mounted birds and animals to form the basis of a department of zoology. Martha had attempted to learn the process of stuffing animals, the art of taxidermy, when she first saw some mounted birds in Colorado. She had written her family, “I wish to learn how to preserve birds & other animal curiosities in this country.”26 Now she threw herself wholeheartedly into this new opportunity.
For the next two years, while James mostly lived in Colorado, Martha learned taxidermy, ran the Maxwell household, and stayed active in Baraboo through organizations like the Loyal Women’s League, which aided Union soldiers during the Civil War. But the work wore Martha out, and her health deteriorated. In September 1866 she entered a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, to rest and take treatments. The sanitarium promoted good health through a vegetarian diet, water cures, fresh air and light, sleep, and rest. But if Martha did not mind the separation from James, the distance from Mabel did hurt.
Martha returned to Baraboo in the spring of 1867, but not for long. She packed up Mabel and headed to an idealistic society recently founded in Vineland, New Jersey. Feminists, temperance people, and reformers flocked here. Edward Everett Hale, speaker and author, reported Vineland was the only place he’d visited where “I have found the greater part of the women satisfied.”27 But this time, Martha’s quest for independence had gone too far. James asked Martha to return to Colorado. She refused. He traveled east, and in short order, James, Martha, and Mabel headed to Colorado.
Back in the Rockies, settling in the Boulder area, Martha pursued her passion for the natural world and taxidermy. At first she relied on local boys or James to furnish her with bird and animal specimens for mounting. But this proved unreliable. Martha practiced her marksmanship and soon toted her own gun into the mountains on collecting expeditions, often traveling with James, Mabel, and Martha’s sister, Mary. Not cold, rain, or rocky slopes could prevent Martha from collecting birds and mammals of every size. Carting the animals back to Boulder for preparation proved an arduous task. Then Martha began the heavy and often unpleasant work of skinning the animals, building a support structure, and recreating the creatures to lifelike affect.
In October 1868, Martha presented a display of her work at the Colorado Agricultural Society. Reported the Rocky Mountain News, “The largest collection of Colorado birds we have ever seen is now on exhibition at the Fair Grounds. They were picked up by Mrs. Maxwell, of Boulder, within six months, count over 100 different kinds, and are arranged on two large shrubs of cottonwood with a great deal of taste.” The collection did “rare credit to the skill and scientific attainments of the lady.”28
In an era when society viewed a woman’s role as that of nurturer, homemaker, and wife, Martha instead devoted her life to study and work. The times made it nearly impossible for a woman who desired a career to also have a happy marriage.
Martha felt unprepared by her lack of education to carry on the serious work of a naturalist. In early 1869, she wrote to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, asking what books he recommended to study birds. “I am making a collection of Colorado specimens,” she wrote, “have something over a hundred different varieties, among them are some which seem new and strange, at least I am unable to classify them with my present light upon the subject.”29
Martha’s letter sparked a relationship with the Smithsonian, one of the country’s most prestigious seats of science, which lasted for the rest of her life. Over the years, she corresponded regularly with Smithsonian secretary Spencer Baird and ornithologists Robert Ridgway and Elliott Coues. Baird asked Martha to help build up the Smithsonian’s collection by sending eggs and nests of Colorado species. She also wrote Baird about the different birds and their habitats, some of which she collected from elevations of nearly 8,000 feet. When Martha discovered a new subspecies of screech owl, Robert Ridgway named it after her (Otus asio maxwelliae) “not only as a compliment to an accomplished and amiable lady, but also as a deserved tribute to her high attainments in the study of natural history.”30
Martha continued her taxidermy work, often to the point of exhaustion. She added to her own collection and mounted animals for others. She again displayed at the Colorado Agricultural Fair—an astounding 600 specimens including wild cats, wolves, deer, antelope, eagles, and reptiles—and won two ten-dollar prizes. But with money always an issue, she ended up selling most of her collection to a botanical garden in Missouri. The sale proved a bitter blow to Martha, who’d worked so hard to create the collection, and the payment of $600 was less than what she’d spent to create the specimens.
With the collection gone, what else could Martha do but begin the laborious process of building it up once again? Clad in her expedition outfit of bloomers under a calf-length skirt, Martha collected the birds, animals, and reptiles she needed. James seemed happy to accompany his wife on her trips. Back home in her “den,” she devoted all her energy to work. Her sister Mary commented, “Society was ignored, all superfluous articles of food and dress were dispensed with.”31 Mabel noted that her mother was never at home; if she was, she remained consumed in her work. Writing years later, as an old woman of
90, Mabel recalled, “I was bitterly jealous of the animals that seemed to absorb all the interest and affection for which I longed.”32
The den contained the tools of Martha’s trade and art. Piles of hemp, cotton, hay, and wire lay about. Branches of trees, bars of iron, brushes, paints, and putty covered surfaces. Bottles of insects and reptiles, nests and eggs, shells, glass eyes, bones, antlers, and skins lined the shelves. Martha carefully measured each animal to build an artificial body, and over it she stretched and fit the skin. She cleaned and preserved bones, studied the shape of skeletons and muscle and sinew. She often used the leg bones to mount the animal and a body shaped from iron with stuffing of cotton or wool. Martha, in remote Colorado, and pretty much self-taught in taxidermy, was using techniques that were several years ahead of her time.
Martha also perfected the art of displaying her specimens in naturalistic settings and poses, such as baby birds in a nest, their necks stretched and beaks open, as their mother (with a rabbit in her talons) hangs over them. Martha seemed to work almost frantically; the family always needed money, and she worried about paying for Mabel’s college education.
In June 1874, Martha opened a new educational and moneymaking venture—the Rocky Mountain Museum in Boulder. She hoped the museum would serve as a scientific institution and work in harmony with the new state university. She hoped that her exhibits, “if artistically mounted and arranged, would interest the young, and awaken in them a love” for the natural world. She also featured “curiosities” meant to entice the paying public. Her vision once again placed her at the front of the scientific and museum world.
The main attractions, alongside the fossils, minerals, antique coins, and Indian pieces, were Martha’s specimens. A huge buffalo dominated the center of the room. Birds perched in tree-tops. A doe licked her two fawns. A bear crawled out of a cave. A mountain lion sprang through the branches of a tree. People gawked and wondered. Critics and the public loved it. Newspapers in the East even took note. But the museum could not sustain itself. Martha eventually moved her museum to Denver, where she again found little success. At this low point, however, she received an offer that could lift her talents to new heights.
The United States prepared to celebrate the nation’s centennial with a huge exhibition in Philadelphia. The men in charge of Colorado’s exhibit asked Martha to crate her animals and create a display honoring the state’s wildlife. Ten million visitors would pass through the exhibition halls and pavilions with Martha’s groundbreaking creation dazzling them as one of the top draws.
Arriving in Philadelphia in the spring of 1876, Martha worked round the clock with an assistant to build a Rocky Mountain fantasy using paste, pulverized ore, lime, gravel, evergreens, and water. The display was breathtaking—stones, trees, a stream, a lake, the plains. It had every manner of bird, fish, mammal, and reptile—huge buffalo and elk, bears, mountain sheep, turtles, fish, rattlesnakes, and more. A placard on the front of the exhibit proclaimed this all to be WOMAN’S WORK.
Martha intended that her efforts prove something. “The greatest desire of my life,” she had written to Spencer Baird the year before, “is to help inspire women with confidence in their own resources and abilities. Talk is pure nonsense, about the matter, work, and excellence in the things wrought, will set the whole matter right.”33
Martha’s exhibit amazed people. Some poked the animals, insisting they must be alive. Visitors bombarded Martha with questions. Had she killed the animals herself? How had she stuffed them? Was the game really this thick in Colorado? Everyone was crazy for information about Colorado. One of the Colorado commissioners noted that Martha’s collection actually brought people to the exhibit as word spread—”her fame increased every day to the last week and the last day.”34
Articles about Martha Maxwell and her display appeared in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, while newspaper articles popped up everywhere, even as far away as Paris. Martha herself proved fascinating. People marveled that a tiny woman, less than five feet tall, a “modest,” “refined,” and “delicate” woman, could have done such hard labor.
As to questions about how she could kill the animals, Martha had a plain answer. “There isn’t a day you don’t tacitly consent to have some creature killed that you may eat it. I never take life for such carnivorous purposes! All must die some time; I only shorten the period of consciousness that I may give their forms perpetual memory and I leave it to you, which is the more cruel? to kill to eat, or to kill to immortalize?”35
After Philadelphia, however, Martha Maxwell’s hope for financial ease based on her success fell through. Colorado failed to pay her the costs for shipping the collection to Philadelphia. She couldn’t find a buyer to purchase the collection. With Mabel now in college, Martha frantically sought ways to raise money. She spent the next two summers exhibiting the collection in the East, again claiming critical and scientific success. She tried to make money selling photographs of the display, but the company that owned the rights to sell the images barred her from continuing her own sales.
When Mabel proposed dropping out of school to save the cost, a horrified Martha urged her to stay. “Ever since you were born it has been my ambition to realize in you my own disappointed hopes for education and usefulness. So long as there is the least probability for success,” she wrote her daughter, “I cannot give it up.”36 At the same time James Maxwell, who also wanted Mabel to receive an education, warned his daughter that no amount of book learning could atone for a lack of good housekeeping skills, the very foundation of a good home, and something that Martha had failed at.
Martha spent the next few years traveling and exhibiting her work in Washington, DC; Boston; and Philadelphia. With her sister Mary, Martha wrote a book of her experiences, again hoping to reap financial security. But after several years of writing On the Plains, and Among the Peaks; or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection, the book, though highly praised, failed to sell. It did create a lasting record of Martha Maxwell’s scientific achievements and included catalogs of Martha’s work by Ridgway and Coues—who credited Martha with discovering not only a new owl but a black-footed ferret as well.
By 1878, Martha’s health was declining. She missed her daughter and struggled with Mabel’s different view of women’s place in the world. For a while she enrolled in classes at the Woman’s Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Martha loved school, “but ah me!” she wrote Mary, “it cost lots of money.”37 She gave taxidermy lessons and lived in an attic room like a pauper.
Ill health and hard work marred Martha’s last years. At one point, she worked dressing dolls for Christmas sales, commenting to Mary that the dolls “all represent the ‘girl of the period’ and must have the wasp waist—the long trail [dress train] and all the fashionable follies which I detest and I can but think that I am cultivating in other women’s daughters the love of just those things which I so much deplore in my own.”38 She did all she could to further Mabel’s career as a teacher and fretted when Mabel decided to leave teaching for marriage, a step Martha viewed as a loss of freedom. Martha’s own marriage had been a disaster, marked by years of separation.
In her last years, Martha pinned her hopes on opening a beachside resort near Long Island that would feature the collection. But ovarian cancer sapped the energy from Martha’s once vigorous body. She died in Mabel’s arms on May 31, 1881, not quite 50 years old.
Martha Maxwell went to Colorado as a gold seeker, but she found her life’s work in the years she spent tramping through the wilds of Colorado to collect and preserve specimens of the natural world. She was the first woman to do so, in a field, like all others, that belonged to men. She helped pioneer lifelike displays of her specimens in a realistic habitat. Her hard work and determination, which only seemed to reward her with financial insecurity, lost her those things that were meant to matter most to a woman of her time—her marriage and her relationship with her child. But in the end, Martha M
axwell accomplished much of what she set out to do—to show that a woman could excel in her chosen field.
Charlotte “Lotta” Crabtree
“Golden Wonder” of the Stage
In 1855, the mining town of Rabbit Creek, California, witnessed the debut of a local performer, Miss Lotta Crabtree. The show opened in a log theater tacked onto a saloon run by Mart Taylor, a one-time strolling actor who dispensed whiskey along with dance and singing lessons. Meaning to cash in on Lotta’s talents, Taylor featured his prized pupil clad in green breeches and a hat. Lotta kicked, twirled, and tapped through an evening of spirited jigs and reels mixed with sentimental Irish ballads. The little redhead’s performance tugged the heartstrings of lonely miners, many of them Irish, just as Taylor had planned. After her last bow, Lotta’s mother Mary Ann swept up the coins and golden nuggets tossed onto the stage by the grateful miners. Taylor immediately planned a tour through the mining camps, featuring his new sensation. Lotta Crabtree was eight years old.
Lotta Crabtree. Library of Congress
Born in New York to English parents on November 7, 1847, Lotta traveled to California with her mother in 1852. Her father John, a ne’er-do-well who often abandoned the family, was already in California seeking his riches in gold. Finding only failure, he sent for Mary Ann and Lotta to come west and open a boardinghouse. Lotta made the harrowing journey with her mother by the fastest route available, traveling across Panama, by boat, train, canoe, and mules, to a sailing ship that carried them to the wicked city of San Francisco. The boomtown boasted at least one murder a day and possessed nearly 750 bartenders catering to the thirst of citizens, while a mere 21 ministers attempted to save the souls of gamblers, adventurers, prostitutes, and miners.
Women of the Frontier Page 11
