by Gail Collins
Annie, with her tiny figure, long skirts, and gentle demeanor, embodied the kind of strong but feminine cowgirl easterners wanted to believe in. To maintain her image, she set firm boundaries. She refused to wear trousers and always rode sidesaddle. Frank told reporters that although Annie was able to hit targets while standing on her head, she considered it “not proper to do” in public. No one was permitted to curse or drink in her presence. She thought the idea of women voting was unladylike. At the turn of the century Oakley took to the stage, in plays that always featured her as the western cowgirl who defeats evil in a genteel manner. In the course of her long career, she made it acceptable for women to shoot, hunt, and even compete with men—as long as they kept both legs on the same side of the saddle.
Calamity Jane, unlike Annie, was a real westerner. She was born Martha Canary, the oldest child of an unsuccessful farmer and a mother who often rode into town to drink with men of questionable background. The family left their farm in Missouri during the Civil War to escape creditors and wound up in Montana, where her father became a gambler and her mother a prostitute, and the little girls were forced to beg for food. By the time she was a teenager, Martha’s parents were dead, and she was homeless and illiterate. She may have turned to prostitution to support herself and her siblings. When the younger children were sent off to live with a Mormon couple in Salt Lake City, Martha struck out on her own, ending up in Piedmont, Wyoming, a small, wild railroad town where she was, at age thirteen, the only unattached female. Although nobody knows precisely what happened to her next, she most likely wound up in a brothel and may have made her way to the Dakotas as an army camp follower. By 1875, she had been dubbed Calamity Jane—“jane” was a western word for any female—and was known as a hard-drinking drifter who hung around with Wild Bill Hickok and his crowd. She seemed most comfortable wandering from one town to another, taking temporary lovers who she always referred to as “husbands” and occasionally running afoul of the law for stealing or getting drunk. Ultimately, she was a sad outsider, a woman who behaved like a man in places where men tended to behave very badly. But she was also well liked by people who could tolerate her antics. (Despite rumors that she and Hickok were married, he was not among her more patient acquaintances.) She was a good friend when she was sober, and a caring woman who reportedly dared to nurse smallpox victims during an outbreak in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1878.
Calamity had a knack for telling tall tales, and she manufactured stories about having scouted for General Custer and ridden for the pony express that may have helped inspire her tabloid legends. But the real creator of the Calamity Jane known to most of America was Ned Wheeler, a writer of dime novels, a popular form of turn-of-the-century literature. Wheeler created a popular series of books featuring the ongoing adventures of Calamity Jane and her platonic friend, the totally fictional Deadwood Dick. The Jane in Wheeler’s novels smoked cigars, wore buckskin trousers, and rode astride, but she never swore or drank. There were hints that she was the daughter of a good family who came west after she was betrayed in love. Above all she was beautiful, graceful, and daring. In one episode, intent on averting a mine explosion, Calamity “dashed madly down through the gulch, standing erect upon the back of her unsaddled horse and the animal running at the top of its speed…. her hair flowing wildly from beneath the brim of her slouch hat, her eyes dancing occasionally with excitement, every now and then her lips giving vent to a ringing whoop, which was creditable imitation…of a full-blown Comanche warrior.”
The real Calamity, who was a great rider but neither beautiful nor particularly graceful, tried unsuccessfully on a few occasions to take advantage of her fame and published an extremely imaginative autobiography. But she was no entertainer, and her attempts to perform in Wild West shows were failures. “Her sorrows seemed to need a good deal of drowning,” Bill Cody told a Montana newspaper after Jane decamped from an exposition in Buffalo. She died in her forties, of the effects of drinking, hard living, and poverty.
“SHE PUT HER ARMS AROUND A TREE
AND HUGGED IT”
Most women who went west intended to be farm wives, not cowgirls. They rarely encountered cattle stampedes or mine explosions, but they did fight prairie fires, grasshopper invasions, tornadoes, and killer droughts. Their journeys west often ended not in California but Kansas or Nebraska, and the fact that the trip was shorter did not necessarily make it less grueling. Julia Lovejoy, traveling with two of her children to meet her minister husband in Kansas, took a riverboat to Kansas City. Her small daughter, Edith, caught the measles on board, and when one of the male passengers offered Julia his cabin, she found it was so filthy that a dead cat was in one of the bureau drawers. After she cleaned the room as best she could, the original owner decided to reclaim it and evicted her and the children. After landing, they wound up staying in a falling-down shack, in the home of a woman who turned out to be a violent alcoholic, and later in a hotel where they had to pass dead bodies in the hallway to get to their room. When the little family finally got on the wagon to Lawrence, the driver, a “drunken rowdy,” took four days to make the trip, instead of the usual two. There were no beds at night, and Edith slept moaning on the dirty floor of an Indian tepee. On the final night, the driver stole all their belongings, and Edith died.
Many settlers made their first homes in dugouts, glorified caves carved from the side of hills. One girl who lived in a dugout wrote that when it rained “we carried the water out with buckets, then waded around in the mud until it dried up. Then to keep us nerved up, sometimes the bull snakes would get in the roof and now and then one would lose his hold and fall down on the bed, and then off on the floor. Mother would grab the hoe and there was something doing and after the fight was over Mr. Bull Snake was dragged outside.” Pioneer diaries mentioned snakes a lot, particularly the ones that fell from the ceiling into people’s beds at night. One woman in Gaines County, Texas, reported killing 186 in one year. Julia Lovejoy found a rattlesnake under her bed, and another in a cupboard above her baby’s cradle. “We have never enjoyed a walk in the garden, or gathering plums, or indeed sleeping in our unfinished cabin in warm weather on account of these intruders,” she wrote.
The soddy, a somewhat superior shelter, was made out of bricks of sod, weighing up to 50 pounds apiece. It took an acre of prairie sod to build a one-room house. Soddies were sturdier than dugouts and many families lived in them for years. Wives may have yearned for a solid wood home, but if the family made money on the farm, the first priority for investment was to buy new equipment for the fields or better stock for the barn. One female pioneer said she and her neighbors grew so accustomed to gravel floors that they asked each other, “Have you done your house raking today?”
The flat, empty landscape of the prairies, the perpetual winds, and the dirt houses were enough to dispirit anyone, but some of the wives loved the challenge. “The wind whistled through the walls in winter and the dust blew in summer, but we papered the walls with newspapers and made rag carpets for the floor and thought we were living well, very enthusiastic over the new country we intended to conquer,” said Lydia Lyons. But not every woman was that cheerful. “When our covered wagon drew up beside the door of the one-room sod house that father had provided, he helped mother down and I remember how her face looked as she gazed about that barren farm, then threw her arms around his neck and gave way to the only fit of weeping I ever remember seeing her indulge in,” one girl recalled. Another woman begged her husband to take her along when he went to a town called Little River to purchase wood: “She hadn’t seen a tree for two years, and when they arrived at Little River she put her arms around a tree and hugged it until she was hysterical.”
Prairie fires were a threat from late summer through autumn, when a spark from lightning or a campfire could set the tall grass blazing. “Many a time my mother stayed up all night, watching the red glare of the prairie fires in more than one direction, in fear and trembling that they might come swooping down
on us asleep in our little log cabin,” said Lillian Smith. When that danger faded, the winter arrived, with winds reaching over fifty miles an hour. In a blizzard, a family could be cut off from the outside world for weeks, snowed in so effectively that they were unable to reach the woodpile. The wind was a force to be reckoned with year-round, shredding clothing on the line, blowing dust into houses through closed doors and windows.
One of the most bizarre and terrifying assaults of nature involved grasshoppers. Swarms would appear suddenly, in huge clouds, and devour everything in sight. “They commenced on a 40 acre field of corn about ten o’clock and before night there was not an ear of corn or green leaf to be seen,” said Elizabeth Roe. Another woman remembered that the grasshoppers “struck the ground so hard it sounded almost like hail.” If a housewife tried covering her garden with gunnysacks, the bugs simply went under, or ate their way through them. They ate the peaches off the trees and left the pits hanging. After they ate the crops the grasshoppers moved into the barns and houses. They ate all the food, and some women said they devoured furniture, fence boards, and cabin siding. They ate the clothing and left window curtains hanging in shreds.
In the summer, flies or gnats swarmed over everything. In a desperate attempt to drive away mosquitoes, plains women burned buffalo chips—they could stand the smell longer than the bugs could. A visitor to frontier Illinois looked through a cabin window and saw a woman and her children dancing around in what he presumed was the ceremony of a religious cult. But on entering, he discovered “they were all busy in warring with the mosquitoes.” In the Southwest, women were instructed to place their beds at least two feet away from the walls, lest they wake up covered with scorpions. Fleas were a terrible problem. Indian wives made houses that were easy to replace and simply burned them down when the fleas became too bothersome. But American settlers had a yen for permanence, and a sturdy house that lasted forever was also a permanent abode for vermin.
Most white women were terrified of Indians, even though relatively few settlers ever had a violent encounter with them. But they had read the captivity literature, which featured stories of gang rapes, mass murders, and disfigurements like that of Matilda Lockhart, who was taken by the Comanches and returned in 1840 with much of her nose burnt off—“all the fleshy end gone and a great scab formed on the end of the bone.” George Custer instructed his men to shoot Mrs. Custer rather than let her be captured by hostile Indians. In reality, the range of experiences of women captives varied, depending on the tribe, the personality of the woman, and that of the Indian who claimed her. Some women were taken as slaves, others as wives. Susan Parrish, a pioneer, told the story of the Oatman family, who were attacked by Apaches while Mrs. Oatman was giving birth. The Indians murdered the parents and smaller children and carried away two older girls. Many years later one of the girls, Olive, was found by settlers while she was sitting on a riverbank, perhaps preparing to bathe. She had been sold to the Mohave Indians, and among them had married and raised a family. She desperately wished to return to them. “For four years she lived with us, but she was a grieving, unsatisfied woman who somehow shook one’s belief in civilization,” wrote Parrish.
While the white women were worried about Indians, the Indian women were absolutely frantic about the white settlers, and they often buried their babies in the dirt to conceal them from pale strangers. The Indians were incredulous at the disasters that the whites brought along with them, particularly the disease. The Lakota called 1844, the year of a measles epidemic, “The Rash Breaks Out on Babies Winter.” In 1849, almost half the Cheyenne tribe died from cholera. By the time the first settlers made it to the West Coast, early contacts with whites had already left many of the California tribes well on the way to extinction. The Indians knew that white people were responsible for these terrible plagues and assumed, generally incorrectly, that the whites had done it deliberately.
But the whites were deliberately killing the buffalo. White women traveling across the plains saw buffalo hunting as merely something their men wasted time on when they should be pushing the train forward. However, Indian women were keenly aware the slaughter would doom their way of life. Pretty Shield, a Crow woman, said, “My heart fell down when I began to see dead buffalo all over our beautiful country, killed and skinned and left to rot by white men, many many hundred of buffalo.” In the culture of the Plains Indians, women were responsible for butchering and drying meat after a buffalo hunt, processing and tanning the hides with a preparation made from the animal’s brain and liver. It took about twenty-two hides to make a tepee, which the women sewed. They then owned the finished home. But as the buffalo vanished, the women’s place in the tribe did, too.
Sarah Winnemucca, a Paiute who remembered being buried in the earth by her terrified mother when white men approached their camp, became a popular lecturer on the abuses suffered by her people. Winnemucca had great faith in women’s capacity to bridge racial gulfs. “If women could go into your Congress,” she wrote, “I think justice would soon be done to the Indians.” Actually, white women had a range of emotions about Indians, many of them decidedly unsympathetic. A Mrs. Miller, writing from Oregon in 1852, explained cheerfully that the Indians were “dying here as elsewhere, where they are in contact with civilization…. I used to be sorry that there was so much prospect of their annihilation…. Now I do not think it is to be much regretted. If they all die, their place will be occupied by a superior race.” Some white women did sometimes express pity for the Indians’ plight, and a few developed friendships with Native American women. But almost no one expressed regret for taking their lands.
“I CANNOT MAKE A FRIEND
LIKE MOTHER OUT OF HENRY”
Life in the West was generally devoid of anything women regarded as fun. In Topeka in the 1890s, Martha Farnsworth, a young Kansas housewife, was so desperate for entertainment that she went to see the Wizard Oil Medicine show troupe thirteen times during its two-month run. In Wyoming, the chances for socializing were so rare that girls would ride forty miles on horseback to go to a dance. A Texas woman became so lonely she began going out to the watering hole to have conversations with the cattle. Women particularly missed talking with other women. “I have been very blue,” wrote Nellie Wetherbee in her journal, “for I cannot make a friend like mother out of Henry.” Margaret Armstrong, a teenager on the Texas frontier in 1872, wrote that she and her mother hardly saw an outsider once every six months. “If we did not have a lot of house work to do we would be at a loss how to kill time,” she said. Armstrong, who clearly had a talent for seeing the glass half-full, eventually found happiness in marriage to a local teacher.
Women must have missed the company of their own sex most when they were pregnant. Annette Botkin said her mother, a Kansas pioneer, was expecting her third child and caring for toddlers four and eighteen months, when her husband left on a seventeen-mile journey to get wood. As soon as he was gone, she began feeling contractions. She got the baby clothes together on a chair, along with scissors, drew a bucket of fresh water, made some bread-and-butter sandwiches, and set out milk for the babies. The family’s faithful dog, which protected the children from snakes and other danger, was left on guard. When her husband arrived home, he discovered he had a baby boy. “My mother having fainted a number of times in her attempt to dress the baby, had succeeded at last; and when my father came in he found a very uncomfortable but brave and thankful mother.”
Like the colonials, the pioneers lived in small, dark houses bereft of luxury. Jessie Hill Rowland of Kansas once told the story of the time her father, a justice of the peace, officiated at the wedding of a local farm family. Her parents were ushered into a dugout—one room, furnished with two chairs, a bed, a small table, a bench, and a stove. A small sheet had been stretched across one corner of the room, and the bride and groom stood behind it, attempting to look inconspicuous. The mother of the bride was grinding dried carrots for a kind of pseudo-coffee. She seated Rowland’s parents on the
two chairs until the neighbors arrived, and the couple emerged from behind the sheet to be officially married. “Soon after all sat down to the wedding supper. The sheet that hung across the corner of the room was taken down and spread over the table for a cloth.” Besides the carrot coffee, the newlyweds served their guests bread and butter, fried pork, and sauces made out of wild plums. “After supper the bridegroom took my father to one side and asked him to accept some potatoes in payment for performing the ceremony. He readily consented and returned home.”
Glass for windows was scarce, and many women had to do their chores by candlelight at noon. Susanna Townsend, the wife of a gold miner, theorized that the reason they didn’t have windows was because the husbands were home only after sundown. When she finally set aside some money for glass, she wrote to her sister Fanny triumphantly, “I have a window in my house…. All the passers by stare and gaze at the wonderful phenomenon.” Women tried to turn their surroundings into something pleasant. They papered the walls with newspapers and magazines, and a new tenant moving into a previously occupied house always got a kick out of “reading the walls.” Bertha Anderson, a Danish immigrant, was determined to make her first home in Montana nice, even though it was a former chicken house, measuring about twelve by twelve, occupied by five children and three adults. She covered the log walls with newspaper, then whitewashed them, and spent one entire winter making rag rugs, which she put on the floor of the front room so her children could play without getting splinters from the rough planks. Her pride in her refurbished nest lasted about a week, until it rained hard and the roof began to leak. The muslin she had tacked on the ceiling hung heavy with mud, the beds were wet, and, Anderson reported sadly, “the poor carpet which was supposed to be striped had now faded and the colors had gone, so that it was a dirty mess.”
