No Place for a Lady

 This movable society of settlers going west had guidelines for moving...supplies that should be left behind, like elegant clothing, heavily carved furniture, or a silver service - which were plainly not practicable on the trail going west.  All possessions were to be secure, compact and portable.  Space and weight had to be conserved for food, water, shelter, ammunition and tools.  There were actually guidebooks to explain how to pack your wagon!

One thing commonly left behind in the beginning of the land rush west was women.  The mining camps were notoriously male.  In the spring of 1849 in all of San Francisco, it is said that women numbered only 15.  Every camp had its share of prostitutes, but tough, bearded, weather-beaten men would stand on the street for hours just to have the sight of a real lady or a child.  Often men would travel miles to welcome the first "homemade lady" to camp. And let's face it, mining camps were not the ideal place to raise a family!

The scarcity of women  lowered the morality and made life rougher, but it had some advantages as well.  When women did come later, they brought their morality along with their inequality.  The making of social distinctions was women's work.  "Putting on style" wrote one Montana reporter, "is the detestation of everybody.  It is neither forgiven nor forgotten and kills a man like bullets."  In these movable towns, people seems more equal than men and women do otherwise, not because of a creed, but because of their way of life. 

Women were, however, moving west.  The women who moved in the wagon trains were probably not as interested in "putting on style" as their counterparts back East.  They were interested in survival, in feeding their families and keeping their children safe from the perils of the trail.  These were not your society conscious women - they were rugged and hearty and helped make the frontier what it was - a place for people to find a new life and a new way of living.  

Women became the organizers of schools and churches in the new settlements.  They brought order to the West and a bit of civilization.  Without women, the West would not have been a place for families. Many became honest businesswomen - cooking for the men, sewing clothes and keeping the place "respectable."  Men may not have wanted respectable, but without it the West would have remained just one abandoned town after another.  We will look at that next time.

 

Next time...Ghost towns

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Today in Pioneer History: "On August 13, 1878, Kate Bionda, a restaurant owner in Memphis, Tennessee, because the first to die of yellow fever in the epidemic that spread through America from a steamboat passenger.  Yellow fever, carried by mosquitoes, gets it name from the jaundice that usually accompanies the disease.  The cause was not known in the 19th century and spread to New York, New Orleans and Philadelphia and killed thousands of people over several outbreak years.

This Land in My Land

Traveling back in time to a wide open West.  Before the Gold Rush.  A nearly empty continent west of the Allegheny Mountains.  The Great Land Rush of the 19th century in America.  When there was no government rule, just land for the taking.  Or was there?

The western public lands were technically under the control of the Federal government headquartered in the East.  The belief was that you could not deal with land at a distance without an accurate definition of what you were dealing with.  This led to surveying the lands into rectangle townships - each six miles square with 36 sections, each a mile square of 640 acres.  The sale of these large tracts of land to those in the East with money seemed the simplest and most orderly way of settling the West.  Beginning with Ohio in 1803 (the first public land state) the government kept the title to all ungranted land with the exception of that for education.  Nice and orderly...

That's not how it actually happened though...the first settlers, called "squatters" were those that got there first and they didn't wait for any laws or deeds to tell them they owned the land.  They cared less and knew even less what the government said.  To have waited for protection by law would have been to lose all the advantages of being there first.  So they made their own laws.

These settlers came without proper documentation, nor the intention of adhering to any program or surveys.  They stopped here, they stopped there, according to how the land looked, how the wagon was faring, if the oxen were tired.  More times than not they didn't stay put and moved on - not really knowing where their final destination was, but hoping for the best land.  However orderly and neat might the Federal plan be, the settlement of the West was anything but that - nearly all westward movement in America in the 19th century was a land rush.

Next time...building a system of laws.

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Today in Pioneer History: "On June 15, 1846, the Oregon Treaty is signed between the US and Great Britain, establishing the 49th parallel from the Rocky Mountains to the Strait of Georgia as the boundary between the United States and British Canada.  The United States gained control of the Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana while the British retained Vancouver Island and navigation rights to part of the Columbia River. 

Where'd the Beaver Go?

Like most things in history, greed took its toll on the wildlife in the new American West.  The beaver was declining at a rapid rate.  Too many competing trappers and trading companies, along with the desire for beaver pelts for fashion were decimating the wild beaver population.

Increased Indian hostility toward the over 600 trappers now in the western mountains were also increasing.  The invasion of tribal lands, dwindling number of buffalo, and thinning herds made even the friendly tribes on edge.

The American Fur Company under John Jacob Astor had moved west, establishing trading posts at Fort Union on the Yellowstone River and Fort Piegan on the Marias, and breaking up or buying out smaller firms that got in their way.  The company even considered arson to discourage any competitors!

By the mid 1830s the "writing was on the wall" so to speak concerning the beaver trade.  The mountain men were so successful and so efficient in tracking and trapping the critters that the streams and rivers were almost denuded of beaver.  Trappers had to travel much farther distances to find even less beaver to trap. 

The worth of beaver pelts was also declining from $6 a pelt in 1830 to scarcely $1 a pelt a few years later.  Fashion now favored silks from China, or coonskin caps for the Russians and Eastern Europeans. 

The last great trapper rendezvous was held in 1837...we will visit that party next time.
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Today in Pioneer History: On May 9, 1887, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show opens in London, giving Queen Victoria and her subjects their first look at real cowboys and Indians.

Wagons and Horses Still Rule the Trail

Wagons were still the most common mode of travel for pioneers going west in the mid 1800s.  Women were also more involved in the travel journey as 15 year old Eliza Warner notes in her journal:

"I drove four horses nearly all day, saw the most magnificent scenery I ever saw."

After finishing their work for the day, Mary says "we had a good time singing." 

When the weather was good, she and her Aunt Celia (a married lady barely out of her teens) rode
horseback for the sheer fun of it.  With all that open land, riding would have been a thrill with the wind in your hair, fresh air in your lungs.  Can't you imagine it along with Mary and Celia?

Next time - a more older a serious Katherine Dunlap

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Today in Pioneer History: On Mary 29, 1843,  John C. Fremont again departs from St. Louis to explore the West, having only recently returned from his first western expedition.