by Chris Enss
The eager young man set to work and made inquiries of those suspected of being members of the group. After tackling half a dozen, one society bachelor willing to share information with the reporter was found. The gentleman wasn’t an inducted part of the organization yet, but he had a friend who was. The friend agreed to submit the reporter’s name to the group, and if he was accepted, his initiation would follow that night.
The following article, written by the journalist about his experience, appeared in the Nevada County newspaper, the Daily Transcript.
My application was favorably received at the next regular meeting. I had gone to bed. It was 11:30 p.m. when I was informed by the committee of my success, and led to the place of the meeting in the bushes half way up the north side of Sugar Loaf. I was blindfolded and the initiation ceremony was most peculiar. Finally, the bandage (a lady’s lace handkerchief) was removed in response to an order like this, “Proclaim the fact of his redemption and let the blind behold!”
The sight that met this reporter’s eyes cannot be adequately described. The members sat in a circle on the ground. In the absence of President Mike Garver, Jerry Payne was called to the chair, or rather a boulder, which answered the same purpose. Joe Fleming and George Stewart were hanging on to a monstrous banner to keep it from being blown over by the breeze. On this banner was inscribed the name of the order “THE RED STOCKING SNOOZERS.” Am Lord, Dex Ridley and L. Sukeforth were taking turns throwing wood upon the campfire that illumined the mysterious scene, and at the same time discussing topics of current interest, such as the new style of fall bonnets, etc.
The two Fulweiler Brothers were playing seven-up with the queens left out of the pack. M. Rosenburg and H. Hirshman had been stationed one on the summit and the other at the foot of Sugar Loaf to give warning of approaching danger.
Among other names proposed for membership during the evening were those of Walter Vinton, Fred Searls and Archie Nivens. George Hentz moved that the applications be allowed to remain over for one month. Hentz seconded his own motion. It was put to a vote and carried unanimously. Everything was going along smoothly until Am Lord discovered the President pro-tem wearing a white vest and mauve-colored necktie. This created a suspicion among the members that Jerry’s faith was weakening. He saw the storm brewing, and rising, began to speak. In a few well chosen words, he sharply criticized former members who had “for years” shared the benefits of the society, and had basely deserted it, “seeming” he added, “to embrace the first opportunity. A woman!”
French advertisement, 1857. A French woman stands between two mines where California Argonauts bid for her affections and the chance to be her husband.
CALIFORNIA HISTORY ROOM, CALIFORNIA STATE LIBRARY, SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA
“I call the gentlemen to order,” hastily interrupted John Bacigalupi. “If the President knows anything he knows that according to the Constitution the name of wo____, that is to say fe____, of course you understand, the other sex of our species is not to be spoken of or about on such occasion as this.”
The president glared upon the crowd and singling out Si Jackson who lately joined and was extremely bashful, fastened his eye upon him and said sternly, “Sit down!”
“Go to thunder!” was the prompt response.
Charley Fulweiler smiled approvingly, but detecting the president looking at him with considerable austerity, squirmed so that he put his foot in the hat of Jesse Holcomb, who had dropped in, in a friendly sort of way.
“Now gentlemen, what I want to say is this,” said H. Hirshman, who had left his post at the foot of the hill to join the conclave. “We need a higher discipline in our organization. We need so to speak, a sort of spartan firmness, we need . . .”
“You will need to get your lives insured before we get through with you,” shrieked a female voice a short distance away. “Gim’me the club, Sarah. Oh, gimme it quick!”
There was the sound of rushing skirts through the bushes. The meeting adjourned in confusion, and the members scattered in every direction.
The guards had been negligent in their duties, and when the indignant Tea Trio reached the scene of the “Red Stocking” deliberations, there wasn’t a young man to be found.
Harris Longfield—March 3, 1878
There is no historical information available to indicate that the Red Stocking Snoozers continued to get together after their encounter with the Tea Trio. The Trio did continue to meet but shifted their focus from matchmaking to raising funds for orphans.
ELIZA FARNHAM
The Dedicated Sponsor
The mission is a good one, and the projector deserves success. The enterprise in which Mrs. Farnham has engaged is one which evinces much moral courage. Her reward will be found in the blessings, which her countrymen will invoke for her when the vessel in which the association is to sail shall have arrived in California with her precious cargo. May favoring gales attend the good ship Angelique.
Horace Greeley, Newspaperman—April 12, 1849
Eliza Farnham stepped off the spacious packet ship Angelique, docked in the San Francisco harbor, and scanned the bustling, seaside city with a smile. The pier was lined with curious, enthusiastic men waiting to introduce themselves to the more than 200 young ladies who had replied to Eliza’s ad seeking marriageable women to accompany her to the West. Taking the hand of each of her young sons, she proceeded proudly down the gangplank. All eyes were fixed on the thin, bespectacled author and lecturer, on her intelligent, deep-set eyes, and her dark hair arranged in prim ringlets around her face. She stopped and waited for her charges to disembark. Just three ladies who dared to take the trip across the ocean followed after Eliza.
The happy expressions the hopeful men wore were at once replaced with disappointed sneers. Lonely miners, who had come to California seeking a fortune in gold in 1849, were eagerly looking forward to seeing members of the opposite sex. Men outnumbered women on the emerging frontier by more than twelve to one. When news of Eliza’s trip to the Gold Country reached their desperate ears, they believed she would be bringing 10,000 eligible ladies with her.
Disgruntled pioneers from every profession took to the saloons to drink away their dreams of finding a wife among Eliza’s few recruits. The streets were soon filled with intoxicated men using their fists to work out their frustrations. Miner Dashel Greech reported of the scene: “I verily believe there was more drunkenness, more gambling, more fighting, and more of everything that was bad that night, than ever before occurred in San Francisco within any similar space of time.”
It was precisely this volatile, dissolute way of life that Eliza sought to correct. She believed the gentling influence of good women could bring positive lasting changes for western pioneers and miners, and could help tame the Wild West in the process. Many notable historians described her at the time as “a woman bent on doing the world as much good as possible.”
Born on November 17, 1815, in Rensselaerville, New York, Eliza Woodson Burhans was raised by an overbearing aunt and drunkard uncle. Her mother passed away when she was five, and she never knew her father. Her upbringing was strict and troubled, plagued with abuse and neglect. She managed to rise above her struggles, however, finding solace in her schoolwork, as well as in books by Voltaire and Thomas Paine.
In 1835, at the age of twenty, Eliza made her first trip west, traveling over the Santa Cruz mountains in a buggy. The trip was grueling, but exhilarating for the young woman who gained strength in the beauty of the open country. She had read about the spacious landscape of the western frontier and wanted to see the unsettled prairie firsthand. She considered the new territory “a wholly honest place where mankind could push the boundaries of all he believed possible in himself and his world.”
Upon her return from her adventures out West, she moved to Illinois to live with her sister and brother-in-law. It was there, in the Prairie State, tha
t she met a young New England lawyer named Thomas Jefferson Farnham. After a brief courtship the pair married in the fall of 1836. Eliza, who never saw herself as attractive, was transformed by Thomas’s love. “I never imagined myself clothed with external splendor, or gifted with beauty, until approving eyes gazed upon me,” she wrote.
Eliza Farnham
CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, FN-05824
Thomas moved his new bride into a quaint two-room cottage, and presented her with a chestnut pony as a wedding gift. For a while they were blissfully happy.
In 1838, she gave birth to their first son. But the following year the couple watched him suffer with yellow fever and die. The disease also took her sister’s life. She buried the pair together. “It is a devastating time,” she wrote, “My sister is gone and my boy. His little coffin . . . seemed to carry my very heart into the earth with it.”
Thomas mourned the loss by taking a job as leader of an emigrant party heading to Oregon. Eliza remained behind, pouring her sorrows out on paper. She traveled throughout Illinois by stagecoach, compiling notes for a book she hoped to one day write.
Not long after Thomas returned from his overland trek, he moved his wife east to New York. He wrote extensively about his trip across the frontier, and by 1846 had published four guidebooks. After giving Thomas two more sons, Eliza realized her dream of seeing her own work in print. Her first manuscript, published in 1843, focused on what she called “a woman’s moral and spiritual superiority.” Her subsequent work centered on the same theme, pondering the importance of a woman’s role as a civilizer in frontier society. Her profound declarations and ideas shocked most readers, generated attention from politicians, and prompted a job offer from the Sing Sing Prison, where she was invited to serve as jail matron for the women’s section.
Eliza was twenty-seven when she accepted the position at Sing Sing, and she set about immediately to change the cruel ways in which female inmates were treated. She brought the establishment out of its dark age, where harsh fire-and-brimstone religiosity was practiced, and into a new era where prisoners were supplied with books and taught to read.
Feeling restless and increasingly resentful of Eliza’s popularity as a reformer, Thomas went west again in 1847. A year later, while visiting San Francisco, he fell ill and died from complications of pneumonia. Once Eliza heard of Thomas’s death, she left at once for California. With her arms around her sons, nine-year-old Charles and eleven-year-old Edward, Eliza walked through the muddy, unpaved San Francisco streets toward the mortuary. Rowdy men filled every thoroughfare, parading from gaudy gambling house to gaudy saloon and back again like ants. Bawdy music spilled out of windows and doors of the bars, and guns fired at all hours of the night. Eliza drank in what she deemed “a wild, depraved scene—the reckless abandon of a city raging with Gold Rush fever.”
The lack of women in this rambunctious setting did not escape her attention. She was one of a handful of females in the Gold Country and wherever she went, men stared at her. “Doorways filled instantly,” she wrote, “little islands in the street were thronged with men who seemed to gather in a moment, and who remained immovable until I passed.”
Recalling her belief that women were “civilizers in a frontier society,” a plan began to take shape. “If this rugged area were to be reformed—it would take women to bring that change about,” she later wrote. After a short rest, Eliza began the journey back to the East Coast with the idea to petition single women to move to California as “checks upon the many evils” there.
On February 2, 1849, Eliza drafted an advertisement to be published in New York papers that explained her intentions:
It is proposed that the company shall consist of persons not under twenty-five years of age, who shall bring from their clergyman, or some authority of the town where they reside, satisfactory testimonials of education, character, capacity, etc., and who can contribute the sum of two hundred and fifty dollars, to defray the expenses of the voyage, make suitable provision for their accommodation after reaching San Francisco, until they shall be able to enter upon some occupation for their support, and create a fund to be held in reserve for the relief of any who may be ill, or otherwise need aid before they are able to provide for themselves.
To give her advertisement an air of respectability and authority she hoped would further attract prospective brides, she secured endorsements from leading political figures like Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, and Henry Ward Beecher. More than 200 ladies responded to Eliza’s broadside, but a sudden illness kept her from being able to actively organize the expedition. In the end, only a handful of brides-to-be agreed to go to California with her.
Reformer Eliza Farnham authored this broadside encouraging single women to come West and act as “cheers upon many of the evils there.”
CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, VB-4
Eliza and her entourage set sail on April 15, 1849. The trip was widely publicized in frontier newspapers. Lonely miners eagerly anticipated the arrival of the packet ship Angelique, hoping to find a wife among its gentle freight. Some men, such as miner Henry Holmes, made mention of the forthcoming event in their daily journals. “Went to church three times today,” Holmes reported, “A few ladies present, does my eye good to see a woman once more. Hope Mrs. Farnham will bring 10,000.”
Not everyone found the idea of supplying single pioneers with potential brides acceptable. Many socialites considered it a scandalous plan, and the campaign was mired in controversy. Rumors that Eliza was little more than a procurer ultimately kept many women from committing to the journey.
The highly anticipated trip to San Francisco was troublesome from the start. Eliza challenged the authority of the ship’s captain, demanding he make an unscheduled stop for fresh water. Furious with what he referred to as a “brazen female meddler,” the captain lured Eliza and her charges off the ship in Chile and left them stranded there. A long, anxious month passed before they were able to catch another ship for San Francisco. Eliza and her boys arrived at their new home in Santa Cruz in February of 1850, and from there proceeded to find the land that had been left to them. After a short carriage ride through the country, the three arrived at the homestead. The house itself was little more than a shack, but the acreage around it was lush and filled with cattle. “An ideal place to raise a family,” she would later write in her book, California, In-Doors and Out.
With the help of her good friend, Georgiana Bruce Kirby, the two built a ranch house on the property and began farming the land. Realizing their long, full dresses hampered their work in the fields, Eliza decided the two needed to wear bloomers. She made their wide, loose pants from old gymnastic suits. Like her mail-order bride plan, it was another unconventional action that shocked the community around her.
In 1852, Eliza accepted a marriage proposal from San Francisco resident and entrepreneur, William Alexander Fitzpatrick. According to Georgiana’s journal, William was the “greatest blackguard in the country.” He frequently mistreated Eliza and their life was a series of stormy partings and reconciliations. The two divorced four years later.
In 1856, Eliza abandoned ranch life and returned to her work at state women’s prisons, speaking out for reform. She eventually took a job as principal of the first Santa Cruz public school. In her leisure time she toured the state, lecturing on topics ranging from spiritualism to women’s rights. She penned four books on the subject of women and the emerging West. In 1859, she organized a society to assist destitute women in finding homes in the West, and took charge of several such emigrant parties. “None but the pure and strong-hearted of my sex should come alone to this land,” she reasoned.
Historian Herbert Bancroft boasted that Eliza was one of the “first women to recognize the effects her sex could have on the Wild West—and probably one to be avoided at all costs by the hell-raising male population in the California gold fields.”
Her efforts convinced like-minded female pioneers to relocate and cast their influence over the new frontier.
This is the most gladdening intelligence of the day . . . Eliza Farnham and her girls are coming, and the dawning of brighter days for our golden land is even now perceptible. The day of regeneration is nigh on hand . . . We shall . . . prepare ourselves to witness the great change which is shortly to follow, with feelings akin to hilarious joy.
California Daily Alta—1849
Eliza Farnham’s unconventional methods of bringing civility to the Wild West helped transform the frontier and make the emerging country fit for wives and family.
BRIDAL COUPLES
During the late 1880s, Gold Country hostelries were literally filled with blushing brides. Women arrived from eastern locations to wed the men they’d met through mail-order advertisements and set up house in the rich hills of northern California. San Francisco was one of the most popular places in the country to honeymoon. Couples found it to be a cheerful city with enough sights to occupy their time for months. The presence of many new partners gave the location a sense of solace that helped make the mail-order pairs feel at home as well. San Francisco innkeepers competed for the business of honeymooning couples, offering them a variety of goods and services in return for staying at their establishments. The rivalry between the hotels was fierce and often made front-page news.
So great has become the competition between three or four of the leading city’s hotels in the solicitation for bridal couples that the most successful of the landlords in this effort presents each one of the brides who stop at his hostelry a beautiful bouquet or basket of cut flowers. The clerk who receives the couple inquires of the bridegroom if he suspects a recent marriage—and it is seldom that a mistake is made—and then the flowers go up to the apartments engaged.
