THREE
Outside of Indian domains, America had a surplus of men from the earliest colonial settlements until just after the end of World War II. It was not just the arithmetical fact of the surplus that mattered; it was how the extra men were distributed. If they had been spread evenly across space and time—if, for example, every community's gender ratio had stabilized at about 105 men for every 100 women—the surplus probably would not have counted for much. Under those circumstances it would have been comparatively easy to attach the supernumerary males to existing families and to keep them from congregating in large groups. Such, however, was not the case.
Men to the Frontier
The surplus men drifted, as if caught in an inexorable current, toward the frontier. Women, especially widows, more often stayed in settled regions or moved to cities. This tendency was apparent everywhere in the colonies by the second half of the eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth. Massachusetts is a prime example. In 1765 the gender ratios for whites sixteen and older in the two oldest coastal counties, Plymouth and Suffolk, were respectively 88 and 87.1 In the more recently settled Berkshire County, on the colony's western border, the gender ratio for whites sixteen and older was 114. "You know that new towns have usually more males than females," Daniel Webster wrote to a friend in 1802, "and old commercial towns the reverse . . . When I resided at Exeter I thought petticoats would overrun the nation." Later in the nineteenth century, as the frontier moved to the Mississippi River and beyond, Massachusetts was left with more and more women. In 1865 the state's governor, John A. Andrew, actually called for state assistance to relocate unmarried young women, "who are wanted for teachers, and for every other appropriate as well as domestic employment in the remote West, but who are leading anxious and aimless lives in New England." The legislature rejected this scheme as unnecessary and impracticable.2
Massachusetts and other eastern states developed surpluses of women primarily because large numbers of young men moved toward the frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner celebrated them as refugees from capitalism, venturesome souls who refused to accept inferior wages and subordinate positions in the new industrial order.3 In this he was largely mistaken. The key force, which antedated both the commercial and industrial revolutions, was the exponential growth of America's youthful population.
Male migrants were typically losers in a natal lottery. They had poor parents or were crowded out of a comfortable inheritance by too many siblings. This was especially true of New England, where two centuries of rapid population growth inevitably outstripped the supply of good land. Population pressure also came to play a role in the middle and southern colonies, as did exhaustion of the soil and the concentration of coastal lands in the hands of a planter elite.
A farmer's son with little prospect of inheritance essentially had four choices. He could learn a trade, join the army, go to sea, or take advantage of the land and labor opportunities along the frontier. These were not necessarily exclusive options. A few men like Samuel Clemens managed eventually to try all four. Clemens was in his youth a journeyman printer, a soldier, and a prospector; he knew the water as a river pilot and later as a travel writer. It is no accident that his mature literary works are filled with descriptions of masculine groups and subcultures.
Those who were compelled by economic or family circumstances to pursue one of these four courses of action were often unmarried and in their late teens or twenties when they made their choice. Those among them who were engaged or already married, and who decided to migrate permanently, naturally made plans to bring their fiances or wives and children with them. But they often preceded their families to the new site, spending a year or so girdling trees, building shelters, and keeping a watchful eye for hostile Indians. The Connecticut emigrants who in 1769 began settling "Wyoming," the disputed region along the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania variously claimed by Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and the Indians, went as a kind of armed expeditionary force. In May 1772 there were only five white women in Wilkes Barre compared to about 130 men. By the late 1770s, however, the settlement had become normal in both a demographic and social sense. There were prosperous family farms, schoolhouses, and Sabbath days observed with customary strictness.4
The men-first, families-later pattern of settlement was common along the great agricultural frontier stretching from the Appalachians to the eastern reaches of the Great Plains. George Carroll, an Iowa pioneer, recalled that there were only half a dozen or so families in the Cedar Rapids area when he arrived. "The larger portion of the inhabitants," he remembered, "were men who had come on in advance of their families to secure their claims and erect some kind of a shelter for them when they came." Married men with families sometimes brought their older sons and hired help with them, collecting their wives and younger children later. Engaged men who returned to their fiancees during the winter or bachelors who went back East in search of a bride would tack a sign on the door to warn off claim-jumpers: "Gone to get a wife."5
Fetching wives and families, or going back to find a bride, was less practical in the Far West. Distance and slow transportation made back-and-forth migration difficult before the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Married men who traveled along the Oregon Trail and other routes generally had to take their families with them or endure a long period of separation. The most typical overland immigrant, however, was a young single man. This fact is readily explained by the region's climate and labor demand. The prevailing lack of rain west of the ninety-eighth meridian (rainfall is abundant only in the Pacific Northwest) discouraged family farming and therefore family migration. The nature of the Far Western economy encouraged the migration of young, unattached men. They were well suited for mining, lumbering, trapping, construction, freight hauling, cattle driving, and other occupations that required itinerancy and physical strength.
Work on the Far Western frontier was dangerous and exhausting. "Many a fine, spruce young clerk coming to California with golden dreams of wealth before him has proved, to his sorrow, that the crowbar is heavier than the pen," cautioned an advice book for prospective emigrants. The forty-niner Richard Ness once hired a man to help him mine in California's Yuba River region. The man lasted ten minutes in the July sun. One reason so many European and Asian peasants were brought to work on frontier mining and construction projects was that they were inured to hard work and capable of sustained physical labor. The mountain excavations of the Chinese are the most famous instance of this, though determined workers of Irish, Italian, and several other nationalities could be found toiling throughout the Far West. The importation of masculine labor from around the world made it the country's most ethnically diverse region, an immigrant nation within a nation of immigrants. In 1870 roughly a third of the population in California was foreign-born; in Idaho and Arizona, more than half.6
Women to the City
American women were not inclined toward such jobs, nor were they expected or usually permitted to take them. Many also disliked the prospect of a difficult journey to the frontier and the hardships and isolation of the new country where the chores were more burdensome, the neighbors few, and old friends but a yearning memory. Their apprehensions were magnified by personal correspondence ("none can imagine the suffering that many women underwent in or during the transit"); by memoirists who warned of rattlesnakes and dysenteric death; and by the conventional wisdom of writers like Hinton Helper, who declared that no woman he met in Gold Rush California was willing to make the place her permanent abode. George Napheys, the author of a popular advice book for women, drew his readers' attention to the oversupply of men along the frontier. This was due, he said, to the disinclination of women to emigrate and to the fact that women were "unfitted for the hardships of pioneer life."7
Napheys was wrong about women's ability to endure hardships. Thousands of stoic pioneer wives accompanied or followed their husbands westward; their achievements and sacrifices are embedded in the national legend. Without their skilled and patient toil the western lands could not have been permanently settled by Americans of European descent. The "gone to get a wife" signs were more than statements of marital intent. They were admissions that the primitive farms and towns were incomplete and untenable without women and their labor.
Napheys was right, however, about the reluctance of women to migrate. Most women, single or married, wanted nothing to do with the frontier and tried to stay away from it altogether. The wife of David How, a Massachusetts Revolutionary War veteran who aspired to become a frontier farmer, was adamant in her refusal to move into the wilderness. How was forced to give up the New Hampshire land he had already purchased and partially cleared and to open a currier's shop instead. In 1847 Elizabeth Dixon Smith wrote in her Oregon Trail diary of a woman who refused to proceed farther and set fire to her husband's wagon. He put out the flames and then flogged her. Harriet Paddleford Goodnow, the wife of a Kansas emigrant, dreaded the Plains Indians and the climate about equally. When her husband settled there in 1855, she stayed at home in Maine, necessitating a long-distance shuttle marriage of fifteen years.8
Other women agreed to venture forth but were so appalled by what they found that they departed for home—with or without their spouses. One Colorado woman, who lived with her husband at a remote way station near Denver, decided she had had enough and resolved to board a stage eastward bound for civilization. An army officer warned her that the stage would almost certainly be attacked by Indians. The woman replied that she had been living in fear all summer, that she was sure to be murdered by Indians if she stayed, and that she might as well die on the stage. As events transpired, she very nearly did."
It was not simply that women were repulsed by the adversity and isolation of frontier life. The economic opportunities open to them were to be found, by and large, in cities and towns. Young women could work in domestic service, in mills, or, later, in offices. Older women and widows could support themselves by operating restaurants or boarding houses. Farm wives who outlived their husbands often sold or rented their properties and went elsewhere, unless they had a son prepared to take over the operation. Women moving to urban areas thus formed a countercurrent to the predominantly male movement toward the rural west. The city, as historian David Potter remarked, was the frontier for American women.10
The inevitable result was that cities, except for those dominated by heavy industries like steel, began developing female surpluses. "There are large communities in the East where there is an excess of women," observed the reformer Mary Livermore in 1883. "It is very evident in such communities that there will be large numbers of unmarried women, unless the surplusage of women should emigrate,—Heaven only knows where,—or Utah should be re-enacted in New England.""
Black women were in the same predicament. In southern cities before the Civil War female slaves outnumbered male by as much as 50 percent. Free black women outnumbered free men by 25 percent or more. White residents used large numbers of black women as maids, cooks, laundresses, nurses, and seamstresses both before and after the abolition of slavery. As late as 1930 Natchez, Mississippi, was home to 4,194 black women and 2,965 black men, giving it a black gender ratio of only 71. The ratio of employed black men to women was doubtless even lower. The difficulty that black men had in securing urban jobs made family formation (and hence socialization) difficult; it also contributed to the rise of a frustrated male counterculture given to petty crime, intoxication, and intraracial violence.12
The drift of women to cities was by no means peculiar to America. It has been observed in other societies widely separated by time and place and culture, so much so that it seems a near constant of social history. What was different about the American experience was the presence of a large and continuously expanding frontier which was simultaneously drawing men out of cities. The result was a persistent (though never absolute) gender polarization of the population. This polarization had two separate but overlapping dimensions, east-to-west and urbanto-rural. In the West women were not only scarcer than in the East, they were also more concentrated in cities and towns."
More Boys than Girls
The male surplus along the frontier was not solely the result of adult migration. It was also caused, to a lesser degree, by an excess of male children. Historical demographers who have studied nineteenth-century census records have found small but persistent regional differences in gender ratios for children under fifteen years. Rural and agricultural areas nearest the frontier had higher-than-average numbers of male children, eastern urban and industrial areas the reverse. Some have speculated that this difference was due to the greater economic value of boys to farm families. Because girls were less valuable as agricultural laborers, they were less well cared for and hence perished at a higher rate. In cities and commercial areas, where job opportunities for female children were equal or superior to those for males, there was no economic reason to neglect girls or to do anything else that would directly or indirectly cause their deaths.14
This is an intriguing hypothesis. If passive female infanticide was widespread, it would help explain the concentration of young men and related social problems. It would also revolutionize the way we think about life and death on the frontier. Is it possible that the deadliest behavior actually took place in sod houses rather than saloons and that it was motivated by cold economic calculation rather than hot-headed passion?
The answer is almost certainly no. Parental behavior toward children was unlikely to have been dictated solely by the value of future labor, unless one dismisses religious conviction out of hand. Protestant Americans who believed in God's stern judgment would not have withheld food or medicine from an unregenerate daughter of tender years. If they had done so it would surely have been remarked by observers, as it has been in societies where such practices are common.15 Yet no anecdotal, journalistic, or legal testimony suggests that economically motivated neglect of girls occurred in the rural and frontier regions of nineteenth-century America.
What the evidence does show is that parents valued the farm labor of both boys and girls. Pioneer immigrants praised the usefulness of children without reference to gender, emphasizing their helpfulness in gathering wood, hauling water, planting and harvesting crops, picking cotton, minding siblings, and doing sundry other chores. They also stressed the cheapness and abundance of food. Too many mouths to feed could not have been a motive for neglecting daughters, as it often was in peasant societies. "Children are no burden but a great help to their parents," summed up Elise Amalie Waerenskjold, a Norwegian who lived in Texas from 1847 until her death in 1895.16
The mystery remains, however. If the neglect of female children did not cause the higher-than-average number of male children reported in western censuses, then what did?
One possibility is that more boys were born in frontier and rural districts than in eastern and urban areas. Different races and classes produce different ratios of male to female births. Whites have more male offspring than blacks; wealthy parents have more than poor. The differences in gender ratios by race and class probably reflect differences in levels of nutrition and physical well-being, healthy women being more likely to bear male offspring than unhealthy ones. Coital patterns also seem to have a bearing, with young males who engage in frequent intercourse more likely to produce sons. Male frontier migrants were typically white and young and vigorous. Those among them who were married and engaged in farming had every incentive to produce children and so may be presumed to have had frequent intercourse. They and their spouses had ample food and a reasonably good material standard of living. All of these factors would have increased the frequency of male births.17
If more male children were born in remote rural areas, more of them also survived. Boys were more vulnerable than girls to infectious diseases and, prior to the twentieth century, urban populations suffered more from infectious diseases than rural populations. City boys were more often exposed to diseases like measles and diarrhea than country boys, and they died from them more often than city girls, whose natural immune responses were stronger.18
It is also likely that remote rural areas had more boys simply because more boys moved there. A farmer living on a small eastern farm with many sons had a problem and an opportunity. The problem was that his landholdings were apt to be too small to divide among his heirs. The opportunity was that his sons could provide the labor to help him in the arduous task of clearing virgin land.19 There was, in other words, a double incentive for families with many sons to migrate toward the frontier.
Some boys went without families. They set out on their own like Huckleberry Finn or traveled in "orphan trains" organized by aid societies. These benevolent enterprises relocated about 200,000 men, women, and especially children from eastern slums to rural and western areas from the 1850s through the 1920s. About 60 percent of the transported children were male.20
There are thus three independent explanations for the larger number of male children found on or near the frontier: more of them were born there, more of them survived there, and more of them moved there. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the presence of extra boys under the age of fifteen was not the principal reason why the overall frontier gender ratio was unbalanced. That imbalance was due, first and foremost, to the presence of young adult male migrants.
Variations in Gender Ratios
Not all frontier populations were dominated by men. Different mixes of immigrants produced different degrees of gender imbalance along the frontier. This point cannot be emphasized too strongly. Some regions had heavy male surpluses that lasted for a comparatively long time, others did not.
The experiences of seventeenth-century Massachusetts and Virginia provide, as they so often do in American history, an instructive contrast. Massachusetts had more men than women during its first decade, but the imbalance was modest and quickly disappeared as wives joined their husbands and began bearing large numbers of children. Puritan society in America was orderly and family-centered from its inception. Bachelors were distrusted and assigned to established households to keep them out of trouble. The repeated attempts to repress Thomas Morton's Merry Mount, a bacchanalian trading post complete with maypole and willing Indians, are a vivid reminder of the Puritan determination to check the sexuality of single men. Virginia, of which the Puritans likewise had a low opinion, was another turbulent bachelor society. The census of 1625 showed a gender ratio of 333, with the bulk of unmarried men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine. The gender imbalance of Virginia, and the Chesapeake region generally, persisted into the eighteenth century.21
It is useful to think of the demography of subsequent American frontiers as resembling the Massachusetts type, the Virginia type, or something in between. Figure 3.1 shows examples from the nineteenth century. The age and gender distributions are based on census lists compiled shortly after the first influx of permanent white settlers into each area. The population of Richardson County, in the southeastern corner of Nebraska, was only slightly abnormal: 55 percent male in 1860, with children present in substantial numbers. Access to Richardson County, via the Missouri River, was comparatively easy; so was farming, thanks to excellent soil and abundant rainfall. Hence the familial immigration.
Wells County, in the north central section of North Dakota, was also agricultural, but with more bonanza farms, a shorter growing season, more extreme climate, and greater risk of drought. Most of its early settlers came not from the United States but from Wales and Scandinavia. Two-thirds of the residents were male in 1885. The young adult population was lopsidedly masculine, the children very nearly so. Over 60 percent of Wells County residents under the age of ten were boys, reflecting the tendency of immigrant farmers to bring more male children with them.
Dodge City, Kansas, represented an extreme case of gender imbalance. The absence of farm families and a surfeit of buffalo hunters, gamblers, saloon keepers, and traders explain the odd
shape of its 1875 population pyramid, so skewed that it has been likened to a deck gun. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, the peak years of Dodge City's career as a cow town, the gender ratio was even more imbalanced during the summer months, when cowboys arrived with their herds of longhorns. By 1885 the native population had begun to normalize, although the town still had a noticeable surplus of men in their twenties and thirties. The larger region in which Dodge City is located, semiarid western Kansas, had a similar population history. Its gender ratio was 768 in 1870, fell to 124 in 1880, but remained above 110 for nearly forty more years.22
These three cases illustrate an important rule of frontier demographic and social history. The harsher the environment, the sparser the population, the longer and more difficult the immigrants' journey, and the lesser the importance of smallscale agriculture, the higher the gender ratio in a given frontier location. This was most apparent in the cordillera, the vast elevated region running from the eastern Rockies to the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges. Most of the remote cordilleran towns were established by miners and had wildly skewed populations, with as many as thirty-four men for every woman. The extreme gender disparities of the mining frontier passed within a decade or two, although as late as 1870 California's gender ratio was still 166, Nevada's 320, and Idaho's a lopsided 433. These ratios actually understated the true male surplus, as nonagricultural frontier regions had more than their share of homeless drifters who were missed by, or fugitive men who avoided, the federal census takers.23
Figure 3.2 maps the known distribution of men and women in the United States in 1870, during the climactic stage of continental frontier expansion. Except for the fertile Willamette Valley, Mormon Utah, and New Mexico with its established population, the dry plains and mountain west had high gender ratios, as did the cold and thinly populated lumbering regions on the western fringes of the Great Lakes. The well-watered lands settled by farmers during the mid-nineteenth century had normal or slightly elevated gender ratios. Eastern urban areas had female surpluses, as did large parts of the southeastern states, which had suffered the largest share of Civil War casualties.
Seedbed of Violence
The shortage of men in the Southeast was also a consequence of migration. Poverty, soil exhaustion, and political turmoil encouraged white men to leave, just as they discouraged European immigrants from taking their places.24 Florida was the only southeastern state that consistently gained from immigration during the period 1870-1950. Otherwise outmigration was the rule until the rise of prosperous cities like Atlanta began attracting and retaining people in the decades after World War II. Prior to the Sunbelt revival the Southeast was the nation's economic backwater, a place with a very high birth rate but little industry and few well-paying jobs. Consequently the region produced a steady stream of emigrants of whom the most common type was a man in his twenties.
White men went west, at first mainly to Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. After 1900 they began leaving these states as well, moving farther west or to the north central industrial belt. The Depression turned southern emigration along Route 66 into a flood. California was the primary destination, as 1.2 million white southerners moved there and to other western states during the I 930s and 1940s. These "Okies" and "Arkies" and "Texies" were looked down upon as poor white trash, prone to violence, alcoholism, and incest. One California theater seated them in the balcony with blacks, the irony evidently lost on its management.25
The onset of World War I, which cut off European immigration and increased the demand for American manufactured goods, gave large numbers of black workers an opportunity to move to northeastern and midwestern industrial cities, where they hoped to earn better wages and escape poverty, legal segregation, and racial terrorism. "Dear Sir," wrote one, responding to a 1917 advertisement for laborers in the Chicago Defender, "this would be a grand opportunity for me to better my present conditions ... I am a single man and would be willing to do any kind of work . . . There is but little down here to be gotten." There was even less in the 1930s and 1940s when a combination of declining prices, federally sponsored crop-reduction programs, and agricultural mechanization destroyed the sharecropping system and severed the main economic link between blacks and their native South. Well over a million left the region in the 1940s, a quarter of them to the West, drawn by the magnet of defense jobs. In Los Angeles alone the black population jumped from 3,000 in 1940 to 131,000 at the end of 1942. Los Angeles, Chicago, New York—the great twentieth-century migrations transformed black Americans from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban people, from a regional racial minority to a national one.26
All of this made the South a seedbed of national violence. When millions of white and black southerners moved elsewhere, they took their obsessions about reputation and vengeance and deadly weapons with them. The places to which they moved, such as Central Texas and Harlem, soon became known for frequent shooting and stabbing affrays over trivial disputes. Trivial, that is, to outsiders, though not to the southern-born combatants and their sons and grandsons who faced shame and demasculinization if they failed to respond to insult or challenge.27
The consequences of the outmigration of violence-prone southern men were apparent in criminal justice statistics. During 1906-1935 Pennsylvania-born blacks were eleven times more likely to be committed to the Western State Penitentiary for crimes of violence than Pennsylvania-born whites, but blacks born out of state (overwhelmingly immigrants from the South) were forty-eight times more likely than native whites to be committed for violent crimes. More recent and sophisticated studies of murder rates have shown similar differences among white southerners, whose propensity for violence not only has kept their native state homicide rates high but has inflated the rates of other counties and states into which they have moved.28
Southern outmigration thus had a social, cultural, and demographic bearing on American violence. It transplanted, to use the seedbed metaphor, impoverished young men who were unusually quick to resort to violence to settle personal disputes. Insofar as postbellum southern emigration, especially that of whites, was in the direction of the frontier, it also contributed to the east-west gender polarization of the American population.
Age Structure on the Frontier
The gender ratio was not the only unusual feature of frontier demography. The age structure was also skewed. In nonagricultural regions children were few and the aged a curiosity. A scant 6.5 percent of California's 1850 population consisted of children under fourteen, compared to 40.5 percent for the country as a whole.29 The frontier areas which had substantial numbers of dependents present from the beginning were those in which family farming predominated. Children often accompanied their parents to frontier farms; more children were soon born after their arrival since the fertility of frontier women was high. This is why there were comparatively large numbers of children under the age of ten in Richardson County, Nebraska, when the 1860 census was recorded (Figure 3.1).
Old persons were scarce in newly settled regions, at least until the pioneers themselves aged and the frontier had moved elsewhere. In 1850 only 3.0 percent of California's people were fifty or older, compared to 9.1 percent nationwide. Western miners were considered old at forty; an over-thirty cowboy was a rarity. Cowboys, to paraphrase Owen Wister, did not live long enough to become old.30
The youthfulness of frontier legends is often startling. John Wesley Hardin claimed to have killed five men by his sixteenth birthday. Billy the Kid (Henry McCarty) may have killed nine before being shot to death at twenty-one. (There were actually two gunfighters named Billy the Kid. The other, William Claiborne, was shot dead at twenty-two.) George Armstrong Custer, perhaps the most legendary figure of them all, was twenty-seven when his Seventh Cavalry fought Indians on the Kansas plains.31
Lesser mortals were also young, most often in their twenties, when they journeyed west. Few came over forty, whether married or single. The places they left had a high median age for the adult population, the places to which they moved a low median age. Letters and advice aimed at prospective emigrants emphasized the physically taxing nature of the work and suggested, at times bluntly, that the weak and aged should stay at home. There was, after all, no point in toiling beyond one's capacities in a new and unforgiving land.32
Nor was there any point in dying en route. Before the advent of ocean-going steamships and railroads, the prospect of a long and dangerous voyage served to discourage, or to kill off, the elderly. "Above all I warn old people who have no one but themselves to rely on against coming here," wrote a San Francisco immigrant in 1852. "Only young, healthy people are fit to travel to California— I have seen many instances of that." At that time all three of the routes to California—overland, across the Isthmus of Panama, and around Cape Horn—were risky and arduous. One San Francisco-bound army officer likened his ship to a charnel house. The danger and difficulty of the journey, together with the physical demands of mining, explain why there were few older persons (as well as few women and children) residing in California during and immediately after the Gold Rush."
Here again we encounter the paradox that long-distance migration was simultaneously good and bad for American society. Insofar as it screened out the infirm and encouraged the relocation and concentration of young, healthy men, it was a boon to economic and civic life. Immigrants with strong backs built industrial America. They dug its canals and mines, laid its tracks and sewers, erected its bridges and factories. But the same process of labor concentration simultaneously increased the prospect of local violence and disorder, particularly in places like mining camps or railroad towns where the young workers resided. If the continuous influx of prime-age male workers profited the railroad magnates and cattle barons, it was equally lucrative for the liquor dealers and prostitutes. Commercialized vice targeted at bachelor laborers was as much a growth sector of the American industrial revolution as coal or steel.
Intermarriage: The Path Not Taken
Marriage, like migration, was a life adventure most often undertaken in young adulthood. The young men who went to the frontier discovered that they could not immediately embark upon both, owing to the lack of eligible brides. Adult women were generally married before moving west and hence unavailable as spouses for bachelor frontiersmen. The problem was particularly acute in places like California's Grass Valley, a mining town where a scant 3 percent of the men had wives in 1850, and only 6 percent a decade later.34
One alternative to bachelorhood was intermarriage with Indians. This was, in a sense, a natural solution, for intertribal warfare had often left surpluses of women. George Catlin, the celebrated painter and student of Indian life, reported that many tribes along the Upper Missouri in the 1830s had "two and sometimes three women to a man.""
Trappers and traders whose livelihoods brought them into contact with Indians, and who stood to gain useful alliances as well as sex, companionship, labor, and children, were the quickest to take advantage of this availability of native women. Some intermarriage took place in the seventeenth-century southern colonies, which were chronically short of white women, and along the midland backwoods frontier in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Free blacks and runaway slaves also married Indian women. Casual or exploitative sexual contact, including Indian prostitution, occurred among all frontier groups. Women were sometimes "lent" to white men for the winter in exchange for food. "The girl, when sold to a white man, is generally skeary for a while and will take the first chance to run away," casually explained one Rocky Mountain hunter. "Should you take her again, and whip her well, and perhaps clip a little slice out of her ear, then she will stay."36
White-Indian marriage of a more civilized and permanent sort also occurred. John Rolfe, who chose an Indian princess for his bride, protested that it was not for "the unbridled desire of carnall affection," but for Jamestown, England, God, and salvation that he was marrying "an unbelieving creature," namely Pocahontas. Sir William Johnson, an imperial official and great landowner in the eighteenth-century New York upcountry, dispensed with pious rationalization and simply lived with a common-law Mohawk wife. A century later Granville Stuart, a prominent early Montana settler, took a Shoshoni wife. Unlike other early Montanans who married Indians, he did not abandon her when white women became available.37
Such tolerance and respect were unusual in the general run of Indian-American sexual relations, which tended toward the impermanent or the meretricious when they occurred at all. Remarkably little intermarriage took place in British and American territory, especially in comparison to French lands. Partly this was due to the very high gender ratio among French immigrants, for whom it was Indians or bachelorhood. Partly it was due to the liberality of French religious and imperial policy, which recognized and often encouraged intermarriage. But it was also due to the racial pride and Indian hating of American frontiersmen, who mostly preferred dead natives to connubial ones. Prejudice against Indian spouses, evident from Jamestown on, was formalized in colonial anti-miscegenation laws and persisted into the nineteenth century. In 1859 the journalist Horace Greeley, then touring the Far West, counted only seven Indian women living with white men among the nearly four thousand residents of Gregory's Diggings, a mining camp about twentyfive miles beyond Denver. By contrast he noted that French trappers and voyageurs in the Rocky Mountains might have two or three Indian wives apiece.38
Spanish men also frequently married women of native or mixed ancestry. Nacogdoches, Texas, like most frontier towns, had a disproportionately male population, roughly six men for every five women. European-Indian and European-Mestizo couples were common in Spanish Nacogdoches: between 1792 and 1804 more than half of all marriages crossed ethnic lines. After the town passed from Mexican to American control such marriages became increasingly rare. In 1860 only 6 of 1,055 married couples were Anglo-Mexican. American contempt for Mexicans, repaid in the coin of ethnic standoffishness, was common throughout the Southwest. Like Indian hating, it blocked an alternative marital path for American frontiersmen.39
Anglo racism is another example, like southern touchiness about honor, of how a cultural trait exacerbated the biological potential for violence and disorder inherent in concentrations of young men. If intermarriage among Europeans, mixed bloods, natives, and Africans had been as common on the American frontier as it was on the French and Spanish, the average frontiersman would have been more domesticated, better nourished, and less inclined to kill people of a different color. The "Wild West" of fact and legend was the bachelor West, the domain of the miner and cowboy and gambler. It was not the West of the banker and merchant and family farmer, men with wives and children and something to lose.
Throughout American history migration has been the chief cause of an uneven distribution of its people by gender and age, with more males and young adults in newly colonized and developing regions, more females and old persons in settled areas and cities. The imbalances have varied in magnitude and duration, but at times they have been extreme, as in the southern colonies during the seventeenth century or in the Far West during the nineteenth. Young men who found themselves on or near the frontier could not all marry white women, and they generally would not marry Indian or Hispanic women. The price of prejudice for supernumerary men was widespread bachelorhood. The price of widespread bachelorhood for society was more violence and disorder.