THE CONTRADICTIONS OF WESTERN AMERICAN...
Transcript of THE CONTRADICTIONS OF WESTERN AMERICAN...
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF WESTERN AMERICAN MANHOOD
AS SEEN THROUGH 1858-1866 IMMIGRATION TO PIKES PEAK
by
STEPHANIE MCGUIRE
B.A., University of Colorado at Boulder, 2012
A thesis submitted to the
Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Colorado in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
History Program
2016
This thesis for the Master of Arts degree by
Stephanie McGuire
has been approved for the
History Program
by
William Wagner, Chair
Rebecca Hunt
Thomas Noel
July 30, 2016
ii
McGuire, Stephanie (MA., History)
The Contradictions of Western American Manhood as Seen Through 1858-1866 Immigration to Pikes Peak
Thesis directed by Assistant Professor William Wagner
ABSTRACT
This paper will analyze the complexities of mid nineteenth-century western manhood
by focusing on a case study of migration to Pikes Peak during the late 1850s through the
early 1860s. The western environment, far from home and luxury, created many tensions in
defining manhood, and thus a western man was often full of contradictory traits. The family
man left home to provide for his family yet he continued to maintain familial duties despite
distance or hardship. Migrants often despised vulgar, drunken men and valued more
restrained and polite qualities, and yet the western man strove to remain brave and physically
tough to withstand the journey. Part of his toughness entailed the performance of intense
physical work, and yet a western man often simultaneously took charge of “womanly”
household tasks. This man often felt pure joy in the fruits of the wilderness, and yet his hopes
remained set on a fully civilized region. Defining manhood in the West was neither simple
nor single-faceted, and we must bear in mind the complexities of the western man.
The form and content of this abstract are approved. I recommend its publication.
Approved: William Wagner
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. PROMOTING WESTWARD EXPANSION 9
Brave Hearts 12
Foolish Travelers 18
III. THE CONTRADICTIONS OF BEING A FAMILY MAN 21
Leaving Comforts to Gain Comforts and Maintaining Patriarchal Duties 23
Staying Emotionally Connected from a Vast Distance 31
IV. RUGGED OR RESTRAINED? 36
Westerners Must Remain Gentlemen 36
A Good Man is Carefree and Makes a Good Cook 40
The West Calls for Grit 44
A Distaste for Drunkenness and Vulgarity 49
V. DOES A MAN EMBRACE OR CHANGE THE WILDERNESS? 53
Men Rule the Wilderness 54
Men Embrace the Wilderness 56
Be Warned: The West is Uncivilized 58
Westerners Create Their Own Unique Civilization 60
VI. CONCLUSION 63
BIBLIOGRAPHY 65
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Martha Maxwell journeyed to Pikes Peak from Wisconsin in 1860 on a quest for gold
with her husband James and four other men.1 She was the only woman traveling in her party,
and with no female companions to assist her, she greatly appreciated the men’s help with
tasks generally assigned to women of the time such as cooking and cleaning. She exclaimed
in a letter home, “David generally gets breakfast sometimes washes the dishes and is as
handy as a girl. I consider myself fortunate in having him in the company.”2 Her statement
about one of her co-migrants, David Brown, illustrates the nuances of defining manhood in
the American West during the westward migration of the mid-nineteenth century. As
easterners and mid-westerners left their homes along with most of their luxuries for an
unfamiliar territory, they grappled with conflicting definitions of manhood.
As different people travelled west, they formed differing and often conflicting
opinions of what constituted manhood. Based on personal letters and journals of migrants
during the mid-century migration to Pikes Peak, construction of a western man was
complicated, contested and highly contradictory. Maxwell’s gratitude toward her male
helper’s willingness to help out in the kitchen, a quality she viewed as feminine, reveals that
defining masculinity in the West was not simply a matter of foregoing gentlemanly restraint
1
1 Throughout this paper I will use the term “Pikes Peak” to refer to the area of North America that now comprises the current state of Colorado for the sake of being concise as well as appropriate to mid-nineteenth century notions of the area. Easterners at the time referred vaguely to regions of present-day Colorado as “Pikes Peak.” The mountain had gained fame with Eastern audiences due to Zebulon Pike’s westward journey and thus, the mountain stood as a marker for an “unknown” region as opposed to an actual site of migration. Most westward migrants followed the South Platte River into “Denver City” and Auraria where they stayed or dispersed from there into the mountains or along the front range of the Rocky Mountains.
2 Maxine Benson, Martha Maxwell, Rocky Mountain Naturalist (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 53.
and resolving to adopt a hard ruggedness. To Maxwell, a good western man had less to do
with a display of refinement or roughness and more to do with his performance of
housekeeping duties, which Maxwell deemed necessary due to the absence of other women.
A man who cooked and cleaned complicated any simple definition or dichotomy of
masculinity, and he added new dimensions to defining manhood in the West. When we
unpack the nuances revealed in promotional sources as well as personal writings of those
involved in the westward movement, we begin to grasp a complicated, and often
contradictory western masculinity.
To analyze the complexities of mid-nineteenth century western manhood in detail, I
will provide a case study that focuses on migration to Pikes Peak between 1858 and 1866.
These dates comprise the beginnings of a mass westward migration to Pikes Peak from the
East, in which migrants rushed for gold, made settlements, and took part in other ventures
such as religious trips and field reporting prior to Colorado’s statehood, and in which these
migrants tackled the complexities of defining a good man in the West. I will look at the ways
western newspapers hailed specific men to their regions while refusing others during this
migration and the ways personal letters and diaries complicated the regional pulls and yet
similarly revealed a contradictory western masculinity.
Significantly, these personal sources include documents written by both men and
women, as gender definition required both sexes to deliberate and determine an outcome. A
large amount of literature exists on western womanhood as well, including breakthrough
studies such as The Women’s West by Susan Armitage that brought women into the western
story in the 1980s, and more recent additions such as Annette Kolodny’s The Land Before
2
Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers about pioneer women’s views of the
West as a cultivated garden as well as Brigitte Georgi-Findlay’s discussion on the various
ways women grappled with national expansionist narratives in The Frontiers of Women’s
Writing.3 Histories such as these of women pioneered histories of gender, and my research
will essentially expand on these authors’ ideas about gender as a construction, and how we
may use this framework to comprehend mid-nineteenth century western history through the
formation of masculinity in the West.4
Historians for generations have thought of Frederick Jackson Turner as the
grandfather of Western American history. In his 1893 frontier thesis, Jackson not only
incorporated the West into American history, but he argued that the West actually made
America unique as opposed to an offshoot of old Europe. He glorified the West as a military
training school where men developed the rugged qualities of the individualistic frontiersman
while focusing on an overall narrative of white progress.5 Turner’s emphasis on the white
rugged individual certainly drew attention to a region not yet fully accepted as part of
“civilized” America, but it crucially left the many nuances of western manhood hidden in
history.
3
3 Please see also: Karen M. Morin, Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Nineteenth-century American West (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008); Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken, Home Lands: How Women Made the West (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2010); and Sandra L. Myers, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1982).
4 Further research should be undertaken on constructions of western femininity, as well as on migrants from different areas of the world and during different time periods, but such examinations are beyond the scope of this study.
5 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (El Paso, TX: Academic Reprints, Inc, 1960), 3, 12.
Although Turner’s thesis went largely unchallenged well into the twentieth century,
recent western historians have challenged his progressive and glorified narrative of the West
and its frontiersmen. Historians Monica Rico and Susan Lee Johnson somewhat endorsed but
also complicated Turner’s thesis by describing the West as an escape from the restrictions of
eastern society and a world in which individuals partook in the reconstruction of manhood.
Rico asserted that European men romanticized the American West as a place to “establish,
elaborate, and defend masculinity” during an era of profound economic and social
transformation.6 Johnson delved even deeper into this study of the West as a place to redefine
masculinity, stating that Easterners who travelled to California for gold enjoyed being freed
from the refinement of the East and the “skewed sex ratios” and unsettling of traditional
social norms caused the gold rushers to socially improvise and it often led to intense
violence.7 Rico and Johnson abandoned Turner’s progress narrative but they both understood
the West as a place of important gender construction in which a certain “ruggedness” was
crucial.
I aim to complicate Rico’s and Johnson’s arguments about a repressed class of men
that fled to escape into the wild. Although many men likely felt the western pull of adventure
and freedom during the mid nineteenth century, the West was not a place where all men shed
their gentlemanly ways and stepped into a vision of western vigor. Each individual had their
own complicated ideals which remained very much a part of their identities in the West. To
overcome the obstacles of their overland journeys across the plains, migrants necessarily
4
6 Monica Rico, Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 10.
7 Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2000), 100.
grappled with notions of masculinity that usually conflicted with or at least complicated other
manly values. The beauties of the vast western wilderness often sparked in men feelings of
freedom and bliss, but this feeling was never detached from other more restrictive notions of
manhood.
I also aim to challenge historian Amy Greenberg’s conceptualization of restrained and
unrestrained manhoods during the mid-nineteenth century in Manifest Manhood and the
Antebellum American Empire. Greenberg argued that prior to the American Civil War, a split
emerged in which two forms of masculinity competed for dominance. As she asserted,
“restrained manhood” favored family and domesticity while “martial manhood,” which, she
argued, took dominance during the 1850s, reveled in physical strength and aggression.8 My
research suggests that a physical-based masculinity indeed appeared in personal
understandings of western manhood along journeys to Pikes Peak, but I will argue, however,
that this competition between a rugged and restrained man oversimplifies the experiences of
individuals and families involved in the westward movement. A man fit for this journey, and
fit for the West, was neither fully rugged nor fully restrained, and he often embodied the
contradictions of both simultaneously while taking on characteristics that did not fit neatly
into this dichotomy.
I will take further and also complicate the arguments of historian Brian Roberts in his
book on middle-class America during the California gold rush, American Alchemy. Roberts
argued that Easterners who travelled to California for gold remade the middle-class during
what Roberts called their temporary “slum” in the West into something they were both a part
5
8 Amy S. Greenberg. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 8-17.
of and yet rebelled against.9 He explained, “Many would be liberated, for a time at least, but
they would not become liberals.”10 I want to use this claim to analyze a similar
transformation of conflicting values in the decades after the California gold rush, not just in
class but in masculine gender identity, in which migrants confronted rugged ideals but still
did not become entirely rugged. I will, however, reveal the many nuances of creating a
gender identity that challenged a simple definition of either liberal or non-liberal, of rugged
or restrained.
During the mid-nineteenth century migration to Pikes Peak, western and eastern
newspapers promoted their own regions by idealizing specific types of men. Western
newspapers called for a physically strong, brave and enduring hard worker while shunning
those too lazy or unwilling to stick it out. The tough westerner, however, could not be overly
rugged or carefree so as to harm societal growth, so the promoters ideally wanted a man
somewhere between rugged and restrained. They also wanted an individual man to
essentially build a home and civilization without a family, and thus they embraced quite a
contradictory westerner. The eastern papers, however, with their own promotional aims,
criticized the West and its immigrants for what they felt were stupidly obvious contradictions
which abounded the traveler who left a good life for a miserable one.
Personal experiences by individuals and families who participated in this movement
also implied the contradictory nature of defining manhood in the West while also revealing
the actual complexities of clarifying this man in day-to-day life along the westward journey.
6
9 Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and the Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 219.
10 Roberts, American Alchemy, 15.
We can see these contradictions through three broad categories in which men and women
contemplated masculinity: 1. familial relationships, 2. character traits, and 3. a man’s duty to
and relationship with the environment and larger society. In each of these categories,
individuals and families grappled with conflicting ideals of what it meant to be a man in the
western American landscape. Each example from a letter or diary is meant to illustrate the
variances in masculine identity in the West, but also string together some common threads
throughout to make sense of a larger narrative.
It is the goal of this study to stress the multifaceted nature of western manliness and
to upset the common notion of the untamed male Westerner as a rough and rugged bachelor
who broke free of eastern ties and embraced the Wild West with guns blazing. I also want to
discourage a simplification of manly ideals defined by either rugged or restrained, and to
encourage an investigation of the varieties of characteristics each person debated and
accepted or rejected. The western environment, far from home and luxury, created many
tensions in defining manhood, and thus a western man was often full of contradictory traits.
The family man left home to provide for his family yet he continued to maintain familial
duties despite distance or hardship. Migrants often despised vulgar, drunken men and valued
more restrained and polite qualities, and yet the western man strove to remain brave and
physically tough to withstand the journey. Part of his toughness entailed the performance of
intense physical work, and yet a western man often simultaneously took charge of household
tasks typically assigned to women at the time. This man often felt pure joy in the fruits of the
wilderness, and yet his hopes remained set on a fully civilized region. Defining manhood in
7
the West was neither simple nor single-faceted, and we must bear in mind the complexities of
the western man.
8
CHAPTER II
PROMOTING WESTWARD EXPANSION
Boosters of the Pikes Peak region took advantage of the gold hype that sparked the
Pikes Peak Gold Rush of 1859 to publicize and, they hoped, to populate the new territory.
Prior to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, gold seekers travelled beyond the Central Rocky
Mountain region toward California in a movement known as the California Gold Rush. After
the United States government acquired the Kansas-Nebraska Territory that encompassed
present-day Colorado, prospectors began chasing down rumors of gold in the Pikes Peak
country. Pikes Peak country, so named for the peak’s long-standing publicity, encompassed
the gold mining region of present-day Colorado along the Rocky Mountain front range, then
located in western Kansas Territory and southwestern Nebraska Territory. American gold
mining camps and settlements populated the soon-to-be cities such as Denver, Auraria,
Boulder, South Park, and Golden, and the miners travelled north and south along the
mountain range to mine for gold.
The Pikes Peak region was not merely for miners, however, as many types of
travelers sought opportunities in this newly acquired territory. As leading Colorado gold rush
era historian Elliot West explained, a financial collapse in 1857 shook Americans in the East
and Midwest, leaving many men desperate for change and hopeful that Pikes Peak was the
answer to their problems.11 For many men with new financial troubles, the West presented
new opportunities for success. Newspaper editor and traveler himself, Horace Greeley
described these types of travelers as the “men of broken fortunes from the dead mushroom
9
11 Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 101, 115-116, 125.
‘cities’ of Nebraska and Kansas.”12 “Broken” men from the Midwest appear most prevalent
among letter-writers and diarists who travelled to Pikes Peak during the mid-century
migration. Many of these writers expressed hopes of a better life in the West and for a change
in fortune, just as West argued. The promoters of the Pikes Peak region, too, focused their
energies on luring these desperate men out to dig up gold and help create a new society in the
West.
This great westward movement sparked a rivalry among economic interests across the
nation. Self-interested writers from the East and West competed to convince the public of
their region’s superiority. While boosters in the West profited from luring the population
westward, eastern towns felt a twinge of fear for their economies, as West explained, and
they fought back with promotions of their own.13 The struggle for capital in America is
evident in newspaper publications of the late 1850s and early 1860s, in which each editor
advocated for their respective region, and they did so largely by advocating for or rejecting
specific types of men.
To lure people out to Pikes Peak, western newspapers not only boasted about gold in
the area but they also promoted a specific manhood that was quite contradictory in character.
The goal for these promoters of the West was to encourage men living toward the East to
come, work, stay and settle in the Pikes Peak region. Settlement was the end goal and
western boosters worked hard to discourage the returning migrants, or “go-backers,” who
10
12 Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey, from New York to San Francisco, in the Summer of 1859 (San Francisco, CA: H. H. Bancroft & Co, 1860). https://archive.org/details/overlandjourneyf00gree, 140.
13 West, Contested Plains, 116, 123.
went back to their eastward homes for any number of reasons.14 To achieve their goals,
writers of the early Pikes Peak papers encouraged men to leave their homes, leave their
families, and get to work to create a new home near the Rocky Mountains. To convince these
men to settle here, they advised lazy men to remain home with their families in the East, and
they called out for brave, enduring, physically strong miners to come tough it out and stay
put. They insisted that only through hard labor would an individual have a chance at finding
gold and making a better life for themselves.
But a settlement necessitated all types of men, not just physically tough miners, and
most importantly, settlement necessitated women and families, not just brave single men.
When the papers requested men, and men alone, they accepted not only a contradictory man,
who left home and family to essentially come out to create home and family, but a
contradictory society of tough, independent male workers free of other necessities of
settlement, such as women. While they encouraged a population of physically tough men to
Pikes Peak, they were not, however, looking for an unruly, ruffian town since civilization was
the goal. Promoters, therefore, did not encourage men to detach themselves from civilization
enough to become vulgar, sinful, or lawless, and they often simultaneously stressed the
importance of “honest men” with a strong morale. They grappled with the fine line between a
tough, independent worker and a rowdy, carefree thug who would have challenged society.
To encourage a new population in the West, newspaper writers embraced and promoted a
man with often conflicting and contradictory traits.
11
14 Jolie Anderson Gallagher, A Wild West History of Frontier Colorado: Pioneers, Gunslingers and Cattle Kings on the Eastern Plains (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2011), 21; many travelers returned eastward when hardships were too many and a “better life” seemed nonexistent, or at least not worth the trouble. Many turned back before even arriving in Pikes Peak upon hearing bad news from others along the trails that Pikes Peak was all a “humbug.”
Whereas the western promoters embraced and encouraged this contradictory man and
contradictory society, the papers that encouraged more eastward settlement in the far East
and Midwest in a sense confronted the Pikes Peak boosters’ claims and pointed out the
contradictions of their requests. They mocked westward travelers for their foolish and naive
endeavors and for leaving better familial and societal circumstances behind to willingly enter
hardships. These conflicting political agendas not only shed light on a mid-nineteenth
century economic panic in America, but also on competing notions of masculinity in
promotional sources at the time.
Brave Hearts
Before the Pikes Peak region produced newspapers of its own, the Kansas territorial
newspapers, based near Topeka, Kansas, stood as the major source of promotional reports on
Pikes Peak. The Kansas Herald of Freedom published letters from lucky miners who boasted
about the abundance of gold along the South Platte River. In addition to correspondence on
their region’s riches, the Herald printed sections of poetry with an equally promotional effect,
encouraging men to be daring and courageous if they wish to tackle this region. One such
poem, called “In the West,” describes the West as a region of “promise” and “glory” where
“success, and joy and honor” await anyone strong enough to leave their home toward the
East.15 The poem exclaims, “And the soul looks up and onward, With a bold, insatiate quest,
Hoping always - weary never - Daring all things - in the West.”16 The poem paints a majestic
12
15 George Washington Brown, ed., “In the West,” Kansas Herald of Freedom, January 1, 1859, accessed November 5, 2014, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82006863/issues/1859/, 1.
16 Brown, ed., “In the West,” 1.
picture of the West, assuring any bold adventurer the rewards of “freedom” in their new
territory.
Other poems printed in the Herald with the same purpose praised brave men while
focusing specifically on the importance of a man’s strength and individualism. Although the
newspaper hoped to boost the western region and draw out settlers, they applauded
individuality and bravery over family or society. A poem exclaimed, “Be firm, be bold, be
strong, be true, And dare to stand alone; Strive for the right, what e’er you do, Though
helpers there are none.”17 This poem invited men to “dare The battles brunt” and face
hardships as an individual, free of “helpers.”18 The Herald editors celebrated the potential
contradictions of a man who stood alone and yet would soon help build them a community.
To be daring and hard-working was crucial to the Herald promoters, who used
another poem to declare, “Dream not, but work! Be bold! be brave! Let not a coward spirit
crave Esca[p]e from tasks allotted!”19 A bold, brave man, however, could not run amuck in
the West according to this publication. He had to simultaneously exhibit morale and
contribute to society by combating bad character, evidenced when the poem went on to
encourage men to stand up against “sin and wrong.”20 Although the editors promoted a tough
man who could conquer the West alone, they discouraged an excess of ruggedness by
reminding men to fight against wrongdoing. The westerner could not be all rugged, or all
13
17 Brown, ed., “Dare to Stand Alone,” February 5, 1859, 1.
18 Brown, ed., “Dare to Stand Alone,” February 5, 1859, 1.
19 Brown, ed., “Dream Not, but Work,” February 5, 1859, 1.
20 Brown, ed., “Dream Not, but Work,” February 5, 1859, 1.
refined, to the Herald editors, and thus they seemed to encourage a man with both seemingly
contradictory traits.
Admiration for a bold man became extreme in propaganda from the first newspaper
of the Pikes Peak region, the Rocky Mountain News. Founder and editor William N. Byers,
who left the midwest to eventually settle in Denver in 1859, clarified his goal to promote the
Denver area in his paper’s initial issue. He glorified his region, recalling the “wild beasts and
wilder Indians” of yesterday that inhabited the land in contrast to the “Anglo-Saxon
enterprise and civilization” of today, and he predicted the future of his region as “a great and
powerful state.”21 He printed countless success stories of gold mining and he recalled his
own attempts at prospecting, claiming he had found “gold in every pan.”22 Through Byers’
first publication, he clarified his goal of civilization, which will be crucial to his assertions
about the ideal western man.
Beyond glory and gold, Byers used masculine identity as a tactic to populate the area
by calling out for men of particular, strength-centered characteristics while ridiculing other,
less persistent men. Many weary travelers to Pikes Peak returned home in the East and
Midwest after experiencing firsthand or hearing stories of hardship and disappointment along
their journeys, causing a problem for promotors of Pikes Peak. Byers was one of many who
worked to fix the problem of the “go-backers,” and one of his strategies was to insult this
type of man through the Rocky Mountain News. He asserted that fleeing men were
undesirable, “restless spirits who are of no advantage to any country.”23 He told of a man
14
21 William N. Byers, “Salutatory,” Rocky Mountain News, April 23, 1859, accessed October 10, 2014, http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org, 1.
22 Byers, “Returning Immigration,” 2.
23 Byers, “Returning Immigration,” 2.
who returned to his eastward home, spreading stories of horror along the way, which were,
according to Byers, “lies, which from the first [w]ere false as his own black heart.”24 He
continued to promote Pikes Peak by claiming that the turn of migration was “an infection”
and “it is only brave hearts that can withstand it.”25
Byers wanted “brave hearts” to help him build up his civilization, who could tough it
out in a difficult region that so many “restless spirits” gave up on. But Byers, in a sense, also
called out to restless spirits, anxious in their own current homes and eager to make a new life
and a fortune in the West. A “brave heart” had restrictions, as he could not brave the
westward journey and then flee on another journey while spreading rumors. Byers grappled
with tensions in defining western manhood between one who was restless enough to leave
home and who had enough grit for the West, and someone who was indeed too restless to
stay. He wanted a man tough enough to bear Pikes Peak longterm, but restrained enough to
stick around and build a society, and although these qualities may appear contradictory, Byers
embraced them as a definition of masculinity.
In agreement with Byers on the incorrect western man, H. P. A. Smith, a probate
judge appointed by the territorial governor of Kansas, also condemned the “go-backers” by
critiquing their manly identities in a letter to the editor. He wrote passionately,
[Men] expect to find the precious metal on the surface or to dig it as they do potatoes at home and one days’ prospecting in the most improbably localities is enough for them, they hurry back to the home - the wife and children they
15
24 Byers, “Returning Immigration,” 2.
25 William N. Byers, “Returning Immigration,” Rocky Mountain News, April 23, 1859, 2, accessed October 10, 2014, http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org.
never should have left - we do not need nor want such a class of population, what we want is the resolute, energetic man who comes to stay and work.26
Smith condemned “the loafer” but he also made jabs at the family man who returned to his
home. The judge did not want a population of men who “hurry back to the home.” Although
his, and Byers’, end goal was civilization through “perseverance and industry,” neither Smith
nor Byers encouraged a man to have, or bring, a family.27 Just as Byers embraced the
potential contradictions of a man bold enough to come west and yet restrained enough to
remain, both Smith and Byers, as well as the Herald editors, promoted a contradictory
society without families, and a contradictory man who should civilize the West alone with his
bravery and endurance.
A New York-based paper titled Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper contained an
1859 article that praised physically hard working western men while demeaning supposedly
weaker men who could not tolerate the area. Though the majority of newspapers advocated
for their own regions, the unknown author of this Pikes Peak article identified himself with
the western country and wished to promote this region. A gold-rusher himself, the author
spent time in the West and argued for a similarly complex western man. He described exactly
the kind of westerner he approved of, and exactly the kind he wished would stay toward the
East:
The voyager himself was one of those insouciant, devil-may-[c]are sort of fellows that seem to take life very easily, and find it all the more pleasant for doing so. These are the right men in the right place, more fit for the work than the white-handed store clerks who come out here expecting to become
16
26 H. P. A. Smith, “Correspondence,” Rocky Mountain News, edited by William N Byers, April 23, 1859, 2, accessed October 10, 2014, http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/Default/Skins/Colorado/Client.asp?skin=Colorado&AW=1413309758710&AppName=2.
27 Smith, “Correspondence,” 2.
millionaires in a few months, and then because their expectations are not gratified, have gone back to the cities with lugubrious countenances, cursing the country and the fates that brought them out.28
The unknown author applauded a rougher, carefree and persistent attitude as opposed to the
more well-kept and uptight men who were unwilling to put in physical labor. As other
promoters elevated a strong, independent man over a family, the author of Leslie’s also
embraced a contradictory society of men in which they all performed the same physical
labor. He condemned the clerk despite the probable necessity of clerks to the western society
envisioned by these promoters.
Despite the fixation on strength and bravery, the newspaper writers were unwilling to
allow men to become fully rugged, and they tackled difficult issues of defining a man who
necessitated both a carefree and a more refined attitude to be able to make it in the West.
Paralleling other Pikes Peak boosters, the unknown author of Leslie’s article chastised
returning migrants. He expressed that “if some [reports about the West] are unfavorable, all
the better, as they will probably deter some lazy, good-for-nothing loafers and rowdies from
coming out, a blessing most devoutly to be wished for.”29 He held nothing back in
discouraging laziness and instead requesting men with “a strong arm, a strong constitution,
and stronger moral courage,” asserting, “Let honest, working men come here, and they will
be heartily welcomed.”30 While he promoted a rough, tough, enduring man, he also
condemned “loafers and rowdies,” making sure not to let that rugged, carefree attitude go too
17
28 N.A., “Pike’s Peak - the New Gold Region,” in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Frank Leslie, ed., New York, NY: April 30, 1859, accessed October 10, 2014, http://digital.denverlibrary.org, 343.
29 Leslie, ed., “Pike’s Peak,” 343.
30 Leslie, ed., “Pike’s Peak,” 342, 343.
far. To the author, a man good enough for a new western civilization was not only physically
strong but he necessitated “honesty” and morale as well, for the betterment of a society.
Foolish Travelers
Eastern newspapers during the mid-century migration promoted the opposite story
which usually encouraged men to stay in their eastern homes while condemning those who
went west to Pikes Peak. Rather than glorifying the physical strength of men who persevered
and aggressively conquered the land, the writers of eastern papers criticized rather than
embraced the contradictions of the western migrant. According to many eastern promoters,
only fools believed the western success stories and they argued that all travelers to Pikes
Peak would inevitably fail. Many articles advised everyone to “stay at home” and many
mocked the whole movement with poems and jokes calling it a “humbug.”31 These
competitive articles provide an illustration of the economic tensions in America at the time
and reveal a need for regional boosterism even in the longer-established cities and towns of
the East and Midwest. Additionally, they reinforce competing notions of manhood in
promotional literature, in which editors from the East discouraged all men from becoming a
contradictory westerner.
In contrast to the positive imagery of brave migrants from western promotional
literature, many eastern sources conveyed the message that no matter how “brave” their
readers think they may be, the realities of leaving the comforts of home are far harsher than
the western papers suggested. One such statement was clear in an article with a series of
18
31 Elwell, Pickard & Co, ed., “Another Peek at Pike’s Peak,” The Portland Transcript, July 16, 1859, accessed November 10, 2014, http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.skyline.ucdenver.edu, 119; Gabriel Ravel, ed., “Pike’s Peak Jokes,” Comic Monthly, November 1, 1859, accessed November 10, 2014, http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.skyline.ucdenver.edu, 6.
illustrations published in Harper’s Weekly from New York. The drawings were of
discouraged, starving, sick men returning to the East. The unknown author reported a bleak
side to westward expansion, stating, “During the past ten days we have met thousands of the
deluded and suffering gold-seekers retracing their steps to the quiet farms of the West. Many
of them were in a starving condition, bare-footed, ragged, and penniless.”32 One sketch of
these miserable men depicted two sitting on the ground, looking exhausted and sorrowful
with an empty gold pan in the foreground, while another image showed men and horses
hanging their heads with depictions of animal bones cluttering the dry wasteland. The author
even described instances where migrants survived only by means of cannibalism.33 Bravery
and strength do not exist in this concept of the migrants’ identities. Harper’s discouraged the
contradictory nature of leaving eastern comforts, and in doing so attempted to convince the
public to stay at home.
In another effort to critique the West and its immigrants, Harper’s Weekly printed an
illustrated short story about a farmer named Abner who travelled from the East to Pikes Peak
to make a better living selling groceries and liquor to the new immigrants. He struggled
through his journey, and made no money in the West. He finally returned home in a poor
state, and concluded that “there are worse cares in life than those of a farmer.”34 The pictorial
story was meant to help readers visualize the inevitability of failing in the West and that it
19
32 Harper & Brothers, ed., “The Pike’s Peak Gold Mines,” Harper’s Weekly, August 13, 1859, accessed November 10, 2014, http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.skyline.ucdenver.edu, 516.
33 Harper & Brothers, ed., “Pike’s Peak,” 516.
34 N.A.,“Ye Pictorial Historie of Honest Abner Howe’s Journey to Pike’s Peak in Search of a Rapid Fortune,” Harper’s Weekly, Harper & Brothers, ed., May 7, 1859, 292, accessed November 10, 2014, http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.skyline.ucdenver.edu.
may be a contradiction to leave something pleasant at home for something unknown in the
West.
Along with marking the West as a place of unnecessary hardship, many Eastern
journalists shamed and mocked the westward migrant himself. In Comic Monthly from New
York, the editors told a joke of a “humane individual” who asked a band of western travelers
whether they wanted any grass.35 When the migrants asked what they wanted with grass, the
“humane individual” responded, “‘Why seeing that you have made asses of yourselves, I
don’t know why you don’t want grass as well as any other beast.’”36 Comic Monthly
chuckled at a savage western man whose glaring stupidity entertained the ideal, “humane,”
man. As the eastern and western newspapers competed for the population, they created
conflicting ideals of masculinity in which the West promoted an embrace of certain
contradictions while eastern papers discouraged such nonsense.
20
35 “Pike’s Peak,” Comic Monthly, 3.
36 “Pike’s Peak,” Comic Monthly, 3.
CHAPTER III
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF BEING A FAMILY MAN
Promoters of the Pikes Peak region certainly perpetuated a specific, strong, conquest-
oriented western manhood during the mass migration, who was also somewhat restrained;
they called out for an individual to leave his home and family and yet they meant for him to
build a home and a society. Eastern promoters, however, jabbed at the emigrants’
masculinities to point out his contradictions and persuade people to stay. With competing
ideals of western manhood circulating through the papers, we must question how the
migrants themselves viewed their own masculine identities and the identities of other men.
Did they fit the papers’ western standard of manhood or did they agree with eastern
publications that the western man ideal was a joke? We will now turn away from newspapers
to personal letters and diaries to understand the ways westward migration affected
individuals and families who took part in this experience, and the ways they grappled with
different ideas of masculinity. Each man’s unique experience complicated the newspapers’
idealistic narratives, and yet they also illustrated a very contradictory manhood.
Personal documents help us uncover the subtleties of defining masculinity along the
westward journey and they reveal that most western men fell somewhere between, or
nowhere near, a simple definition of bravery or strength or refinement. These men did not
cross the frontier and become rugged individuals as the papers might have suggested based
on their competing values. Men and women involved in the migration grappled with
opposing versions of masculinity and they embraced the tensions and competing values of
what it meant to be a western man. Letters and diaries of individuals and families tended to
21
use three broad categories to define manhood: 1. familial relationships, 2. character traits,
and 3. a man’s duty to and relationship with the environment and larger society. In this
chapter we will delve into the ways individuals and families embraced conflicting masculine
ideals surrounding a man’s personal relationship with his family.
Popular culture and histories alike often portray westward migrants as rugged
individuals free of any relational or societal ties, yet many men who immigrated to the West
had families with whom they maintained close relationships throughout their journeys.
Husbands and fathers often left their families or sometimes brought them into harm’s way in
order to take care of them and provide for them a better life, and these family men preserved
their familial duties despite distance or hardship. They stayed connected to their wives,
children and other family members in the East through mail and conveyed the difficulties of
separation, despite their choices to migrate west.
The westward movement brought up many tensions for individuals and families in
their attempts to grapple with their own familial relationships in this western environment.
Men and women both struggled to define a good western family man. As travelers either left
their families behind or sometimes forced them into danger or discomfort, individuals
questioned and reconsidered the roles of a western family man. The contradictions of this
experience necessarily created conflicting visions of manhood wherein both men and women
embraced a family man who was quite contradictory in character. A proper family man
maintained loyalty to his family and led his household despite the burdens of the journey, and
he connected with his family as often as possible even as he traveled hundreds and hundreds
22
of miles away. He embodied a contradictory family man who abandoned his family or forced
them into hardship for the sole purpose of caring for them.
In this chapter we will explore the intricacies of manhood based on a man’s familial
relationships. We will look in detail at the expectations for how a man should treat his family
in this western setting and the consequences of maintaining these relationships while
traveling on a westward journey. I will first describe the struggles between maintaining
familial duties and the actual hardships of the West or of leaving family, and the assumptions
about a man’s role during this experience. This discussion will be followed by one on the
significance of mail communication to maintaining these duties and the emotional aspects of
keeping connected to home despite the intent to leave. Contradictions abounded in the
formation of manhood when his relationships were held in tension or torn apart due to the
conditions of his migration.
Leaving Comforts to Gain Comforts and Maintaining Patriarchal Duties
The mid-century mass migration to Pikes Peak offered a new start for many families
in the East and mid-West who were struggling to make ends meet or at least searching for a
“better” life. “Better” meant something different to each migrant who travelled to Pikes Peak
in pursuit of gold, adventure, settlement, religious work, trade, or exploration. Despite many
objectives, the West often symbolized to migrants a new experience of freedom, an
opportunity for improved finances, and a challenge to create a new self-made world. With
these hopes for a brighter future, many easterners took off on a journey across the plains.
Many of these easterners were fathers and husbands who set out toward the West with their
23
families solely in mind. Sometimes whole families left the comforts of their home together in
the hopes of reaching a land of “milk and honey.”37
Diarists and letter writers of the mid-century migration to Pikes Peak described their
decisions to leave for the West to benefit their families and the difficulties of this decision. In
the spring of 1859, gold rusher John Gibson explained as he took off from Iowa with his
band of “devil-may-care fellows” that he aspired to take advantage of the “suitable
opportunity” in Pikes Peak for the good of his family. He believed few men would turn down
such an opportunity except for those “schooled in th[e] condition” of being poor, and he felt
there were great prospects in the West for “the industrious man.” Despite Gibson’s positivity,
he expressed the tensions underlying his decision to leave home. As he described the various
men’s intentions for traveling, he explained, “Some like myself, leaving a comfortable home,
a loving wife and family for the sole purpose of placing them in easier circumstances... none
however with any very extravagant hopes.”38 From Gibson’s account, we get a sense of an
internal struggle over guarding the home and yet seizing an opportunity miles away.
Although he felt a loss over leaving home, his persistence was strong to strike it rich for his
wife and children.
With the objective of God over gold, Reverend Alexander Rankin revealed a similar
conflict when the time came to decide whether he could leave his family in Philadelphia for
the West. In an 1859 letter to his wife, he explained that the board of domestic missions
aimed to send him to Kansas Territory and he considered the journey not just for the good of
24
37 Mollie Dorsey Sanford, The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford in Nebraska and Colorado Territories, 1857-1866, ed. Donald F. Danker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959), 126.
38 John McTurk Gibson, Journal of Western Travel, edited by Weldon Hoppe (1997), accessed April 16, 2016, http://www.wjh.us/journal/.
the mission, but for the betterment of his family.39 Rankin expressed his worry about the
rising prices of land in “the Old Settlements” and he hoped that if he moved his family to
Kansas, his children might have a chance at owning land.40 To comfort his wife, he included
her in the decision-making process, stating, “he [himself] ought not to decide without
consulting you... you will write what you think about the matter.”41 As with Gibson’s remarks
on leaving his family, readers may perceive in Rankin’s letters the predicaments of
withdrawing from the home to support it.
Some mid-century family men who enlisted in westward migration chose not to leave
their families behind, but to instead bring them along, and migrants’ writings also reveal the
struggles in accepting a head-of-house who often forced his home into hardship. Newlywed
Sarah Hively from Indiana wrote about the contradictions of her new spouse imposing a
westward journey on her in her 1863 journal. She declared her discontent in being torn away
from “all that is near and dear” to “go with him who claims me for his own.”42 Hively’s
husband hoped to gain them more home comforts by essentially leaving home comforts, and
through her words we see the dilemma of such a journey. Also torn from her home in
Indiana, Mollie Dorsey Sanford traveled toward Pikes Peak some years before Hively, first
with her family under the instruction of her father and later with her new husband. Her father,
she explained, “has met with reverses, and is obliged to make a change. It is very hard in a
city like this for one pair of hands to support so large a family.” In times of financial
25
39 From the time of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 until the formation of the Colorado Territory in 1861, Kansas Territory encompassed a large portion of the region that is now the state of Colorado.
40 Alexander Taylor Rankin to Wife Ann, 1859, WH1686, Alexander Taylor Rankin Papers, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO.
41 Rankin, letters.
42 Sarah Hively, diary, March 19, 1863 - July 9, 1865, M 356, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO.
hardship, Sanford’s father marched his family across America to provide for them better
circumstances. And although Sanford admitted her apprehensions, she proclaimed her
simultaneous attraction to the West, stating, “there is something fascinating in the thought of
the opening up of a new life, a change so complete as this will be.”43 Men like Gibson, who
left his home, and fathers like Hively’s, who journeyed alongside their families, maintained
the importance of fulfilling the duties of being a family man who travelled west despite its
seeming contradictions.
Although men often took their families westward in efforts to protect and preserve
them, this act of familial responsibility often had the opposite effect. Homesickness, illness,
and death were common consequences of the migration to Pikes Peak. Though Mollie
Sanford expressed hope for a new life awaiting them in the West, she often complained along
her travels of feeling homesick and missing her friends and family who felt “so far away.”44
Diarist Ellen Hunt travelled from Illinois in 1859 to Pikes Peak with her two babies and
husband, who would later become Colorado’s Territorial Governor, to join in the gold rush.
In her diary, she admitted putting on a happy face for her husband regardless of her true
feelings. She said, “I was homesick and could have cryed, but Cam feels so sadly when I get
discouraged that I try hard to be cheerful when he is about.”45 Hunt not only felt homesick
but her physical health was very poor for most of the journey. In almost every entry she
complained of not feeling well and she noted that she was “attacked in the night with cholera
26
43 Sanford, Journal, 3.
44 Sanford, Journal, 38.
45 Ellen E. K. Hunt, “Diary of Mrs. A C. Hunt, 1859,” Colorado Magazine 21, ed. Leroy Hafen, September 1944, 161-170, accessed March 2, 2016, http://www.historycolorado.org/sites/default/files/files/Researchers/ColoradoMagazine_v21n5_September1944.pdf, 169.
morbus.”46 The reality of the migration often opposed the family man’s intentions and
responsibilities.
In addition to homesickness and illness, death was a very real repercussion of
traveling West. Sanford and her family raised money for a poor woman with a dying child
and they witnessed a man who almost bled to death. Reflecting on these dismal
circumstances, she stated, “with all our pleasures the sad has come, showing us that there are
two sides to life, the grave and the gay, a good lesson too.”47 Some families even wrote about
losing their own loved ones, like Charlotte Ronk who traveled with her parents and siblings
to Denver from Wisconsin in 1860. She complained of homesickness throughout her letters
and she described the death of her little brother and later her mother. She expressed severe
loneliness and exclaimed in a letter to her cousin, “oh Louisa it is so lonely without a
mother’s kind words to tell us what is right or wrong or to cheer our lonely hearts it is hard to
part with those we love.”48 In trying to fulfill their patriarchal duties, some men who brought
their families out for a better life during Pikes Peak migration essentially brought them out
into serious hardships. If the head-of-house was meant to protect his family, the western man
contradicted this value while simultaneously fulfilling it.
The family man’s duties were far from complete upon arriving in the West with his
wife, children, parents, or siblings. In addition to choosing a route for a better life, the family
man was expected to, above all, take care of his family and manage his role as patriarch
while out in the western landscape, regardless of hardships. One man’s westward migration
27
46 Hunt, “Diary,” 164.
47 Sanford, Journal, 10.
48 Charlotte J. Ronk to Cousin Louisa Russell, Dec 15, 1861, WH2262, Charlotte and Anna Ronk Papers, 1856-1866, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO.
exemplified this manly ideal to place family at the top of the priority list. Calvin Perry Clark
went to Pikes Peak in 1859 from Illinois with a group of men, including his father, to stay
and mine for gold. He relayed many adventures throughout his diary of taking off on his
own, shooting wild animals, getting lost, tumbling down a steep hill, and somehow managing
to locate his party again later. On a particularly rainy night, his independent adventures came
to a halt so that he could tend to his father and keep him fed and out of the rain. He “got out
Fathers Overcoat for him” and “got Father under the cart” where he could keep dry. He then
gave him food while Clark went out in search of firewood. The hardships forced Clark to
take on a caretaker role and set aside his more selfish curiosities for a while.49
Clark sent for the rest of his family back in Illinois after settling in Pikes Peak, and
his sister Helen Clark revealed similar expectations of patriarchal duties in the West along her
journey to meet Calvin in 1860. She hinted at a certain familial assumption in her diary when
she described the way her “Aunt H.” quarreled with her husband. She said, “Aunt H. says
because Uncle Porter did not wait for her when she told him she couldn’t walk, that he may
get dinner,” revealing the subtleties of a man’s duties to his wife.50 Similarly, Clark
mentioned meeting a woman along her journey who had been abandoned by her husband,
and Clark offered her own opinion on husbandly responsibilities: “I don’t see how a man can
leave a woman in such an emergency as that. I should laugh, I think, to see such a man in
trouble. I don’t believe I could pity him.” To Clark and her aunt, the West was not a country
28
49 Calvin P. Clark, “The Diary and Journal of Calvin P. Clark, 1859,” in Two Diaries, 1859-1860 (Denver, CO: Denver Public Library, 1962), 33-34.
50 Helen E. Clark, “The Diary of Helen E. Clark, 1860,” in Two Diaries, 1859-1860 (Denver, CO: Denver Public Library, 1962), 4.
for reckless independent men to cut their family ties, but rather it was a place where men
under no circumstances should disown or disobey their wives.51
Even from hundreds of miles away, loyalty to family remained an important
masculine trait. Many letters between families torn apart during the mass migration express
similar expectations for husbands and fathers. Alexander Rooney from Iowa cared for his
fiancee, Emeline Littlefield, along his westward journey by reassuring her via letters that
Iowa was the most suitable environment for her to remain sheltered while he endured the
harsh climate of the West. Although he wished she could join him, he protected her from afar
as he made his way toward Pikes Peak for gold. Rooney’s faithfulness to their monogamous
relationship was another important topic to the couple that was necessary for sustaining
familial loyalty evidenced by Rooney’s request that “Ema” be understanding of his new
female acquaintance and by Littlefield’s words of warning: “A little of my love to Hanna,
without encroaching on your rights.”52 The western family man, regardless of distance, must
maintain his patriarchal role and duty to his family.
Many men who left their families in the East also used money and patriarchal
instructions sent through the mail to fulfill their husbandly or fatherly roles across country.
Rooney, who reassured his fiancee of his loyalty, also sent her a “sample of the gold” from
the mines and Rankin, while on his mission trip to Pikes Peak, reminded his wife in a letter,
“I sent you $20 the 22nd instant which I trust you have received ere this.”53 Remarks such as
29
51 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 16.
52 Alexander Rooney to fiancee Emeline, 1859-1862, WH1700, Rooney-Littlefield Papers, 1859-1862, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO; Emeline Littlefield to fiancé Alexander, 1859-1862, WH1700, Rooney-Littlefield Papers, 1859-1862, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO.
53 Rooney, letters; Rankin, letters.
these about the importance of sending money home touch on the expectations of remaining
the head-of-house despite distance. In another message sent to an undisclosed home toward
the East, John Hartzell, who traveled in 1859 to Golden and Denver for riches, wrote to his
wife that he would send her gold, but more as a trophy of her husband’s adventures. He wrote
to her, “Send you a sample of the gold we washed out the first day we went to work you had
better put it in a small Phial - so that it will not be lost in showing it to your friends.”54
Although this gold souvenir likely boosted his family’s hopes and possibly status rather than
finances, Hartzell, like Rooney and Rankin, took care of the home by reassuring his family
that his venture was worth while, and that he had gold to prove it.
Mail enabled family men to transfer not just money but fatherly or husbandly
instructions as well to their families while away. In the same letter to his wife about shipping
home gold, Hartzell also took advantage of the post to teach and discipline his children. He
ordered, “tel them [the children] to be kind to there Mother and obay her for she knowes
what is best for you... if anything should prevent my return tel them to always to love respect
and obay there mother.” Through the letter, he temporarily transferred the head-of-house role
to his wife while he was away, and more permanently in the instance of his death. He also
requested that his wife remind the children that their “pap” loves them and to teach their
youngest to say “papy is coming home.”55 The post allowed Hartzell to advise his family and
continue his duties, and it fulfilled the same function for Reverend Rankin, who instructed
his wife on caring for their baby, stating, “you tend the baby, kiss it, nurse it & carry it about
30
54 John Hartzell to wife Augusta, June 21, 1859, -M334, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO.
55 Hartzell, letter.
as much as possibly.”56 These men refused to give up their patriarchal responsibilities despite
not being physically present at home, and they continued to convey their fatherly and
husbandly duties in the West through their letters.
Staying Emotionally Connected from a Vast Distance
Historian David Hankin argued in his book about nineteenth-century mail
communication in America, The Postal Age, that the postal service changed relationships and
made users dependent on distant communication. He described the “new forms of intimacy
and alienation” that accompanied this connectedness that spanned vast distances.57 These
tensions between intimacy and alienation are evident in mid nineteenth-century
correspondence between migrants to Pikes Peak and their families, and the importance of
mail to separated families is unmistakable. As we have already seen, letters were important
for allowing travelers to maintain their family obligations, yet they were crucial on an
emotional level as well. The family man who abandoned his family to provide a better life for
them often felt the torment of separation and used mail as a tool to stay emotionally
connected to his home. This section will focus on mail correspondence and delve into the
contradictions of physically withdrawing yet remaining emotionally connected to the East.
Much of the correspondence between families during the migration focused on the
importance of receiving letters and conveying to the recipient where to send the next letter. In
the same note about money and instruction to his children, Hartzell revealed his dependence
on letters from home when he wrote that hearing from his family was “one of the greatest
31
56 Rankin, letters.
57 David M. Hankin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), x.
Blessings we can be blessed with.”58 Similarly, the newly engaged couple Rooney and
Littlefield expressed their anxieties over receiving correspondence from one another. Rooney
described to his fiancee the men’s nervousness leading up to the next town where they prayed
they would receive news “from our hearts brightest treaseur.”59 He lamented that he
impatiently stood “behind a long file of men waiting in breathless suspense,” and he
portrayed a sense of desperation to hear from his fiancee, stating, “I am poor but I would
freely give twenty dollars to hear from you.”60 Littlefield, his betrothed, echoed his
dependence on the mail when she urged Rooney to write due to the “dumps” she got in when
she heard no word. She exclaimed, “Just see what inspiration your letter has given.”61
Hearing from loved ones was crucial to the families torn apart and the mail symbolized, as
historian Hankin described, both a closeness and an anxious division to these families.
Despite the family man’s intentions to abandon his home for the greater good of the family,
he and his loved ones deemed a complete detachment unacceptable.62
Westward migrants and families in the East often used a good amount of letter space
to describe the technicalities of this postal transmission, offering locations and timing for
retrieving letters and explaining how and when their next letter would go out. Littlefield used
portions of her letters to describe her troubles in timing her letters correctly with her fiancé's
movements, and to remind him she was trying her best. She explained, “I would have sent a
32
58 Hartzell, letter.
59 Rooney, letters.
60 Rooney, letters.
61 Littlefield, letters.
62 Other instances of the desperate dependence on mail correspondence include passages in the Charlotte Ronk letters in which she begs for messages from every family member and in the Mollie Dorsey Sanford journal when she described receiving much-needed mail.
letter there [at Fort Kearney] but had no opportunity... I did not know the distances nor the
rate of your traveling so I just guessed the best I could.”63 In a similar treatment of shipment
details, Reverend Rankin instructed his wife to send her future letters to specific cities and he
made a point to remind her of the time it would take him to journey there, writing statements
such as, “consequently shall not get letters from you till then.”64 In multiple letters he
mapped out his projected timeframes for each of his journeys to the next city so as to prepare
his wife and streamline their postal communication. Such remarks about the details of
sending and receiving mail highlight the importance of a man’s duties to stay connected to
family during this migration and the worries that came not only with separation but with this
broad communication network.
Families used letters not only to ensure communication remained smooth and reliable,
but to keep emotionally connected to each other during the family man’s journey. Writers of
family correspondence expressed discontent at the separation, yet they put a great deal of
effort into comforting one another from afar to maintain closeness. Many migrants made a
point to “send love” home in their letters, and Ronk, who described the deaths of her
relatives, also exemplified these expressions of affection by including many sentiments such
as, “they all send about a ton of their love to you all to divide among one and another.”65
Reverend Rankin also sent soothing words home, stating to his wife, “You must have
patience; time flies; three months are gone; and nine will soon pass away.”66 We get a sense
33
63 Littlefield, letters.
64 Rankin, letters.
65 Ronk, letter, July 13, 1860.
66 Rankin, letters.
from these statements of affection the difficulties in and importance of maintaining families
from a distance. John Hartzell wrote many lines to comfort his wife, stating his good health
and good food, and that should he ever go back West again, he would “bring my family with
me.”67 Just because the vast West tore families apart physically, they often refused to part
emotionally.
Newly engaged couple Rooney and Littlefield used romantic language to maintain
their loving relationship through the mail despite the distance between them. Rooney
comforted his fiancee by reminding her that although they were miles apart, she was his
“constant com[pany],” and he reminded her to “look forward to a bright future whear thear
shal be no breaking asunder those cords of afection.” Rooney also helped preserve their
romantic relationship by gushing to Littlefield that “in evry beutiful flower I see your image
is impresed,” and that every night he kissed her “ambrotype [photograph].”68 Littlefield
returned the romance in a description of her many “fancy flights” she took to Pikes Peak to
be with Rooney in her imagination. She told of the times she would “take supper” with him
and how she would “see how things look at the Peak.” When she awoke from her daydream
she was disheartened and “kiss[ed] the shadows.”69 The betrothed couple did not do away
with romance while Rooney journeyed far to the West, and this emotional connectedness was
crucial to the families involved in migration.
Family men, and their female counterparts, felt it was their duty to make the
westward journey for their families and most crossed the plains with the assumption that the
34
67 Hartzell, letter.
68 Rooney, letters.
69 Littlefield, letters.
West held the possibilities for a better life. The expectations of the migration, however, did
not always match the reality of hardships, and many men ended up creating difficulties and
miseries for their families in the process. A western family man essentially formed out of the
contradictory actions of men attempting to care for their families either in hardships or from
afar, and this man both reinforced and opposed patriarchal values. Similar tensions and
contradictions abound western manhood in individual writings that describe manly character
traits and environmental relationships.
35
CHAPTER IV
RUGGED OR RESTRAINED?
Men and women involved in westward migration defined masculinity based on more
than just personal relationships. In this chapter we will unravel the human characteristics that
defined western men and the challenges both men and women faced in defining these men as
rugged, restrained, and both or neither of these qualities. We will look at the distinct
characteristics men took on, and the types of masculinity that both men and women either
idealized or discouraged. We will attempt to understand whether migrant men and women
expected men to be rough, brave, and enduring, as the western papers encouraged, or to stay
put as part of a family or community, and remain content on a farm, as the Eastern papers
hoped. The result will be a man who is somewhere between.
I will first discuss the necessity of maintaining a more restrained manhood in the
West, the characteristics that contradicted this simple definition, the importance of
simultaneously practicing a physical toughness and endurance, and finally the general dislike
of the rowdy western caricature which, once again, required from men a certain level of
refinement. This narrative will reveal the tensions in designing a western man and the
nuances involved when “vulgarity” was looked down on while characteristics such as
cooking were accepted. The western man was not just rugged or restrained. He embodied a
definition of manliness that used opposing ideals and was full of questions and tensions.
Westerners Must Remain Gentlemen
As we have seen in the importance of family connections, these migrant men were not
the rugged individuals glorified in western lore. Not only did many of them maintain
36
relational ties in the East, men and women involved in the movement enforced many
qualities of a more refined-type man. Even in the West, where physical and mental struggles
abounded, many continued to value gentlemanly restraint. Prior to his promotional
endeavors, newspaperman William Byers wrote a memorable quote to future travelers in his
guidebook to the mines: “Carry your principles with you; leave not your character at home,
nor your Bible.”70 Later in his newspaper, as we noted above, principles were still important
to Byers’ ideal western man, but in his less promotional and more instructional guide, he
stressed even more to men the importance of keeping a certain level of refinement.
Although popular culture might suggest otherwise, the image of a refined gentleman
is far from absent in Pikes Peak migrants’ writings. Sentiments similar to Byers’ ideals
abound descriptions of western masculinity. One particularly adventurous woman, Julia
Archibald Holmes, moved across the plains from Massachusetts to Kansas, and then in 1858
at age twenty she travelled to Pikes Peak with a small group of men where she endeavored,
and succeeded, to climb and summit the Pikes Peak mountain. She intended her writings
along the way to Pikes Peak for a feminist journal, The Sibyl, where they were published
after she returned, and thus her journal expounded the rights of women to wear bloomer
costume and to be freed from the “feminine impotence” forced on them by their “sphere.”71
Despite her flamboyant displays of feminism in her writings, she accepted the roles of the
men in her company as leaders of the group and she appreciated their chivalrous gestures of
sleeping outdoors while she resided in the covered wagon. She was also grateful for their
37
70 William Byers, Handbook to the Gold Fields of Nebraska and Kansas, 1859, accessed February 3, 2016, http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/4535, 113.
71 Julia Archibald Holmes, A Bloomer Girl on Pike’s Peak, 1858: Julia Archibald Holmes, First White Woman to Climb Pike’s Peak, ed. Agnes Wright Spring (Denver, CO: Denver Public Library, 1949), 16.
noble natures as she stated in a letter home to her family: “the most of them very pleasant all
of them very respectful to me.”72 Although she primarily focused on women’s rights, Holmes
also revealed, as so many others did, her expectation for proper men in the West.
Appreciation for a refined manhood particularly flourished in times of western
courtship. Sanford, who experienced the toils of the West due to her father’s insistence of a
better life, refused to marry except for love, and she certainly expressed fondness of Byron
Sanford’s gentlemanly ways. One of the first times she saw “By,” she declared her approval
of his strapping appearance stating, “He is fine looking when rigged up in his suit of black,
and stove pipe hat.”73 She also later praised his sense of humor and deep love for his mother,
and she cherished his role as caretaker when “he bathed my fevered face” after she fell ill.74
Sanford illustrated an idyllic western man who contrasted the popular image of rough,
physical men from the Pikes Peak papers, and from popular culture even to this day. She
expressed her preference for a western man in a suit and top hat, who held strong family
values and who put his husbandly duties above the rest.
The gentlemanly appearance valued in the West also included a restriction on the
types of women a man might associate himself with. In a particularly revealing passage,
Helen Clark described a group of “slovenly” women from another camp which one of her
group leaders went to investigate.75 Although Clark and her group were interested to hear of
other women in the area, their leader refused to join together camps based on these women’s
38
72 Holmes, Bloomer, 28.
73 Sanford, Journal, 24.
74 Sanford, Journal, 59.
75 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 24.
poor outward appearances. A western gentleman’s appearance relied not only on his own
sophistication but also on the looks of others in his company. Men often had to uphold a level
of exterior refinement even in the West.
Religiosity, too, defined the gentleman, and it was often an equally important
characteristic for a western man. As Byers revealed when he reminded travelers to bring
along their Bibles, many migrants to Pikes Peak valued men with a Christian background,
and especially one who fervently practiced his faith. Libeus Barney, an 1859 gold seeker
from New York, criticized the “genuine specimens of border ruffianism” in Denver who,
“having not fear of God nor man,” littered the western population with rudeness.76 Similarly,
Reverend Rankin boasted the importance of God in the West along his mission trip and the
“able and energetic” men who “are doing great work in the Territory” as well as his
disapproval for those less enthusiastic. He believed, “women will be my most efficient
helpers in the work [as they] evince more zeal than the men,” noting his disappointments in
the less passionately religious men.77 Helen Clark would likely agree with Barney and
Rankin as she noted the “niceness” of fellow Methodists and the “bright intellect” and good
nature of a young preacher she encountered.78 The ideal western man longed for in these
39
76 Libeus Barney, Letters of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush, 1859-1860, ed. Thomas Hornsby Ferril (San Jose, CA: The Talisman Press, 1959), 59.
77 Rankin, letters.
78 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 9.
narrations was not free from the refinement and restraint of Christianity, and these writers
indeed frowned upon a lack of church and worship.79
A Good Man is Carefree and Makes a Good Cook
Although many individuals and families involved in westward migration refused to
let go of more restrained masculine values, they also embraced some contradictory traits.
Alternative versions of manhood opposed a refined gentleman while both men and women
simultaneously attempted to reinforce it. The ideal man was often thought to be carefree,
often dressed in “western” attire, and willing and able to perform traditionally feminine tasks.
Significantly, these characteristics threw a refined gentlemen into question, and yet many on
their journeys to Pikes Peak happily accepted them as suitable additions to manhood in the
West. Here we can see the complications and contradictory nature of a western man when
migrants attempted to bolster notions of a restrictive and proper masculinity while
simultaneously breaking them down.
Manly restraint only went so far to many migrants, and a carefree attitude was often a
highly desirable masculine trait to the westward migrants. Sanford, who praised her soon-to-
be husband’s fashionably polite appearance, conversely fawned over his demeanor which she
felt was specifically western. She detested the gallantry of most men who attempted to court
her with too much “flattery” and she appreciated “By’s” easygoing approach. She explained,
“It is wonderful how free and easy people become in this country. I would once have thought
40
79 Further implications of the importance of religion in the West can be found in the many descriptions of devotion to Christian activities on Sundays despite the roughness of the journey. Many parties refused to travel on Sundays as a display of faith, and when leaders made decisions not to rest on the Lord’s Day, diarists and letter-writers often complained. Many also regarded an indifference to Sunday worship in the Colorado towns and cities as appalling. Such examples may be found in writings by Helen Clark, Alexander Rankin, Julia Archibald Holmes, Charlotte Ronk, Mollie Dorsey Sanford, Libeus Barney, and more.
it too presuming for a gent to make himself so much at home on so short an acquaintance.”80
While previously admiring his gentlemanly dress and family values, she later favored
qualities that she deemed opposite to the “gents” she was more familiar with.
Also a supporter of an easy manly attitude, Elizabeth Keays travelled to Camp Collins
from Illinois in 1866 to live with her “Auntie Stone,” and she revealed her feelings toward
western masculinity in her diary. During a leisure period when her group gathered to play a
game of cards, she reflected on men’s rights when one of the wives refused to let her husband
participate. Keays exclaimed, “Mem. to write a book on Mens rights, for no Man would think
it his place to forbid his wife so innocent a thing as a game of cards in their own company.”81
In a similar fashion to Sanford, Keays advocated for a certain manly freedom on her journey
despite the tension with keeping restraint.
Westward migrants John Gibson and John Fletcher, who both left their loved ones
behind in search of gold, similarly endorsed the appeal of a carefree western attitude. As
Gibson took off on his journey with a group of “devil-may-care fellows,” he exclaimed that
“every one appears to enjoy himself and throws all care to the winds.”82 Several times he
described the joy of kicking back with the boys and enjoying their freedom, having “a jolly
time” and getting “pretty mellow.”83 John Fletcher left Wisconsin for the gold in Pikes Peak
with a team of eight men, who he said all displayed “spirits light and free.”84 Upon his return
41
80 Sanford, Journal, 39.
81 Elizabeth Keays, “Overland Diary of Elizabeth Parke Keays, 1866,” in The Saga of “Auntie” Stone and Her Cabin, ed. Nolie Mumey (Boulder, CO: Johnson Publishing Company, 1964) 64.
82 Gibson, Journal.
83 Gibson, Journal.
84 John W. Fletcher, Colorado Odyssey: The 1859 Gold Rush Diary of John W. Fletcher, ed. Gregory M. Franzwa (Tucson, AZ: The Patrice Press, 2001), 1.
home, he concluded that a carefree attitude is necessary in Pikes Peak, arguing that the
“future adventerous ones” would succeed in the West and find gold.85
One specific mark of a carefree western man was a certain western attire. Many
migrants to Pikes Peak expressed their admiration for men dressed in handmade skins, and
many even preferred it to the gentleman’s uniform. In opposition to Sanford’s glee at her
future husband’s formal suit, Byers proposed in his guidebook to Pikes Peak that travelers
hold onto their morals but he did not recommend bringing refined clothing. He urged men to
leave “all kinds of fine clothing” at home, and instead regarded wool and leather as crucial
western wear.86 Other travelers to Pikes Peak supported Byers’ recommendation, as Calvin
Clark described the comfort of his “moqisons,” which he wore through his whole trip, and
gold miner George Andrew Jackson from an unspecified region boasted about his skills at
making and gambling for pants and coats of animal skins.87 Calvin’s sister Helen similarly
approved of this western-type garb, apparent when she described the couple she traveled with
as “fine.” She wrote that the woman “seems a real lady... Her husband is a pilot and cook and
drives a team, besides his father is President of the Co, and is already in Gregory - Rocky
Mts. Mr. W. wears buckskin pants and antelope skin vest (with the hair on) - all fine
appearing people.”88 Rather than praising the man’s “ruggedness” or his “restraint,” Clark
illustrated the complexities of defining an ideal western man who took on multiple roles,
some more restrained than others, and the fashionability of wearing animal skins as an
42
85 Fletcher, Odyssey, 126.
86 Byers, Handbook, 27.
87 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 27; George Andrew Jackson, Diary of George Andrew Jackson, 1858, trans. William N. Byers, 1896, -M 393, Diary, 1858 Dec 26-1859 Mar 7, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO, 9, 13.
88 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 25.
expression of a carefree western attitude. Individuals grappled with the tensions of defining
western manly attire; whereas some preferred a more gentlemanly appearance, many
embraced a rougher look of animal skins.
A lack of women, luxury, and stability created the necessity for a men participating in
westward migration to at times disregard the boundaries of traditional nineteenth-century
masculine roles, which assigned the “public sphere” to men, and the “private” to women. As
Martha Maxwell suggested by praising David Brown for being “as handy as a girl,” good
western men often took on tasks usually deemed feminine in American culture such as
cooking, sewing, and washing. Calvin Clark described the necessity for himself and the other
men in his group to perform active, and more traditionally masculine, roles of hunting and
catching fish, but they did not have the leisure of passing the cooking portion onto their
wives or daughters. Accordingly, one of the men “bot some flower and meat” and they all
“went to cooking.”89 Gibson, who left his family to provide them more comforts,
sympathized with women who traditionally tended to washing when he and his group had to
take on the task. He exclaimed, “we all realized in part, what the women have to endure in
order to make a home comfortable and tidy.... I don't think any of us will ever forget our first
acquaintances with the wash tub.”90 In a similar acceptance of “feminine” tasks, to George
Jackson, who gambled for buckskins, “graining skins to make coat and pants” was a
necessary and typical activity in the West, and he made jabs at his friend Tom for sewing
together the “wrong side of buck-skin.”91
43
89 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 55.
90 Gibson, Journal.
91 Jackson, Diary, 9, 11.
While Jackson, Gibson, and Clark cooked, sewed, and washed to account for the
missing women on their trips, many men, like David Brown, stood up to help even when
women were available to take charge. When Helen Clark and her mother became sick, the
men went into town for some food, and Mollie Sanford’s friend Ned assisted her in cooking
supper.92 Whether traveling apart from their families, in a group of single men, or along with
their wives and children, these men made feminine tasks a part of their masculine identities
while journeying to Pikes Peak.
The West Calls for Grit
Despite an approval of refined men, who, albeit, were also carefree and even took on
feminine roles, the farmers of eastern papers content to stay put did not have the same draw
for many migrants during the mid-century movement to “Pikes Peak.” These travelers were,
after all, the ones who decided to make the journey away from home, and thus, active
leading, hunting, and fighting usually took precedent for these westward migrants over the
reserved farmer. Physicality and endurance were often important to male nature in the West
and strength, usually coupled with hardship, equated to manliness. While this part of western
manliness indeed supported the Pikes Peak boosters’ claims from the newspapers about a
physically tough man, just as the papers’ ideal man comprised of opposing traits, it is
important to view “ruggedness” in conjunction with other nuanced traits. Gentlemanly
restraint, feminine roles, and family morals all worked in tension with carefree and rugged
behaviors and an animal skin wardrobe. It is additionally nonsensical to view physicality as
entirely opposed to gentlemanly qualities, as many physical ventures by westward migrants
44
92 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 24; Sanford, Journal, 125.
contained a chivalrous element in which men took charge to protect the group. Chivalry in
the West embraced both physicality and the role of men as familial protectors. Manliness was
often a complex blur of opposing and multifaceted characteristics.
Crucial to constructing a western manhood was the quality of remaining tough despite
hardships. To many men and women who journeyed across the plains, a man had to maintain
a certain grit to overcome the western world which brought some contradictory
characteristics to the men who was also meant to retain some level of restraint. For many
family men, for example, the West was not merely a place to find a better life for the family,
but to also conquer the perils of the wild with some aggression. John Hartzell, who remained
affectionately and dutifully connected to his home, also provided, specifically to his sons, a
very “rugged” account of tackling a deer, exclaiming, “I shot a deer one day and [c?] it I went
up to it. it made fight with me I had a bayonet on my gun and when it came to me I hit it with
the bayonett and kild it.”93 He bragged to his boys about the importance of toughing it, and
the strength it took to fight with wild animals. Reverend Rankin also illustrated the harshness
of the West when he wrote matter-of-factly, “Every man who crossed the Plains carries his
bed with him or sleeps without one.” While sending money and instruction home, he also
sent comments on the difficulties of the environment and his need to “buy a Buffalo robe” to
tough it out.94 John Gibson, who journeyed for his family, boasted of his stamina in his
journal, stating that although they met many obstacles that “tended to dishearten the timid,”
he exclaimed, “we think we are made of sterner stuff, and are determined to see the Peak,
gold or no gold.” He said that after a while they got used to roughing it, and, as he said, “We
45
93 Hartzell, letter.
94 Rankin, letters.
live like fighting cocks, and are now capable of almost any amount of physical endurance.”95
As these family men trekked through hardships to provide for their families, staying
physically strong in times of hardship became key to their identities.
While family men braved the western turmoil, feminist Julia Archibald Holmes also
remarked on the physical strength of men. Holmes, who felt gracious for the respectable men
in her company, also associated grit in the face of hardships with manliness, a trait she hoped
to take on in order to fulfill her feminist goals. She explained, “Believing, as I do, in the right
of woman to equal privileges with man, I think that when it is in our power we should, in
order to promote our own independence, at least, be willing to share the hardships which
commonly fall to the lot of man.” Although she enjoyed the comforts of sleeping inside the
covered wagon, she forced herself to walk rather than ride to gain strength to climb the Pikes
Peak mountain. She believed her bloomers symbolized a sense of freedom and power to
conquer the land “as much as if I had been one of the favored lords of creation.”96 As an avid
feminist she hoped for the same physical and powerful ideals given to men, and although, to
Holmes, this was an act for the rights of women, in it she revealed her beliefs about a
physical masculinity.
The notion of bearing difficulties using masculine vigor held significance for migrant
men as well, like gold rusher Libeus Barney from New York, whose letters written for The
Bennington Banner provide an example of the necessity for men to toughen up and endure no
matter the misery. Noting the bleak scenes of exhaustion and starvation in Pikes Peak, he
explained, “although their labor paid them but a miserly pittance, they were obliged to ‘root
46
95 Gibson, Journal.
96 Holmes, Bloomer, 17.
man or die,’ work or starve.”97 He claimed to approach his own work-or-die situations with a
similar endurance, stating, “notwithstanding these discouraging evidences staring us in the
face, we pitched our tent and began prospecting.”98 Although Barney and his men had to
“screw our courage to the sticking point,” several times to make it through, he still praised
gentlemanly morals.99 In one description of a typical “western” fight, he explained of the
quarreling men, “Both seemed full of nerve, perfectly composed, and stood manfully up to
the perilous work... Both are gentlemen, and esteemed by all who know them.”100 In this
scene, “gentlemen” fought physically with bravery, all while maintaining their polite
“esteem.”
The ruggedness of the West and western men was also praised by traveller George M.
Willing, who wrote home to his wife in Missouri on his 1859 trip over the plains. He toiled
hard, but expressed with delight “man’s fiercer nature” that came alive in the West, in which
men were “released from all the restraining influences of society, wildly do his passions
riot.”101 Horace Greeley, who journeyed from New York to Pikes Peak in 1859 before writing
promotions for the Rocky Mountain News, also emphasized a tough western man in his hopes
for the future population of Pikes Peak. He believed the area would soon “swarm with a
hardy, industrious, energetic white population” of “men in the full vigor of their prime... fully
47
97 Libeus Barney, Letters of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush, 1859-1860, ed. Thomas Hornsby Ferril (San Jose, CA: The Talisman Press, 1959), 28.
98 Barney, Letters, 33.
99 Barney, Letters, 31.
100 Barney, Letters, 59.
101 George M. Willing, “Diary of a Journey to the Pike’s Peak Gold Mines in 1859,” ed. Ralph P. Beiber, Reprint from The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol XIV, No. 3 (December, 1927), 366.
able to protect and govern themselves.”102 Greeley’s ideal western man boasted a physical
strength and independence while Willing glorified the wild freedom of men in the West, both
reminiscent of Turner’s rugged frontiersman.
Physical strength and vigor was not solely for men who traveled alone or in groups of
other men. Men were expected, by both themselves and their families who accompanied
them, to perform active leading roles and to protect the group from harm, and this type of
familial physicality often contained a chivalrous, gentlemanly quality. Hunting symbolized
one manly duty in which men physically took charge to provide for the group. As Sarah
Hively begrudgingly left her loved ones to follow her new husband to Pikes Peak, she wrote
many times about Andrew’s hunting ventures while she maneuvered the oxen. The men in
Julia Holmes’ group similarly took on the role of hunting and they endured physical
discomfort by sleeping outdoors to take care of Holmes and the other women.103 As noted
previously, Holmes appreciated their polite gestures, which also included a rough physical
element. Strength-centered activities were not merely outlets for men to break free from
restraint, and they often fulfilled patriarchal duties.
This expectation for men to take charge in physically demanding situations was a
crucial part of defining manhood in the West. Traveler Helen Clark remarked on a number of
difficult circumstances that called for the men’s bravery and chivalry to their families and to
the rest of the group. She explained that during a terrible thunderstorm, the men rushed
48
102 Greeley, Overland, 137.
103 Many journals note similar sleeping arrangements in which men slept out in the elements while women stayed warmer and dryer inside more closed in areas such as wagons and tents. Elizabeth Keays noted multiple floods in which the men scurried around to fix tents and stay out of the rain while she and the other women continued to sleep soundly in their covered quarters. Mollie Sanford expressed the same situation when she and the other women in her company rested in their tent while the men took off to hunt.
around to fix the tents, and during two instances in which the women spotted some fierce
wild animals, they cried out to the men who “chased it quite a distance” with their guns.104
Mollie Sanford wrote of a similar situation, but instead of wolves and buffalo, the men in her
group prepared ammunition for the robbers they heard were lurking ahead. Strenuous manual
labor also fell on the men such as the work of building a cabin, as Sanford’s father undertook
for his family, and the cultivation of farms, which calmed Sanford’s nerves as she witnessed
the men working away. A western man might be praised for his physical strength or
ruggedness but not always for its ability to free him from restrained qualities. This physical
type of manhood often linked directly to a man’s own restraint toward protecting his family.
A Distaste for Drunkenness and Vulgarity
Although strength and endurance were key to western manhood, the overtly “rough
and tough” westerner as we know him from myth was most often despised by both men and
women involved in the migration. Traits such as drunkenness, vulgarity and lawlessness were
considered hyper-masculine behavior in the West that symbolized the consequences of too
much freedom, physicality and independence. Most travelers to Pikes Peak refused to accept
this type of man, and men and women alike viewed this excess of ruggedness as improper
and harmful to society. Here we return to the ideals of a more restrained type of masculinity
in which the values of a gentleman opposed this western ruffian. Migrants to Pikes Peak
grappled with the fine line between the charms of a carefree, physical man and the
distastefulness of a man who became vulgar in the West.
49
104 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 23, 33.
John Fletcher, who valued the free-spirited nature the West brought to him and the
adventurous types who could succeed in the gold mines, conversely complained of the
beastly transformation that the West forced upon good men. He explained the “Sudden
change which takes place in Many, as Soon as they leave the Frontier,” in which they
“assume or take upon themselves the actions and looks of ferocious wild beasts.”105 He
described the continual “growling, and grumbling” of their new Western negative mindsets,
criticizing rugged men for crossing the line from manly to beastly. Reverend Rankin revealed
a similar transformation in men that reflected an excess of freedoms. He contended, “there is
no law, no jails, no penitentiaries, & no courts in this country; the consequence is that there is
no restraint on human passion. The public morals are deplorable. Men who were moral in the
states, some who were professors of religion here swear, get drunk, gamble.” With a lack of
restraint, gentlemen became ruffians and even beasts.
Calvin Clark noted a similar negative transformation in men that was specifically
centered on intemperance. He argued that in the West, gentlemen get drunk and forget to pay
up on what they had promised in their belligerent state, and thus the gentlemen turn into bad
men. He explained that these “drunken sots” often “tell you that they wir drunk when they
promised to ever pay it.”106 In a narration of a row with a “drunken gentleman” who refused
to pay him due wages with the reason that Clark’s employer was a horse thief, he contended
that “the drunken gentleman turns out but one graid loer than his particular friend, a Horse
50
105 Fletcher, Odyssey, 128.
106 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 89.
Theif as he pleased to term him.”107 Western men could be carefree, physically strong men in
buckskins, but a complete absence of refinement remained unacceptable.
The idea that drunkenness encapsulated the ruffian attitude in the West was not just
Clark’s. His sister Helen similarly remarked on her distaste for the “drunken, half naked beast
(called man),” whom she encountered on her arrival at Fort Kearney. She complained that
this “beast” was “kicking, yelling & swearing and howling. Rather a poor looking
advertisement for Kearney City.”108 Mollie Sanford also declared her intolerance for Dick
Gregory, a hotel bar tender they meet along their journey. She “lectured him for ever selling
liquor [and] treated him real shabbily, been saucy and rude even,” as she refused to associate
with “that class of men.”109 She disapproved overall of the vulgarity of many westerners, and
of her friends who learned to live with “drunken roughs” and pistol fights, and she declared,
“I think if people would not get used to such things, there would be less of it.”110 Ruggedness
in the West was a contested issue and defining a rugged western man was no simple matter.
Cursing was considered another inappropriate western male behavior, and Mollie
Sanford and Elizabeth Keays in particular made a fuss about their contempt for this rudeness.
Although both Sanford and Keays expressed their hopes that men could experience freedoms
in the West such as card games, they equally felt strongly that there was a limit to that
freedom. Although Sanford enjoyed that “By” was “free” and less “sentimental” than other
men, she cried upon hearing him swear at the “cows,” and she lamented that it was “the first
51
107 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 76.
108 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 23.
109 Sanford, Journal, 17, 20.
110 Sanford, Journal, 21.
time I ever heard a profane word come out of him.”111 Keays also disapproved of male
swearing, and she insisted that women be treated with respect by men. Despite her assertions
about men’s rights, when she met another woman along the way who complained of the man
she travelled with, Keays shuddered at the “profane language and disagreeableness altogether
of her escort.” She praised her own co-migrants, as “not an angry or profane word have they
uttered” and she felt glad that her company contrasted this woman’s.112 Although both
women proved they did not entirely conform to a refined masculine ideal, they
simultaneously demonstrated their apprehensions to accept a complete lack of gentlemanly
respectability.
Westward migrants faced competing masculine traits head on and often fully accepted
opposing characteristics simultaneously as a definition of a good man, such as freedom along
with restraint. Individuals in their personal writings rarely, if ever, advocated a single-faceted
man who should be, for example, a polite, family-oriented gentleman and never a rough and
free individual, or vice versa. The western man was also rarely, if ever, free of any limitations
to such singular qualities. Many migrants saw restrictions on both freedom as well as on
restraint as crucial to a good western man. Western men exhibited a substantial variety of
personal characteristics and concurrently displayed a level of polite refinement, a carefree
attitude, the ability to step into feminine roles and wear animal skins, a knack for physical
strength in arduous circumstances, and the potential for a surplus of vigor to the point of
repulsive vulgarity.
52
111 Sanford, Journal, 120.
112 Keays, “Overland,” 68.
CHAPTER V
DOES A MAN EMBRACE OR CHANGE THE WILDERNESS?
In struggling to define the West as a transient world full of travelers and temporary
shelters that was in the midst of a transformation toward settlement, migrants deliberated the
importance of the wild landscape over civilization. The shifting composition of Pikes Peak
communities caused new inhabitants to question the ways a man should deal with civilizing
the West and the type of relationship he should have with the western environment and its
new society. Personal writings of migrants reveal that defining the West in its transition
between hasty and temporary encampments toward what they viewed as a more stable
community was understood and debated in terms of a man’s relationship to his environment.
As historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued, throughout American history the
frontiersman conquered the western wilderness by first reverting back to primitive ways and
then transforming the wild into a civilization distinct from Europe. Turner indeed captured
the contradictory nature of adopting yet conquering the wilderness, but I will argue that the
migrants grappled with far more complexities about whether or not a man should embrace or
change the West. Here we will explore the ways men and women defined masculinity in
terms of place including men’s relationship to the environment and society. Throughout this
chapter I will explain the popular ideal of conquering wilderness by means of power and
work, the equally attractive standard of embracing the wilderness through sight-seeing and
adventure, the distaste for western crudeness and the rejection of wilderness as a barbaric
place not suitable for society, and the simultaneous feeling that despite its crudeness, men
would make the West its own civilization complete with its rougher qualities. Migrants often
53
believed that a man should simultaneously control, embrace, reject, and accept the western
landscape.
Men Rule the Wilderness
Many migrants to Pikes Peak during the 1850s and 60s expressed their belief that a
man should rule the wilderness and work the land to improve it. Horace Greeley argued in his
letters recounting his journey that “the Rocky Mountains... are destined to be a favorite resort
and home of civilized man.”113 He explained simply the goal of conquest in the West and his
hopes that the wilderness would soon become “home” to the “civilized” instead of remaining
a curious landscape free of the marks of society. Calvin Clark too remarked on the prospects
of men one day owning this land, and his following discussion on cultivation and civilization
summarizes this common ideal:
The vallies in this vicinity will one day be dencely populated and brought under a good state of cultivation, they now call up in the mind of the spectator images of rural ease, and plenty to be realized beneath the scepter of civilization, when the poor old Indian shall be clostly girted with bands of white brothers hoo shall teach him by example the nobility of toil and morality...114
Clark reflected on an ideal society of “rural ease” that would be laid down by the “scepter of
civilization.” He knew that white men would not only civilize the West, but they would also
lead Indians to be noble and moral, and a part of white male society. Ruling the wilderness
was the eventual goal, and Indians were part of this wilderness.
To many migrants, Indians were more one with the wild and less a part of civilized
humanity. Writers made distinctions between men and Indians, ensuring a separation between
54
113 Greeley, Overland, 136.
114 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 18.
themselves and the other, which not only grouped Indians in with the wilderness but also
distanced the writers themselves from this wilderness. As a group of Indians approached him,
Clark revealed his perception of Indians as unmanly, stating, “we soon came in sight of a
cople of men or indians and I could not sez positively which as they wir about one mile
off.”115 Julia Holmes made a similar distinction when she woke up to the sounds of “yelling
and screeching,” and she asserted that “civilized man has his prototype in the noisy Indian, so
the canine domestic has his lupine prototype, which can make comparatively savage
sounds.”116 Holmes viewed man as a progression from the savagery of the Indian, and, to
Holmes, civilization was key to turning a primitive being into a man. Many writers of the
mid nineteenth-century migration made similar remarks on the vulgarity of Indians and their
seeming oneness with the wild while distancing themselves from the whole scene. Mollie
Sanford made this distinction clear when she described Indians as “creatures” who “looked
too filthy to live.”117 To many migrants, men were not Indians, and Indians were not men,
and in this view, wilderness was a mark of unmanliness.
Often key to a man’s relationship with the wild West and his efforts to civilize it was
his ability to work the land. Greeley emphasized a hard-working class of men as the type fit
to live at Pikes Peak. He wrote that the “right men will gradually unearth” the gold in Pikes
Peak, and that these men were “hardy, industrious, energetic [and] white.”118 George Willing,
who described the wild passion of men in the West, revealed in action the ideal of working
55
115 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 54.
116 Holmes, Journal, 18.
117 Sanford, Journal, 122.
118 Greeley, Overland, 136-37.
the wilderness. He explained that despite “all these discouragements starting me in the face”
that he had chosen a claim and, he stated, “at all events, I mean to gouge into it extensively,
and probe it thoroughly.”119 His journey was not about reveling in nature’s beauties, but
about remaining determined to work the land and retrieve the gold he had set out for.
Similarly, Elizabeth Keays, who travelled to Fort Collins and disliked male vulgarity,
appreciated seeing men plowing and raising “splendid crops,” and she complained that “it
really seems incredible that this country does not settle faster.”120 Keays, like other travelers,
wished for a cultivated and civilized western landscape that would squash the savagery of the
wild.
Men Embrace the Wilderness
Although travelers wished to conquer the land, many conversely wrote about the
wonders and pleasures of embracing it. The wilderness offered leisures such as hunting,
sight-seeing, adventuring, and being a part of a stunningly vast world. Although Calvin Clark
dreamed of the day these “vallies” would be cultivated by men, he also embraced the
wilderness for its curiosities and adventures. Much of his diary narrates the individual
escapades he took away from his team where he climbed mountains, explored caves, shot at
wild animals, tumbled down a hill and was saved by his own moccasin, and only caught back
up with his group to get sustenance and shelter.121 He explained that he could not help
“letting [his] curiosity” take him into the wilderness. Similarly, Libeus Barney delighted in
his distance from society, stating, “though far from civilization, and high on the Rocky
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119 Willing, “Diary,” 377.
120 Keays, “Overland,” 68.
121 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 25-27, 33.
Mountains, still even here on such a night, there was much to fill the soul with reverent
gratitude, pious humility and heart prompting praise.”122 Just as Clark felt alive on his
adventures, Barney felt fulfilled after summiting the mountain, and he exclaimed that “never
shall I forget its solitary beauty.”123 In such accounts, men accepted the wild West as a place
of freedom, pleasure, and excitement, and not necessarily to be altered by society.
Many western men like Clark and Barney found leisure and freedom in the
wilderness, especially in embracing sight-seeing and hunting. Editor and migrant Horace
Greeley relished in the beauty of the Rocky Mountains, noting “the pines,” which “though
stunted and at first scattered, give variety, softness and beauty to the landscape, which
becomes more rolling, with deeper and more frequent valleys, and water in nearly all of
them...”124 Reverend Rankin too described to his wife the serenity he felt in viewing the
“eternal snow” that sat atop the mountains from the fair weathered streets of Denver. He
wrote, “The scene is splendid, & the contrast, to stand on the street... & look up to the region
where winter eternally reigns, is impressive & grand.”125 The pristine wilderness that these
men idealized would not likely remain intact after civilization took over, but both the beauty
of the wild and the urge to conquer it defined men in the West.
Travelers, such as John Gibson, who boasted of his group’s stern character and their
“acquaintances with the wash tub,” embraced the wilderness but simultaneously conquered it
in a sense by taking pleasure in the hunt. He said that he and his men “have a glorious time
57
122 Barney, Letters, 31.
123 Barney, Letters, 32.
124 Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey, from New York to San Francisco, in the Summer of 1859 (San Francisco, CA: H. H. Bancroft & Co, 1860) accessed October 10, 2014, https://archive.org/details/overlandjourneyf00gree, 134.
125 Rankin, letters.
generally, feeding on the fat of the land,” and he listed the “tender” and “juicy” wild animals
he and his fellow hunters enjoyed.126 Helen Clark similarly remarked on the highlight of the
journey for one man in her group, stating, “Tom has begun to have some of the comforts of
Job - went hunting over the bluffs yesterday and wore moccasins and today he is sore footed
enough.”127 The act of hunting in the West contained its own contradictions as both an
embrace of a wilderness sport, or of wilderness foods and comforts, and yet hunting
simultaneously equated to a conquest of the land and it’s creatures.
Be Warned: the West is Uncivilized
Although men often cherished their opportunities to delight in the scenic wilderness,
sometimes conditions looked bleak to the migrants and they mentioned in their writings some
more discouraging conditions of the uncivilized region. Many travelers longed for the
comforts of home and they complained of a general crudeness that plagued the West. To his
wife back home, John Hartzell wrote as he arrived to “Golden City” that it is “a City in name
only.” He grumbled that “the City is composed of about one hundred houses or cobbles the
greater fashion of them are small thing... and covered with clay in place of shingles.”128
Hartzell’s account of an unpolished “city” contrasted the more hopeful claims about a future
civilization and the more pleasant feelings about the beauties of wilderness. Similarly,
Elizabeth Keays believed the “vegitation is very backward” in the West due to the “sandy”
soil and lack of water, and the fact that the population “depend[ed] on freighting in things.”
She, like Hartzell, criticized the few houses in town as they were “made of sod or adobe,”
58
126 Gibson, Journal.
127 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 31.
128 Hartzell, letter.
and Helen Clark also jabbed at western building materials, stating, “I was very much
disappointed when I beheld Ft. Kearney. The houses are mud bricks, adobes.”129 Although
many travelers to Pikes Peak hoped for civilization and even embraced the fruits of
wilderness, many still detested the vulgar appearance of the West.
Many migrants also found fault with the western town’s overall character as a
lawless, ruffian place. They frowned upon the brawls and duels that they felt defined Denver
and other western cities and contrasted them against proper civilization. Horace Greeley
described the overall behavior in town, stating, “I apprehend that there have been, during my
two weeks sojourn, more brawls, more fights, more pistol-shots with criminal intent in this
log city of one hundred and fifty dwellings... than in any community of no greater numbers
on earth.”130 Calvin Clark also provided a general description of the crudeness of the West
when he wrote, “in town drunkards, fights, Dewells, swaring, taking shots at someone that
someone has taken a dislike to is generaly the order of the day.”131 When Reverend Rankin
described the transformation of moral men to drunks who gamble, he also reported the
ruffianism that encompassed Denver as a whole, complaining to his wife of the complete lack
of laws, courts, and churches. Just as most men and women both found a vulgar man
intolerable, they too disliked the vulgar western town.
Libeus Barney offered another expressive description of Auraria’s and Denver’s
corrupt character, and he even warned others through his letters not to make the trek. He
explained, “There is scarcely a day revolves, but some one crime or another is committed;
59
129 Keays, “Overland,” 72; Helen Clark, “Diary,” 23.
130 Greeley, Overland, 159.
131 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 88.
theft, robbery or murder... Lawyers and doctors, or, more correctly speaking, shysters and
quacks, are more plenty here than clients and patients.”132 Barney illustrated a town
consisting of only the worst kinds of men. Even as one of the migrants himself, he initially
did not recommend the trip to Pikes Peak, stating, “even now I would not encourage any one
to leave anything like a respectable living in enlightened New England.”133 Despite the
West’s draw as a future civilization or a free wilderness, travelers like Hartzell, Keays, and
Barney turned their noses up at the region’s lack of sophistication.
Westerners Create Their Own Unique Civilization
Writers of the Pikes Peak westward movement sometimes accepted and sometimes
rejected the West, and often simultaneously, but as emigrants began to populate Pikes Peak
country permanently, many set out to make their own civilization out of something perhaps
uncivilized. Like the western man who exhibited some rugged qualities, some restrained,
some brutish, and some others that do not fit nicely into these categories, the western city
featured the contradictory qualities of a civilization and a wilderness, of a region of ruffians
and lawmakers. Many determined to live in the Pikes Peak region embraced a contradictory
combination of characteristics in order to make do with a unique type of civilization, and yet
it was still a civilization to these western men.
Although Barney asserted his distaste for certain unrefined qualities of the western
town, he claimed after a few months of living in Denver that it was transforming into a
“civilized” region. He said, “we reflect that the first emigration to this wild, mountainous,
and but for its mineral products, uninviting region... with a retrospection of only a few
60
132 Barney, Letters, 48, 49.
133 Barney, Letters, 57.
months we behold these mountains unexplored, save by wild beasts and the wilder savage
tribes... [the region is] now known by civilized thousands.” He boasted that the city had
established a Provisional Government, “a circulating library containing fifty volumes of
choice literature,” and that “Building in Denver [was] progressing very rapidly.” He
concluded, “In many respects, separate from speed in building, our town is a marvel of
‘Young America.’”134 Barney boasted about the civilized qualities of his city despite his
previous feelings against it.
To Barney, Denver and Auraria still, however, reflected some rugged characteristics
of his previous descriptions, with its many brawls and duels including one in which two men
fought each other at gunpoint but neither wished to mortally harm the other. As soon as one
dueler shot the other, Barney explained that “‘Wounded honor’ [was] now restored.” This
was, according to Barney, the usual way of dealing with conflict in the West and he argued,
“It is nothing to be frightened at, to hear the report of a pistol under your ear, provided the
ball lodges in no vital part; neither is it an evidence we are a community of murderers
because dead men are found in the streets with bullet holes through them.” In this
description, Barney defended his western city as neither uncivilized nor criminal despite its
rougher qualities, but merely the way Westerners lived. He hoped to make a civilization out
of the very crudeness he initially disagreed with.
Horace Greeley similarly noted some civilized features of the Pikes Peak region
despite his feelings against it. When describing new options in food, he stated, “On every
side, I note signs of progress - improvement - manifest destiny...”135 In an account of a
61
134 Barney, Letters, 50-51, 54, 89.
135 Greeley, Overland, 164.
“public afare” in which a gang of thieves stole a man’s wagon load of turkeys, Calvin Clark
boasted that “the town organized ‘a vidgillence committy’” to take care of it.136 He illustrated
that roughness and vulgarity existed in the West, but they existed in tandem with more
civilized ways and that the two opposing sides did not hinder the region from being a
civilization. He explained, “the city seems more like a sivilized community than of yore for
they have meetings here now upon the sabbath. altho thare is swarring and pistol shooting
and the hoots and yels of the manneacts... it is still ‘all in the sound of the church.’”137 Even
Reverend Rankin, who contended that “the public morals are deplorable,” still saw Denver as
a civilization with “a great many moral & industrious people.” After some time in the city, he
believed Denver “is a well built Town & growing rapidly.”138
Despite complaints about the impolite and uncivilized nature of western society,
many men accepted these towns as civilized along with other more crude qualities. They took
it upon themselves as men to drive a civilization forward despite some of their own
conflicting ideals about wilderness and vulgarity. A western man could both embrace and
change the wilderness, and he could structure a society based on these contradictory
qualities. Just as a man could be constructed of opposing ideals, so too could a society
containing these western men.
62
136 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 89.
137 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 90.
138 Rankin, letters.
CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
Promotional literature may have lured some individuals or families to either stay at
home or travel west, and it may also have pointed out some similar contradictory masculine
traits as those exhibited by travelers, but it neither dictated nor encompassed the nuances of
personal understandings of a western masculinity. Men and women created their own ideals
that were complex and often quite contradictory. Individuals and families contributed their
own varying ideas of what it meant to be a man in the West, and this often entailed the
tensions of feeling pulled between different and often opposing perceptions of manhood that
existed during this period. This way of defining manhood easily complicated simplistic
interpretations. The western man instead upheld family values, exhibited refinement and
chivalry, cooked and cleaned, mustered up grit during hardships, tackled the wilderness,
became one with the wilderness, and even accepted the West as a somewhat civilized and
savage place. The western man’s complicated nature transcended a shallow definition.
It is important to see that western men were not just rugged detached ruffians, nor
were they completely dedicated to maintaining restraint or transplanting civilization into the
western wilderness. These generalizations cloud the complexities of gender invention in the
West that individuals used to adapt to a new environment. Although “rugged” or “restrained”
offers a simple answer to the curiosities of western American culture, it is crucial to realize
the nuances and contradictions that went into creating a western masculine identity so that we
can more wholly understand this important historical construction. Through this study of
westward migration to Pikes Peak between 1858 and 1866, we can begin to grasp the ways
63
that identity and gender ideals could be constructed out of the very contradictions that broke
them down. Questioning masculinity, and embracing the often contradictory nature of the
journey, were crucial to defining men in the western world.
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