Mothers and Daughters on the Western Frontier PDF

0 Mothers and Daughters on the Western Frontier Author(s): Lillian Schlissel Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies , Summer, 1978, Vol. 3, No. 2, Mothers and Daughters (Summer, 1978), pp. 29-33 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346396 REFERE...

0 Mothers and Daughters on the Western Frontier Author(s): Lillian Schlissel Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies , Summer, 1978, Vol. 3, No. 2, Mothers and Daughters (Summer, 1978), pp. 29-33 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346396 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346396?seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms D University of Nebraska Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies JSTOR This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:48:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Mothers and Daughters on the Westem Frontier Lillian Schlissel Few historians would not agree that the western frontier and the Civil War have been so heavily researched that there seems little left to write about. Regarding the frontier, we must know every trail followed, every cut-off taken, every Indian skirmish fought, and every piece of legislation passed that affected the course of western history. We seem to have come to the point where western history must turn in on itself and re-tell stories that are already known. Having arrived at this point, we find two new areas of research open to tell us that what we thought we knew too well, we have not wholly known at all. One of these new areas is the question of ethnicity and ethnic settlements on the frontier, and the other is the study of women's history. The women's movement of the past two decades has served to suggest that the frontier was a place where women, as well as men, lived their lives. The questions attendant upon so simple a perception abound, for if the frontier was a constellation of conditions and circumstances so unique that it affected American character and American political and social institutions, we also must ask how this same frontier influenced the structure of the family. We must frame research so that we can explore the modifications of social and sex roles that were formed by the special demands of frontier life. We must ask about the character of childhood on the frontier-how women were educated when the community extolled exclusively masculine virtues. We must learn about the legal structures that dealt with women's property rights and with the widow's children. Among the research tools available to the historian who searches for these answers are the personal narratives and the. diaries of the women themselves. These diaries are often wonderfully articulate resources and sometimes spirited commentaries upon the life and the people of the period between 1840 and 1870. History may have imposed silence upon women of the western frontier, but in their own time they were a sharp-witted and sharper-tongued breed. From the diaries we begin to learn how families accommodated to the process of emigration, how women measured their personal success as wives and mothers, and how mothers raised their sons and their daughters. From these accounts, I also have gleaned some of the dynamics that affected the relationships between mothers and daughters on the Overland Trail and on the first settlements of the western frontier. Diaries are, by nature, fragmentary records-stories of anomalous and sometimes idiosyncratic lives. They record unique experiences. Yet patterns do emerge. These patterns suggest that emigration generated a high order of dislocation in work roles and in social expectations for women-far more so than for men. The westward migration was a major dislocation in the emotional fabric of women's lives. The "woman's sphere" was already well defined in the Lillian Schlissel writes, ''/ always feel some degree of self-consciousness in presenting myself as a re· searcher of western history. Being from Brooklyn seems to suggest that the "West" means New Jersey. Nevertheless, for the past several years, I have been intensely researching the diaries of women on the Over· land Trail and patterns of family life on the frontier. I am preparing a book on the Overland Diaries of Women, and writing another on Families. The lives of women present dimensions of western history that are new, and family history raises new questions about the dynamics and the tensions of life on the frontier. Both women's history and family history will yet revise some of our assumptions about the life of Americans on the western frontier. '' FRONTIERS Vol. 111, No. 2 ©1978 Women Studies Program, University of Colorado This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:48:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 30 FRONTIERS settlements of the Mississippi Valley by the 1850's. However heterogeneous was the cross-section of socioeconomic groups that made up the emigrant trains, women within that population already had been trained to fairly uniform social roles. The daily lives of women were circumscribed by contact with other women. Their tasks were undertaken in the company of women; their periods of lying-in and childbirth were passed with the care and ministrations of women. The network of their lives was made of contacts with sisters and sisters-in-law, mothers, friends, and neighbors. Both the reality and the ideology of the woman's sphere existed on the middle-frontier, and was sundered by the start of the westward migration. The ratio of men to women, even on wagon trains with families well-represented, was something in the order of five to seven men to each single woman. Far beyond mere numbers, the Overland Trail experience was a greater psychic dislocation for women than for men. First of all, the determination to make the two-thousand-mile journey was not one made by the women. Over and over again, the diaries recount how the decision to leave was reached by husbands and by fathers, often over the protests of wives and daughters. Mary A. Jones wrote: "In the winter of 18 and 46 our neighbor got hold of Fremont's History of California and began talking of moving to the New Country & brought the book to my husband to read, & he was carried away with the idea too. I said 'O let us not go!' Our neighbors, some of them old men & women, with large families, but it made no difference. They must go.... We sold our home and what we could not take with us and what we could not sell... we gave away & on the 7th day of May 1846 we joined the camp for California."[2) Abby E. Fulkerth, writing almost twenty years later, echoed the same feelings: "Agreeable to the wish of my husband, I left all my relatives in Ohio... & started on this long & somewhat perilous journey.... it proved a hard task to leave them but still harder to leave my children buried in graveyards.... " The purposes of the westward migration were almost universally described by men in terms of the upward mobility attendant upon access to free lands. However powerful was the appeal of "Oregon Fever," the promise was seldom one that could be redeemed by women. The women who made the journey gathered their possessions and their children because life offered them no alternative. They valiantly masked their dismay because they were determined, above all, to maintain the family as a unit. For women who had entered their childbearing years, or for women who were pregnant at the journey's start, the Overland Trail was a particularly anxious time. Among these women, custom had imprinted a strong sense of sex and work roles. Once on the journey, these women performed all the traditional tasks allotted to them-washing, cooking, caring for the children and for the sick, and ministering to the dying and to the women in childbirth. But the Trail experience also demanded that they do more; women did the jobs of hired hands. They did whatever had to be done. Thus, they trudged behind the wagons, in choking clouds of dust, collecting "buffalo chips" or greasewood for fuel. Elizabeth Geer advised her friends who had remained at home: "Just step out and pull a lot of sage out of your garden and build a fire in the wind and bake, boil and fry by it and then you will guess how we have to do." They drove the teams of oxen; they loaded and unloaded the wagons at every river crossing, helping to caulk the wagon sides with tar, and leaving ribbons of belongings and keepsakes beside the road when wagons had to be abandoned. They stood watch at night. They melted lead and poured bullets when the group faced Indian attack. They set rocks behind the wheels of the wagons being pushed up the steep Rocky Mountains. They kept up the courage of their men and quieted their crying children. Necessity laid upon them what one historian has called "the double burden of femininity." They performed the traditional women's tasks and part of the men's tasks too. As if to withstand the stress laid upon them, women were responsive to each other's needs and strove to weave the sort of bonding that preserved the equilibrium of their old lives. Miriam Davis Colt tells of one woman so stricken on the Overland crossing with rheumatism from the constant exposure that she could no longer care for her own child. "I picked a lovely bouquet of prairie flowers and carried it to her but she couldn't take it into her hands." The sense that one gleans from these and other diaries is that women endured the westward migration, but their endurance often hid feelings of resentment and anxiety. In sharp contrast to these accounts are the diaries of the new brides and young girls for whom the thousand-mile journey was sparked with excitement and bright hope. Young wives, who had not yet entered the dangerous childbearing years, found the Overland Trail a honeymoon before they undertook the heavy burdens of the frontier wife. Unmarried girls found that the journey provided opportunity to share with young men and boys a brief period of free companionship. Young people sang together by the campfires and played mouth organs, guitars, and fiddles. Young girls drove the teams of oxen and learned to crack the whip as they had seen the men do. (7) Lydia Waters recalled that she climbed the hills with young boys: "sometimes my feet would slip off the [tree limbs] and I would be hanging by my arms. You may be sure my skirts were not where they ought to have been then.... There were many things to laugh about." Mary Eliza Warner, who crossed the continent when she was fifteen, wrote: "I drove four horses nearly all day," and "Aunt Celia and I played Chess which Mrs. Lord thought was the first step toward gam- This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:48:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Schlissel 31 bling."(9] Mrs. Nancy A. Hunt, in her account of her journey to California in 1854, recalled: "The young people had a good time, a great deal of fun. They were free from care, and could ride on horseback or in the wagons all they pleased, or could walk along the road together." Mrs. Hunt, who traveled with her husband and three children, gave her own place in the wagon to her children while she herself ''walked half the way to California. Many times I did not get into the wagon to ride all day." She remembered vividly: "While the young folk were having their good times, some of the mothers were giving birth to their babes; three babies were born in our company that summer.... In every instance, after the birth, we traveled right along the next day, mothers and babes with the rest of us."(10) The divergence in the attitudes of women diarists, therefore, is not a question of whether women did or did not possess the spirit of adventure, or whether women-like men-enjoyed the excitement of the unknown. The critical issue is whether the Overland journey came when a woman was-or was not-most susceptible to the dangers of childbirth and to the heaviest burdens of wifehood, or whether the journey came when she was still on the glad periphery of girlhood. The significant configuration is the life cycle of the diarist. The question of how to handle oneself as a lady and as a woman on the frontier was an issue of no small complexity. It was an issue charged with ambivalence and uncertainty, and one that often created friction between older and younger women. On the one hand were the expectations and habits of traditional female behavior, the ideals of propriety established by a Victorian society. These were carried by women who had entered the childbearing years. On the other hand, the daily conditions of frontier life generated new situations, and younger women were alive to the possibilities of the new dimensions to their lives, of the new relationships they might form, and of the new roles they might play. Typical of the tension between mothers and daughters is this excerpt from the diary of Adrietta Hixon: While traveling, mother was particular about Louvina and me wearing our sunbonnets and long mitts in order to protect our complexions, hair and hands. Much of the time I should like to have gone without that long bonnet poking out over my face, but mother pointed out to me some girls wh~ did not wear bonnets and as I did not want to look as they did, I stuck to my bonnet, finally growing used to it. There were cases made for our splint bonnets that were filled with little splints of wood shaved down very thin and smooth, which kept our bonnets from that wilted appearance that many had, where only pasteboard had been used. In the evening our bonnets were hung up to the ridge pole above the wagon, and mother had some sort of cream lotion for our hands and faces that we occasionally used when her eye was upon us.[11) The mother's discipline was felt to have been burdensome, and Adrietta went on to write: "When riding, I always rode aside with my full skirt pulled well down over my ankles. If we had ridden astride as they do now, people would have thought we were not lady-like. Mother was always reminding Louvina and me to be ladies, but sometimes it seemed to me that the requirements were too rigid, for I also liked to run, jump and climb._... "(12) Minor anecdotes-some trivial, some humorousbetray this continuing sense of ambivalence and uncertainty among younger women. Miriam Davis Colt recounts that when her husband and children were ill with fever and their cow had run off, she set out on foot to retrieve the animal. A neighbor offered his horse. Standing there alone, on the empty Kansas land, Miriam Davis Colt was distraught over whether or not she dared mount the horse "man-fashion." When at last she did so and brought the cow home, her husband met her at the door of her home, more struck with seeing his wife riding astride than in seeing the cow.(13) Mollie Dorsey Sanford recalled a similar adventure when she was a young girl. She, too, was sent to bring back a runaway cow. "It occurred to me how much easier I could get through the tangled underbrush if I were a man, and without letting anyone know of my project, I slipped out into the back shed, and donned an old suit of Father's clothes.... "(14) Dressed in her father's clothes, Mollie came upon a camp of men and, full of embarrassment, ran home. "When it was all explained, it was very funny to all but Mother, who feared I am losing all the dignity I ever possessed. I know I am getting demoralized.... "(15) A significant part of western society demonstrated the same vision of female rectitude and propriety. An emigrant named Loren Hastings recorded his shock upon seeing how the frontier had changed the nature of women: This day met a returning Co. from Oregon. In the Co. was Man & his wife & family; they were going back to Adams County, Ill. The woman rode with one foot on the one side of her pony & the other foot on the other side. This is the greatest curiosity I have ever seen yet. It knocks everything else into the shade.[16) Thus, accommodation to the conditions of the West usually meant some deviation from the received norms of behavior. This deviation almost always generated tension between mothers and daughters. Many young women were not acquiescent about their restriction, as the diaries of Lydia Milner Waters and Mary Ellen Todd attest.(17) There were even a few (very few) mothers who recounted with pride that a daughter could '' go off a half mile and mount a horse without a saddle or bridle" as if she were a boy.(18) But in other accounts, friction is the overwhelming response. In 1870, Jane Jasper, already established in a frontier This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:48:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 32 FRONTIERS settlement (writing to her daughter who was away in a boarding school), betrays in the sharp edge of her admonitions the price that frontier labor had extracted from her own life: "It is no use for me to be thinking and working my Life out for you to have the chance for an Education unless you will have the sense enough to appreciate what is done for your future."[19) Some women eagerly accepted the challenges of frontier life. They built and ran hotels, established and operated saw mills, and were storekeepers, ranchwomen, and homesteaders.[20) But there remained an uneasy line between respectability and notoriety. Folklore suggests the frontier's ambivalence toward independent women. The fame of Belle Starr, Calamity Jane, Pickhandle Nan, Madame Moustache, and Poker Alice indicates the outer range of tolerance. These flamboyant women were indulged like petted tomboys.[21) But there were other women whose efforts at independence were more uncertain. Having learned to crack the whip while driving a team of oxen, Mary Ellen Todd described how she experienced "a secret joy in being able to have a power that set things going, [but] also a sense of shame" in performing a man's feat.[22) The New Country, much like the New World, created friction between the generations and friction within families. The diaries suggest that some women responded to their changed conditions by modifying received norms of behavior; they adopted flexible attitudes and experimental behavior patterns. They assumed new roles easily, with a joyful pleasure; or they moved toward new roles with anxiety and conflict. But they did adapt and discover new lifestyles. Other women resisted change. These deliberately re-formed traditional bonds, and certainly the bond between mothers and daughters was a powerful means of providing a sense of stability and continuity with the past. As one historian has observed, "The chaos-always possible, sometimes desired, and often actual-in their lives on the western frontier was mitigated by obedience to the traditions of their bonds."[23) Lucinda Dalton, eldest daughter of a Mormon household that arrived in Utah in the winter of 1857-58, wrote that she remembered how her mother ''was so energetic in the matter of sending us to school that... she sat by her candle far into the night while I slept, to keep up with women's everlasting work so that she could still spare me, her eldest daughter (the mother's right hand) to attend school." Particularly if a household were close to its immigrant origins, the response to the frontier might be a reassertion of traditional configurations. Among such families, "A daughter's duty was firmly instilled, especially [because] girls [were] growing up in an alien culture."[25) Daughters of newly immigrant families were taught that they carried the responsibility of caring for young siblings and for parental households until they themselves were married. If that marriage were for any reason postponed, these girls soon found theselves drawn into the nascent industries that began to figure in frontier life. They worked in mill offices, in bookbinding establishments, in box factories, in cigar factories, in canning factories. They were domestics and seamstresses; they worked in general stores and in cotton mills. By 1888 the United States Department of Labor issued its Fourth Annual Report, entitled Working Women in Large Cities. The report contained information about Indianapolis, St. Paul, San Jose, and San Francisco. Within a five-year period between 1885 and 1890, the State Departments of Labor of Colorado, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, Nebraska, and Michigan had each issued reports which also included sections on wage-working women. Whatever upward mobility the frontier had promised men in the way of free land, it most certainly did not redeem to those who were compelled to enter the wage-working labor force. Conditions for women duplicated conditions of the mill girls in Lowell, Massachusetts, and in New York. Comparisons within the same decade show that the earnings of working women of Boston were $4.91 as against a national average of $5.64 and a high in California of $6.51. The Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the State of Colorado concluded: "Legitimate calculations lead to the certainty that the wages of a large majority of the female employees in Denver will not exceed $6 per week."[26) Of great interest also is the statistical study included in the national report of the birthplace of the parents of wage-working women. "While a very large proportion, 14,120 out of 17,427, of the women involved in this investigation are native-born, 12,904 had foreign-born fathers and 12,406 foreign-born mothers."[27) Most of these daughters supporting foreign-born parents and siblings lived at home and contributed their wages to the parental household. They were not saving their earnings for dowries, and they were not gaining skills by which they could better their station in life. Work was an extension of the daughter's obligation. Wage-labor in the western regions was just what it was along the eastern seaboard, a dreary round of long hours, low pay, and unhealthy conditions. In summary, many daughters on the frontier paid a heavy price for the geographic dislocation of the parental family. The link between mothers and daughters, while it offered daughters "a sense of stability and of continuity with a past that might otherwise never be known,'' also established a "web of obedience and obligation" that thrust these same daughters into the only frontier they were to know, the frontier of the wage-working class. This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:48:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Schlissel NOTES Research for this paper was partially supported by a summer grant to the writer from the American Council of Learned Societies. 1. See William R. Taylor and Christopher Lasch, "Two Kindred Spirits, Sorority and Family in New England 1839-1846," New England Quarterly, 36 (1963), 25-41; Charles E. Rosenberg, "Sexuality, Class and Role in Nineteenth-Century America," American Quarterly, 25 (May 1973), 131-53; Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood; 1830-1860," American Quarterly, 18 (Summer 1966), 151-74; Ann Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), chs. 1-2; Aileen Kraditor, ed., Up From the Pedestal (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), ch. 3; Katherine Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in Amen·can Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs, I (1975), 1-28; Joan Kelly Gadol, "The Social Relations of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women's History," Signs, I (1976), 809-23. 2. Mary Ann Smith Jones, "Recollections... 1846," Manuscript Diary, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 3. Abby E. Fulkerth, Manuscript Diary, April-August, 1863, Iowa to California. The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 4. Elizabeth Dixon Smith Geer, "Diary, 1848," Transactions, Oregon Pioneer Association, Vol. 26-35 (1907), 171-72. 5. John M. Faragher, "Work and Roles on the Overland Trail," American Studies Association Biennial Convention, Boston, October 1977. 6. Miriam Davis Colt, Went to Kansas (Watertown, New York, 1862), p. 57. 7. John Faragher and Christine Stansell, "Women and Their Families on the Overland Trail to California and Oregon, 184267," Feminist Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2/3 (1975), 157. 8. Lydia Milner Waters, "A Trip Across the Plains in 1855," Quarterly of the Society of California Pioneers, 6 (June 1929), 78. 33 10. Nancy A. Hunt, Manuscript Diary, 1854, Irene Paden Papers, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California. 11. Adrietta Appelgate Hixon, On to Oregon! A True Story of a Young Girl's Journey into the West, ed. Waldo Taylor (New York: Public Library Pamphlet, 1947), p. 12. 12. Hixon, p. 21. 13. Colt, p. 110. 14. Mollie Dorsey Sanford, Journal in Nebraska and Colorado Territories 1857-1866 (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1958), p. 53. 15. Sanford. 16. John D. Unruh, "The Plains Across: the Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1860," Diss. University of Kansas 1975, I, 188. 17. See Faragher and Stansell, 157. 18. Jane A. Gould Tourtillot, Manuscript Diary, 1862, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 19. Jane Jasper, Letters to her daughter, October 2, Nov. 20, 1870, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 20. See Sheryll Patterson-Black, "Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains Frontier," FRONTIERS, Vol. I, No. 2 (Spring 1976), 67-88. 21. See Poker Alice, a History of a Woman Gambler in the West, Nolie Mumey, ed. (Denver, 1951). 22. See Faragher and Stansell, 157. 23. Eliane Silverman, "In Their Own Words: Mothers and Daughters on the Alberta Frontier, 1890-1929," FRONTIERS, Vol. II, No. 2 (Summer 1977), 38. 24. Lucinda Dalton, Manuscript "Autobiography," Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 1876, 25. Silverman, 38. 26. Fourth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, "Working Women in Large Cities," (United States Department of Labor, 1888), p. 69. 27. Fourth Annual Report, p. 64. 28. Silverman, 38-39. 9. Mary Eliza Warner, Manuscript Diary, 1864, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. This content downloaded from 173.244.1.195 on Wed, 28 Feb 2024 18:48:10 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms