Who were they? In photographs of early gold and silver mining towns, they stand along the muddy streets, looking enigmatically at the camera, clothed turtlelike in bonnets and ankle-length dresses that show only their faces and hands.
There is a fitting irony here, for histories of the era have left the women of the mining frontier similarly unrevealed. Most of the story of the mining West tells of the efforts of men to discover precious metals and deliver them from the Earth. The main characters are scruffy prospectors, engineering wizards, entrepreneurial buccanneers and political kingpins. If women appear at all in these accounts, they typically match crudely drawn stereotypes, particularly that of the prostitute cavorting in a saloon or plush brothel of Deadwood or Silver City.
The majority of women on the mining frontier were not hurdy-gurdy girls or ”soiled doves” but wives and mothers. Their central concern was the establishment of homes and the rearing of children–another group woefully neglected by historians.
Women typically made up less–often far less–than 20 percent of all adults in the mining camps. From the male perspective, women were rare commodities indeed, and it is part of frontier folklore that miners greeted the first of them with whooping, boot-stomping enthusiasm. A sourdough in an early piece of gold-rush fiction reacted this way:
”Whoora! for a live woman in the mines. What`ll the boys say? They`ll peel out o` their skins for joy. A live female woman in the mines! Turnpikes and railroads come next and steam engines! Whoora for Pike Country!”
The men`s enthusiasm can easily give a false impression. Women did receive some special favor and respect, but it does not follow that they found exceptional economic and social opportunities on the mining frontier. In fact, men looked upon the women as symbols of respectability and a traditional social order, not as full partners in the western venture, and they fully expected these new arrivals to behave and work much as their sisters did elsewhere in Victorian America.
The mines could produce a lot of money quickly. They often demanded the skills of well-educated, fairly well-to-do-managers, engineers and other specialists, and these men often brought their families with them. Though they accounted for only a few of those living in the towns, this better-schooled financial and social elite left behind more documents about their feelings and ways of living than the poorer, less articulate majority living around them.
Mary Hallock Foote, author, illustrator, mother and engineer`s wife, found Leadville, Col., a ”senseless, rootless place,” and to her friend and fellow writer Helen Hunt Jackson, the Cloud City was ”unnatual. Grass would not grow there, and cats could not live.” These women found few friends of their own background and interests and few of the amenities they had taken for granted at home. Louise A. K. Clappe, a doctor`s wife who as ”Dame Shirley” wrote a series of letters decribing life in the California gold fields, asked her sisters to imagine trying to live with ”no newspapers, no churches, lectures, concerts, or theaters; no fresh books; no shopping, calling nor gossiping little tea-drinkings; no parties, no balls, no picnics, no tableaus, no charades, no latest fashions, no daily mail . . . no promenades, no rides or drives; no vegetables but potatoes and onions, no milk, no eggs, no nothing.”
Deprived of these things and isolated from like-minded women of their social class, mothers of this sort looked on childrearing with misgivings. Foote remembers that ”in the back of my mind always . . . was a secret quake when I thought of our little boy.”
Wives and mothers in the more settled parts of America found comfort and aid in networks of kinfolk and tested friends. Such a system provided emotional support, an outlet for frustrations and help in the daily tasks of homemaking. Those who tried to reestablish those bonds in the mining towns faced two formidable problems. First, there were few women with whom to form new relationships, especially in the early years of a town`s life. Second, the mining camps were among the most unstable and transient human gatherings in the history of the unsettled young republic. In towns in which 90 of every 100 persons typically moved on within 10 years, women did not always find it easy to weave together a new fabric of trusted friends.
”I never was so lonely and homesick in all my life,” a prospector`s young wife wrote from Denver in 1863, and another cried out in her diary: ”My sweet sweet home! Why did I ever leave you in the stranger`s land to dwell?” A Nevada mother of three, after following her restless husband to that parched frontier, regularly filled her journal with terse, bleak comments: ”lonely day,” ”very lonesome,” ”town dull & everything lonesome.”
By the time the wives of professionals, managers and successful merchants arrived, their husbands often could provide them with roomy and comfortable houses. In the most flourishing towns they built Victorian showplaces, painted outside, plastered and wainscoted within, with covered porches, bay windows, marble fireplaces and other contemporary symbols of success.
In a Colorado silver town, five children grew up with camel-hair wallpaper, a solarium and a nine-seater outhouse with a servants` entrance. An editor`s wife bought three yards of carpet on her way up the Missouri to Montana; and others of her economic level imported mahogany pianos, upholstered furniture, crates of books and a variety of Victorian house-stuffings.
In maintaining these homes and caring for their children, wealthier mothers usually could afford the help of domestics. A woman in Montana admitted to her mother: ”I don`t think there is any need for anybody to waste any pity on me for living on the `outskirts of civilization.` ” No wonder. A day maid and night nurse saw to the chores and the care of her two children, while her husband sent out the cleaning and took her to dinner every evening. From this sort of evidence it seems that the sons and daughters of the mining elite, at least in their immediate surroundings, lived much as did others of their class elsewhere in Gilded Age America.
For most mothers, however, making and keeping a house was quite different. They arrived with much less and faced the same high prices, but even in the best of times the family`s income barely covered expenses. Furthermore, in the erratic mountain economy of booms, busts and seasonal slumps, a husband`s income was unpredicatable. Making a household budget must have been quite frustrating.
One group of mining-town mothers is virtually invisible in the usual descriptions, and for them making a home was more difficult still. In those mountain settlements were a surprisingly large number of single mothers. Some of these women were widowed and others abandoned, but many may well have chosen to care for their families on their own. The record in California, at least, indicated many women there expressed a spirit of independence by seeking divorces or simply walking away from unfulfilling marriages. In Colorado, when one restless husband announced that the family would once again be moving on, his wife dug in her heels and dissolved the union:
”Ernest, you can move on if you have to, but I`ve dragged two boys and a houseful of furniture just as far as I`m going to. First it was Ohio, then Michigan, then the Peninsula, then Minnesota, Michigan again, then Denver, Weaver, and Creede, and right here I`m going to stay.”
She may have spoken for many others.
The poorer wives and single mothers had to make and maintain their homes with a few unreliable resources; outside observers, judging them by standards of the days, sometimes were shocked by the result. ”In all my travels on the American continent, I have never yet beheld a scene so thoroughly degrading,” an Englishman wrote of a cramped, stuffy Idaho roadhouse run by a single woman with six ”infidel imps.” In Gregory`s Diggings in Colorado, the heart of a new arrival went out to the mothers he saw there: ”The hardest sight . . . is to behold four or five women with families of little children washing and cooking in the broiling sun and obliged to gather and cut their own wood.”
The journals of these women do contain moments of irritation and despair. One arrived on Gold Hill, Col., to find a one-room, dirt-floored, drafty cabin with a few tin cups and plates, and a bed and table made of pine boughs. Anything beyond makeshift beds, a table and a few chairs or stools was considered a luxury. In the corner might sit a water bucket and dipper, and on a shelf above the cook stove some coffee, salt, dried beans and flour. The list of cooking gear usually was short–an iron pot, dutch oven, frying pan and coffeepot.
These mothers put remarkable effort into making these places ”homelike” by Victorian standards. They lined the walls with cheap cotton cloth, then covered it with wallpaper. A mother of three in Summit, Mont., laid a small piece of Brussels carpet on her dirt floor and hung printed shades on the log walls to show her youngsters where the windows should have been. Another used sheets of canvas to divide a single room into bedrooms, kitchen and parlor. At considerable effort and risk, almost all brought West some piece of china, a chromo (lithographed colored picture), a delicately framed photograph, a lace tablecloth.
Besides being the main arena of child rearing, in a land where so much had been left behind, the home became a depository of traditional culture. With these artifacts and icons of domesticity, mothers tried to give their children a sense of the ”proper” life.
Mining-town mothers faced a regimen of work not much different from that of Midwestern farm wives, though conditions in the camps made these chores even more difficult. Besides washing and cooking, they hauled water, cared for family animals, chopped wood, swept wooden floors and sprinkled dirt ones and made and mended clothes. At appropriate times during the year they also saw to gardening, canning, slaughtering, curing and the making of candles and soap.
Older children helped with all these jobs, but for the many younger wives just starting families, infants and toddlers meant more work. Wives also sometimes helped their husbands at the mines by clerking and even freighting and shoveling gravel at the sluices, but men seem to have taken on the traditional chores of women only in emergencies.
Mothers not only maintained their dwelling places; they also added indirectly to family income by producing food and clothing that otherwise would have to be bought. Beyond that, many poorer wives and virtually all single mothers had to bring in addtional money by seeking other work. Most of them did for others what they did for their own–washing, sewing and cooking for the many unattached men in the diggings.
”A wife of the right sort,” a Californian called the 68-pound spouse of a tavern-keeper. ”She earnt her old man . . . $900 in nine weeks, clear of all expenses, by washing.”
The mining frontier posed an array of special problems for the mother`s most important responsibility–the physical, ethical and educational care of her children. ”To be raised in a mining camp means an experience as full of thrills and wounds and scars as going to the war,” recalled one man who had grown up near the Comstock Lode. Surely most mothers would have agreed. The fouled water, streets strewn with garbage and offal and the crowded living conditions encouraged the spread of cholera, diphtheria, influenza, measles and other child killers.
Helen Hunt Jackson visited a Colorado mother who had lost two children in as many months to scarlet fever and meningitis; her third and last was sick with fever. Among the four households of the prominent Fisk family of Helena, Mont., two children died in half a year.
Then there were accidents. From the time they could walk, boys and girls might tumble into mine shafts or swift-running streams. On the streets children could stray into the path of horses or heavy ore wagons; nearer to home they might swallow lye or other poisons, be thrown from a horse or be wounded in hunting accidents or target practice.
The poorest mothers with the heaviest burdens of work–and so the least time to keep close watch over their young–lived in the most congested and dangerous parts of town. It is little wonder, then, that one woman wrote from Rich Bar, Calif.: ”This is an awful place for children, and nervous mothers would `die daily.` ”
Similarly, the mining towns seemed to some mothers to threaten the moral well-being of children. Saloons, bordellos and dance halls thrived among the crowds of young working men. Youngsters walking the streets would be exposed not only to drinking and whoring but also to gambling, smoking, brawling and an assortment of social blights.
And the language! More formally educated parents worried not just about the bald obscenities but also about the colorful slang that was so much a part of westerners` conversations. A ”you bet” or ”hankering” or ”I licked him” brought shudders. ”Must my little girl soil her sweet mouth with such words and expressions?” worried an editor`s wife.
Burdened with the rigors of housework, and often sewing and cooking for others as well, working-class mothers could give their sons and daughters only what time was left over. Though boys had somewhat more freedom than girls, the reminiscences of both sexes tell of working and playing in ways that brought them into the mainstream of town life.
Young Anne Ellis of Bonanza, Colorado, spent pleasant evenings reading
”Peck`s Bad Boy” with Lil, a local ”notorious woman.”
This does not mean, however, that these young persons grew up without any of the widely accepted benefits of proper child rearing. If nothing else, they often found affection and some ethical guidance from childless adults who missed children and young relatives they had left behind.
In their own homes even the busiest parents could find time at the end of the workday for family entertainments. Group readings were especially popular, as well as singing and playing guitars and violins.
Many children were educated at home. Prescriptions of the day held that the mother should teach her youngsters the basics of reading, writing and ciphering–a responsibility even more urgent in fledgling towns where formal schooling was erratic at best.
Women usually carried a few cherished volumes to their new homes, and in time they bought or sent for others. With the help of this dearly bought literature, fathers and especially mothers found time to drill their sons and daughters in the ”three R`s” plus history and science.
Through it all ran a common theme in the world of western women–a conflict between the roles expected of their sex and the realities of life in this new land. In the mining towns the underlying social ideology of the Victorian era survived largely intact. It taught that a woman should use her life to make and preserve a proper home: a safe harbor of rest and support for her husband and a school of strength and virtue for her children.
Men cheered ”the first live woman in the mines” precisely because her arrival meant to them that this process would begin. To these men, she heralded the first real rooting of civilization. If anything, therefore, a woman in the camps faced a heightened pressure to carry out the traditional mission of Victorian wife and mother.
These women, however, were not ”gentle tamers” who brought civilization with their simple presence. The prescriptions of Victorian womanhood demanded skills, experience and effort at least equal to that of a miner, assayer, or dry-goods merchant. The women who hoped to approach these goals could do so only with dedication and creativity. Frontier conditions, moreover, made such ideals even more difficult to achieve. In sorting out the voices of these pioneer women, I have stressed the obvious distinctions of economic and social class, but it is necessary to ask other questions as well. What ethnic or regional heritage did a particular woman bring with her? Was she a newlywed, a young mother with infants or one with a houseful of older sons and daughters? How long had she lived in the West and under what conditions? Had she established bonds with local institutions such as churches, reform groups or labor organizations?
The testimony is there, but only when much more has been gathered and studied with a respect for the diversity of women`s experiences can historians begin to speak with much confidence about the thousands of wives and mothers who lived in Virginia City, Spanish Bar or Slumgullion Gulch. There still is much to discover about the figures who look at us from those fading photographs.
