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Women of the American West Boom town boulevard The muddy main street of Helena, Montana in 1870. In such towns that sprang up after the discovery of gold, women were rare commodities, and services such as boarding, laundry and prostitution were prized In 1854, a card sharp from the east of the United States, going by the name Dumont – possibly from New Orleans – arrived in the gold-mining town of Nevada, California. Having found success as a professional gambler in San Francisco, this entrepreneur of the American West opened a gambling parlour in this new location that, by all accounts, was highly profitable. But the settlement dwindled and Dumont moved on, spending time in Utah, Idaho and Arizona, testing the waters of brothel management in various spots during the 1860s. In 1872, in Nevada, Dumont was double-crossed by a partner, losing everything. So this inveterate gambler came to the table again, latterly in the gold-mining town of Bodie, California. In 1879, after a disastrous loss, the game was up. On 8 September, Dumont’s body was found outside town, having apparently taken a morphine overdose. What makes this tale of frontier life unusual is that the protagonist was a woman: Eleanor Dumont, later known as ‘Madame Moustache’ and probably born Simone Jules around 1829. The adage “Go west, young man”, reputedly popularised by New York Tribune founder Horace Greeley, conjures a vivid impression of the 19th-century American frontier as a place of masculine action and opportunity. As portrayed in cowboy movies – think John Wayne, Clint Eastwood – this world of toughtalking, gun-toting macho swagger has often been seen as the exclusive domain of men. But, as recent research (and Dumont’s 58 story) has shown, this was also a place of women’s agency, social latitudes and the stretching of established gender boundaries. As such, the history of ‘how the West was won’ (or lost) was much more variegated than the vision presented in traditional historical readings and countless Hollywood westerns. As a place of new starts, economic possibility and social freedom, in the 19th-century the American West represented a realm very different from the east. Travellers on the overland trails in the middle of that century were faced with unfamiliar and challenging terrain. Vast expanses of prairie, the soaring peaks of the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, and the forbidding deserts of the far west separated Independence, Missouri (from where many wagon trains departed) from the shores of the sparkling Pacific. Matching this exceptional topography was an equally monumental imagined landscape of manifest destiny, national dreams and personal aspirations in the making. Expanding empire Over the first half of the 19th century, the US claimed vast swathes of territory through the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the annexation of Texas (1845), the Oregon Treaty (1846), and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). When Jefferson assumed the presidency in 1801, the US counted 864,000 square miles of territory. By 1862, when the Pacific Railway Act was signed, paving the way for a true transcontinental railway line, and President Abraham Lincoln was grappling with thorny issues GE T T Y I M A G E S
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Staking a claim The Chrisman sisters pictured by a sod house in Lieban Creek, Nebraska, in 1886. Many women travelled west to claim territory on the Great Plains; Lizzie Chrisman (second left) bought her land from the government around the time this picture was taken, paying $2.50 per acre Women stretched the limits of convention, changing their costume, habits and daily activities to fit the needs of the trail A L A M Y around slavery and secession, that figure had mushroomed to close to three million square miles. Involved in this dynamic story of territorial conquest and associated political, economic, social and environmental transformation were thousands of women – migrants from across the world, who made the West their home. In the traditional telling of the frontier story, female characters were either invisible or consigned to the role of supporting player and gender stereotype: sun-bonneted helpmates, school ma’ams or sassy saloon girls. A glance at the ‘women’s West’, however, presents a much more complex story – one of resilience and adaptation, loosened social conventions, inventive directions in female empowerment and a ‘hidden history’ of gender unorthodoxy. Although the decision to travel west was typically made by men, many women, too, greeted the possibilities of overland migration with excitement and interest. Some were fearful of the unknown, their fears fed by a contemporary literary digest rich in tales of damsels in distress taken captive by Native Americans, and of a savage landscape roamed by hungry wolves and angry bears. Others, though, relished the adventure and embraced the ethos of westering possibility. On the road, women routinely stretched the limits of convention, either by necessity or inclination, changing their costume, habits and daily activities to fit the needs of the trail. For some, the casting off of etiquettes and the assumption of new roles and duties provoked fears about losing feminine identity in the uncivilised wilds. However, for others, abandoning long petticoats and gloves in favour of riding astride horses, driving wagon trains and shooting game was to be relished. One such woman was Sarah Raymond Herndon, who was 24 or 25 when she emigrated with her family to Virginia City, Montana, in 1865. In her 1902 memoir Days on the Road: Crossing the Plains in 1865, she wrote effusively of trailside foraging, fishing, riding out on her horse and dispensing with her long skirts. For many migrants, the objective was land, and many women travelling within family units aimed to claim territory under the auspices of the Homestead Act (1862). Significantly, one in 10 homestead cla ims were fi led by single women (including widowed and divorced women) who, under the rules of the federal Æ Æ 59

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Staking a claim The Chrisman sisters pictured by a sod house in Lieban Creek, Nebraska, in 1886. Many women travelled west to claim territory on the Great Plains; Lizzie Chrisman (second left) bought her land from the government around the time this picture was taken, paying $2.50 per acre

Women stretched the limits of convention, changing their costume, habits and daily activities to fit the needs of the trail

A L A M Y

around slavery and secession, that figure had mushroomed to close to three million square miles.

Involved in this dynamic story of territorial conquest and associated political, economic, social and environmental transformation were thousands of women – migrants from across the world, who made the West their home. In the traditional telling of the frontier story, female characters were either invisible or consigned to the role of supporting player and gender stereotype: sun-bonneted helpmates, school ma’ams or sassy saloon girls. A glance at the ‘women’s West’, however, presents a much more complex story – one of resilience and adaptation, loosened social conventions, inventive directions in female empowerment and a ‘hidden history’ of gender unorthodoxy.

Although the decision to travel west was typically made by men, many women, too, greeted the possibilities of overland migration with excitement and interest. Some were fearful of the unknown, their fears fed by a contemporary literary digest rich in tales of damsels in distress taken captive by Native Americans, and of a savage landscape roamed by hungry wolves and angry bears. Others, though, relished the adventure and embraced the ethos of westering possibility.

On the road, women routinely stretched the limits of convention, either by necessity or inclination, changing their costume, habits and daily activities to fit the needs of the trail. For some, the casting off of etiquettes and the assumption of new roles and duties provoked fears about losing feminine identity in the uncivilised wilds. However, for others, abandoning long petticoats and gloves in favour of riding astride horses, driving wagon trains and shooting game was to be relished. One such woman was Sarah Raymond Herndon, who was 24 or 25 when she emigrated with her family to Virginia City, Montana, in 1865. In her 1902 memoir Days on the Road: Crossing the Plains in 1865, she wrote effusively of trailside foraging, fishing, riding out on her horse and dispensing with her long skirts.

For many migrants, the objective was land, and many women travelling within family units aimed to claim territory under the auspices of the Homestead Act (1862). Significantly, one in 10 homestead cla ims were fi led by single women (including widowed and divorced women) who, under the rules of the federal

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