I M A G E S

G E T T Y

Jane, depicted by Doris Day in a 1953 musical – became known for flouting female conventions. A child migrant to Montana in the mineral rushes of the 1860s, Canary made a name for herself working in male-dominated occupations (driving mules, travelling with the army) and, especially, for her habit of wearing men’s clothes.

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Take One Eyed Charley (Charlotte Parkhurst). Orphaned in Vermont, she began dressing as a boy, sought her fortune in t t c d r the California Gold Rush in 1849, voted in the presidential election of 1868, and became a well-known west-coast stagecoach driver. After “thirty years in disguise” (as reported in the New York Times), her sex was discovered only after her death in 1879. The wearing of masculine costume, then, could be a pragmatic recourse: a way to find sustenance or work and claim the fruits of the frontier. Reflecting on the common practice of women passing as men to claim mining rights, the Colorado Central City Weekly Register went as far to assert that a “mania for females to appear in male attire has struck”. The decision to

An enigmatic figure who emerged as a frontier celebrity playing in ‘Wild West’ shows at the end of the 19th century, Calamity Jane played on her reputation as a ‘female scout’ with aplomb, regaling journalists and saloongoers with tales of how she might have saved General Custer, her routing of Native American outlaws of the Deadwood Stage, and her capture of ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok’s killer with a meat cleaver. A raconteur and storyteller who played fast and loose with the truth for popular appeal, she ably advertised the West as a place of grand adventuring and tall tales.

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A pin celebrates the centenary of the birth of suffragist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The agency of women in the West gave impetus to the early women’s suffrage movement

Meanwhile, her lived experience, as an itinerant, butch woman on the margins of society, who was at home in the company and performance routines of men, speaks in important ways to modern understandings of fluid sexual and gender identity. Calamity Jane, though, attracted notoriety as much as acceptance: though she garnered attention for her personification of the ‘wild and woolly’ eccentricities of pioneer days and her lively invocation of western spirit, she was also lambasted by critics for her wayward and ‘unfeminine’ attributes.

Different ways of being ‘Passing’ as a man brought various opportunities – work, freedom of movement, safe travel – for independent women in an age of considerable gender restrictions. The West was particularly appealing as a place to experiment with different ways of being – politically, legally and socially permissive, with a mobile demographic and inhabited by plenty of people looking to start afresh.

‘pass’ as a man was also deeply political in nature, and making one’s way ‘in a man’s world’ an important performance of gender liberation. As female rights campaigner Elizabeth Cady Stanton proselytised in an 1869 article in The Revolution: “If, by concealing our sex we find that we, too, can roam up and down the earth in safety, we shall keep our womanhood a profound secret” until such a day when “we shall dress as we please”.

For some, adopting a manly disguise facilitated the tracking down of errant lovers, escape from abusive relationships, or the successful execution of criminal heists. The latter, on occasion, backfired – as in the case of Pearl Hart, ‘the girl bandit’, whose trademark disguise eventually abetted her capture. For others, meanwhile, the possibility of masculine masquerade allowed for the expression of a non-binary gender identity or the pursuit of romantic relationships with women. This important ‘hidden history’ of gender unorthodoxy is only now being excavated.

Long written out of the historical record, the voices of frontier women are vividly evoked by a richly textured corpus of diaries and period accounts, though the voices of non-white, non-literate and nonconformist figures are still poorly represented – for example, women with non-binary gender identities, or who enjoyed same-sex relationships. Of course, the experiences of indigenous women during this period are also absent from this narrative.

Adopting a manly disguise facilitated the tracking down of errant lovers, escape from abusive relationships, or enacting of criminal heists

Horace Greeley had an up-close encounter with these variegated gender dynamics. Riding a stagecoach in 1859, he shared a carriage with a young prospector headed for the mineral fields, full of conversation and dreams of fortune. When the argonaut (the nickname for gold-rush hopefuls) left the train, the conductor pointed out to Greeley that the plucky young lad was, in fact, a woman. “Go west, young man” may have been a catchy invocation, but it overlooked a large chunk of the story.

Karen R Jones is reader in history at the University of Kent. Her new book Calamity: The Many Lives of Calamity Jane will be published by Yale University Press in 2020

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