Exalted Ladies and Soiled Doves: Women in Western Mining Camps

Bickert 1

Exalted Ladies and Soiled Doves: Women in Western Mining Camps

Michelle Bickert

HST 532: Community History

Dr. VanderMeer

November 23, 2011

Writers of Western history have romanticized the unchartered wilderness of the frontier from the moment the first settlers began their trips.[1] Although certainly a minority, women were lauded as frontier heroines, their bravery in forging their own lives part of the developing narrative of the quintessential American. Despite the honor history has bestowed upon them, there was nothing fanciful about their new lives. These women led difficult lives and contributed to the development of mining communities in a variety of ways, retaining Eastern civility in the face of the wilderness while shaping a new culture in a fast-paced environment. Historians agree that women were important to the development of the Western mining town; the historiographic problem lies in examining the few remaining sources in order to determine the ways in which women influenced these towns. Historians have had to move beyond the archetype of the Western woman and see her complexity and how she shaped her growing world, incorporating the lives of these women into the overall narrative of late nineteenth century mining towns and revealing their contributions to the development of the West.

The early literature on Western mining towns focuses on all aspects of the mining town. The authors’ general argument is that their specific case study is demonstrative of the larger trends of Western mining communities. Historians incorporate the role of women into their analysis just as other facets of town life are incorporated, such as the mining company, ethnic minorities, social institutions, etc. Both the respectable wives and the fallen prostitutes are discussed, but prostitution as a cultural institution is usually discussed much more in-depth. However these works were ultimately unsuccessful in revealing much beyond the romantic stereotypes as a result of being works about the towns themselves and not the role of women. By the 1980s social history and specifically women’s history led scholars to rethink the mining town, leading to works specifically aimed at revealing the realities of the mining woman’s life.[2]Early case studies of mining towns and revisionist works on Western women’s history largely address three major themes: the cult of masculinity prevalent in mining towns, the dichotomy of the good woman and the bad woman, and the struggle to create order from disorder through the stabilizing effect of women on the community. This essay will explore how historians have understood women with regards to these three themes and how their opinions of women in mining communities have changed over time.

Historiography

Any essay concerning the historiography of the West is practically required to include a contribution from Frederick Jackson Turner. As early as the 1890s Turner called for historians to stop seeing the frontier as a theater and analyze it for what it really was: a process.[3] A native Midwesterner, Jackson understood the West as part of a necessary discussion in the history of the United States and through his work made it so, most notably in his Frontier Thesis.[4]Harvard contemporary and California native Josiah Royce developed his sociological philosophy of the West before Turner’s thesis, in which he recognizes the importance of place, community, institutions and identity to the inhabitants of the West.[5]As a student of German sociology Royce wrote of Western identity in a way that echoed Max Weber’s ideas of collective consciousness.[6] Royce wrote of Western community in a way that would not be seen again until the rise of social history much later in the twentieth century, and he understood the importance of all of the individual voices in shaping community, including women.[7]As early writers of Western history Turner and Royce shaped the ensuing conversation about the greater themes of frontier communities. This literature review joins the history in the 1960s with authors who examine a specific type of Western phenomenon, the mining town, and the ways in which these individual towns fit into the larger narrative of the West as described by Turner, Royce, and other early Western scholars. Although not specifically aimed at women’s history, these works (unintentionally) perpetuate myths about Western women that later social historians repudiate.

There is no denying that the Western mining town was a man’s world. Each author uses qualitative data from every census to prove it. One point of clarification: authors of mining town histories should not be judged for their lack of emphasis on women’s history. Given the lack of numbers and even greater lack of sources regarding women, it would be inappropriate for these mining histories to include any heavy, in-depth focus on women. However these authors do address the role of women in some way, and their arguable lack of insight into the larger themes of women’s social history has led to an unintentional historical misunderstanding of the mining camp woman.

Cult of Masculinity

W. Turrentine Jackson’s Treasure Hill: Portrait of a Silver Mining Camp is the earliest scholarship examined in this historiography at 1967. He sees his work, as many of the authors do, as a case-study of a microcosm of the late nineteenth century United States. Treasure Hill’s struggle for democracy, identity, and community can be applied to the rest of the young nation recovering from civil war.[8] Jackson portrays the men of this mining town as rugged individuals who may have initially intended to operate alone, but formed a sort of brotherhood as a result of an effort to bring civic order to their new home.[9] His conclusions about the men of the town are laudatory, with only brief mention of the women’s efforts to achieve the same goals of Western municipal democracy. The portrayal of women in Treasure Hill mirrors their supposed importance to the town as demonstrated by the historical record. They appear as a footnote to the triumphs of masculine achievement.

Elizabeth Jameson discusses the nineteenth century ideal of true manhood and true womanhood as it applies to the labor movement in the mines in All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek. A “true” man is aggressive, acquisitive, and competitive; he provides for himself and for his family.[10]She constructs a world in which women’s identity served as a complement to masculinity. By following their assigned gender roles that were predetermined long before settling in Colorado, women helped to maintain a structure that was a comfort when creating a new community.[11]Although Jameson’s argument examines broader questions of gender, race, and class, the Victorian ideals of masculinity she discusses are central to understanding the motivation for men to create a culture of materialism with a fluid (at times nonexistent) social structure. Mining was an opportunity for them to flex their masculinity in ways they couldn’t in their previous lives.

Historians have tried to figure out how women fit into this supporting role within the mining towns that Jameson articulately describes, although her work comes much later in 1998.Through a series of misunderstandings including lack of primary evidence, lack of application of social history methods, and the preponderance of popular cultural images, authors have largely placed women in two camps: wife/mother or prostitute. Both come with their own issues of treatment in the historiographic record.

The Good Women on Pedestals

One major misunderstanding that mining town historians have regarding women is the extent to which they were respected by the abundant population of men. Patricia Nelson Limerick’s analysis of the works of Western historian Ray Allen Billington is true for many of the authors examined here: “The claim that, to male pioneers, ‘women were to be sought after, venerated, and pampered’ makes some sense if one takes Elizabeth Custer to be the norm… Otherwise, references to ‘the pioneer era’s undue respect for women’ leave the reader in double confusion.”[12]Paula Petrik blames Turner’s Frontier Thesis for historians’ glorification of the role of women on the frontier. The democracy and individualism of Turner’s frontier led historians to view the women who were there as fiercely independent, sturdy, and capable beings.[13] Petrik blames this on the reliance upon biographies, which only profile the lives of women who had the luxury to write their travels, felt they had something to write about, and had the means to preserve their writings.[14]For Petrik, and critics of Turner, this view of women was too limited in scope.

The Turnerian view of women has persisted beyond the schools of revisionism and feminism. Some historians do support that the frontier was a liberating space for women – not an easy space, but one that allowed for a considerable amount of freedom. In They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush JoAnn Levy uses primary sources from women who flocked to the California gold rush to demonstrate that women were not only very present in the mining towns, but they loved it. Levy’s California is free from the restrictions of social convention, and free to create its own society and own values.[15] Because Levy has the primary sources do most of her arguing for her, her thesis is quite convincing. These women, for better or worse, were excited by their lives in California. Sally Zanaji finds a similar phenomenon in her study of Goldfield, Nevada, near the central California border. Zanaji also concludes that mining towns were ultimately liberating for women. This was due in part to the lack of narrowly defined roles for women within the new economic and occupational structure of the mining town,[16] which contradicts the arguments by other authors who say that Eastern refinement was imported to the mining town. These examples demonstrate a reality that some authors fail to recognize. Mining towns were free to construct their own communities, and a number of factors influenced the town’s development. Therefore it is unfair for historians to generalize their case study as being representative of the larger trends of mining towns, especially with regards to women.

Although some women may have enjoyed a life of luxury, this was not the reality for most women in mining towns. Petrik calls the historians who describe a life of turmoil “Reactionists”, responding to the academic backlash against the Turnerian view of the West.[17] Ralph Mann noticed that in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, the enchanting effect of women wore off quickly when more arrived in the West, thereby attempting to reconcile the disparity between women who were treated well and women with rough lives.[18]Tom Vaughan explains the reality of women’s lives in Bisbee, Arizona in “Every Day Life in a Copper Camp.” Women in all but the wealthiest groups were a slave to their chores, often spending more time working in the home than their men did in the mines.[19] Vaughan explicitly states what earlier authors don’t always clarify: the plush life of exaltation only applied to rich women. Many of the earlier authors who focus solely on the towns do not recognize that women worked in other capacities besides mother (or prostitute). Although their works form a more complete picture, the Reactionists may have overcorrected. Petrik suggests looking at how women’s groups interacted, rather than focusing solely on the hardships of the farming wife or the luxuries of the town lady. In order to gain any understanding of the “average” frontier woman, the discussion must also examine her foil: the prostitute.

Fallen Angels and Soiled Doves

The Turnerian stereotype of the independent Western women is just as applicable to the prostitute as it is to the wife. She was beautiful, wealthy, and luxurious, garnering the adoration of men and the scorn of women.[20] In “Girls of the Golden West,” Andria Daley Taylor cites Harvard historian Bernard DeVoto and his “Wild and Woolly” school of writing about the Comstock Lode both historically and fictionally.[21] Followers of this school created a subgenre of historical fiction in the 1940s surrounding Nevada’s Virginia City that sought to capture the essence of a feeling about the West rather than fact.[22] These Eastern writers, who migrated west together to craft their works, fell in love with the seedy underbelly of mining town life.[23] Although unintentional, these writers created a myth that, once spread, they could not control.

One of the most pervasive myths is that of the soiled dove. Contemporary Victorians saw the prostitute as a fallen woman, who was wronged by a man and forced to flee respectable society.[24] This rhetoric was an attempt to elevate these women in public opinion, but their reception into their new lives varied by town and by year.Smith says that men in the Rocky Mountain mining camps were benevolent towards the women, claiming that these men cared more about the kind heart of the woman than her dishonorable occupation.[25] Smith notices that the trend towards the devaluation of the prostitute’s status usually occurred around the town’s second decade of existence.[26]In Silver Saga: The Story of Caribou, Colorado he claims that there was a double standard practiced against the women of Caribou, with wife and mothers praised and prostitution allowed to flourish.[27]This is contradictory to his conclusions drawn in Rocky Mountain Mining Camps.If prostitutes were relegated to the bottom of the social structure and forced to live as pariahs in their own segregated districts outside town, it is unfair to say that their continued acceptance in society was an affront to respectable women. It certainly upset the married women, but in the early years the consensus was that prostitution was tolerated so long as it remained within its boundaries.

Understanding prostitution is such a complicated task that historians sometimes contradict themselves. Jackson describes the prostitutes of Treasure Hill simultaneously as a central component of the city’s criminal activity (not through prostitution itself but as consorts to criminals) and victims of a harsh life under the control of men.[28]Despite the in-depth discussion Smith provides in Rocky Mountain Mining Camps, he concludes that ultimately prostitution was harmful to the community because it lowered the town’s moral standards.[29] Smith, in a tone echoed by other authors, says that it would be unfair for history to judge these women any more severely than the people who endorsed them.[30] This attitude is necessary in an evaluation of “immoral” women who cannot speak for themselves, but his advice is weakened by his evaluation of their harm only a few pages earlier.

Historians also lack agreement on whether prostitution was a liberating or restricted life. One common myth that most authors address is that of the heart-of-gold prostitute who found love with a miner and lived happily ever after. This was hardly the case. Vaughan describes the life of the prostitutes of Bisbee as one of deprivation and scorn.[31] They lived fast and died young, living a life of want in which they were shunned by respectable members of the community, abused by their customers or employers, and subject to police harassment.[32] Mann also says of Grass Valley and Nevada City that prostitutes – or any other woman who dared to step outside of the boundaries of respectability – were the subject of mockery.[33] In Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitution in the American West 1865-1890 Anne M. Butler claims that although prostitutes were a feature of the community landscape, the communities they influenced did not in turn take care of them.[34] However Butler does not see these dreadful confinements described by the authors as necessarily inhibiting, and elaborates on the ways in which prostitutes made their own lives.

The feminist authors disagree somewhat with the idea that prostitution was solely an institution that subjugated women to male control – at least in the case of the West. Both Goldman and Butler agree that prostitutes had some agency in their lives. Goldman notes that all boundaries were crossed as new societies formed during the rapid growth of the West; therefore, prostitutes had a limited opportunity to exist in a fluid social structure that was less constrictive.[35] It is difficult for historians to accurately recount the life of a prostitute because they were successful in blurring their historical identity as they blurred their gendered identity in the nineteenth century.[36]By examining the occupation of prostitution itself rather than its role in one specific town, Butler reconciles some of the discrepancies previously mentioned by the other authors and explains that the trends of prostitution vary across time and place. Goldman dismisses the stereotype of the glamorous lady with a heart of gold in favor of an ordinary woman with extraordinary courage to survive in mostly mundane but sometimes bizarre West.[37] Similarly, Butler concedes that these women were bawdy and rollicking –it took a special type of woman to survive in a man’s world – but they should not be romanticized.[38] They made choices everyday regarding their economic, social, and reproductive lives that allowed them to roughly navigate their world.[39] These women apply the sociological lens of second wave feminism to the mining camp prostitute in order to see her many dimensions, demonstrating that individual experiences differed and are hard to generalize as good or bad.