SEVEN
Frontier regions with high gender ratios were social and ecological disaster zones plagued by premature death and wanton destruction of native and animal populations. But they were by no means permanent disaster zones, for the abnormal population structure that caused or exacerbated the problems was a self-limiting phenomenon. The reason mainly had to do with frontier women—when and whom they married, how many children they bore, and with whom they allied themselves socially and politically. Though the story of the triumph of law and order on the frontier is often told from the vantage of determined marshals and hanging judges, it is more properly and essentially a story of women, families, and the balancing of the population.
Hardship and Scarcity
Women over the age of twenty-one who journeyed toward the frontier were, as a rule, already married and reluctant to go. The decision to migrate was not theirs but was made by their husbands, who chose to gamble on the West for reasons of economic advancement, independence, and adventure. But for women the gamble meant the loss of their female relations and friends. Mothers, sisters, cousins, and neighbors lent emotional and, in crises like childbirth, crucial practical support. Migration destroyed these familiar channels of intimacy and assistance, provoking tears, resentment, homesickness, and, on occasion, decisive action, as when pregnant women on the nineteenthcentury southern frontier packed up, left their husbands, and went back home to have their babies.1
The work of frontier women was exhausting, a dawn-to-dark regimen of baking, brewing, stewing, and sewing compounded by the cares of raising large families in an environment where children could wander off into disaster. The floors of their cabins and sod houses were of packed earth, their visitors seldom of the bipedal variety. Rats leapt into beds, spiders lurked under the outhouse seat, and centipedes, mosquitoes, lice, bedbugs, fleas, and poisonous snakes were everywhere. It was a country, an army officer laconically noted in his diary, that St. Patrick did not visit.2
The endless battle with dirt and vermin, the worries over sickness, crops, children, and Indians, and the daily drudgery taken for granted by their husbands wore emigrant women down. The Great Plains, with its stark, featureless landscape and constant, unnerving wind, was perhaps the most demanding and depressing environment, though the haggard, prematurely aged woman was a staple of all types of western memoirs and the butt of the frontier aphorism "this country is all right for men and dogs, but it's hell on women and horses."3
For all the hard work and homesickness, frontier life offered some advantages for women, or at least for those in locales with high gender ratios. Precisely because they were scarce and because they had mastered essential tasks at which men were maladroit, they could command wages that far exceeded eastern norms. Mary Ballou, a California pioneer who hated the place and warned other women off, could at least write home in 1852 that "sometimes I am taking care of Babies and nursing at the rate of fifty dollars a week." "I get fabulous prices for sewing," a young Denver woman named Mollie Sanford confided to her journal in 1860. Other western women profited from teaching, washing, ironing, baking pies, and growing fruits and vegetables in demand as antiscorbutics. Running a restaurant or boarding house was another common means of earning additional income, and one appreciated in ways other than strictly monetary. When a traveling salesman complained about the cooking of Nellie Cashman, the popular proprietress of Tucson's Russ House, a "tall miner" unholstered his pistol and instructed the man, "Stranger, eat them beans."4
Any insult to a respectable nineteenth-century frontier woman was considered a serious matter. One mining town, Yellowstone City, specified death by hanging for such offenses, an instance of Victorian sentimentalism hypertrophied by female scarcity. Some cowboys were afraid to even talk to respectable women, lest they mention "a leg or something like that that would send them up in the air." As late as the 1910s Wyoming ranch hands would call out "Church time!" when a married woman approached and then lapse into complete if awkwardly respectful silence.5
Hypergamy
For single frontier women—scarce people indeed—gender imbalance posed opportunities beyond silent courtesy and good pay. Prostitution was a lucrative option, though it entailed grave risks of venereal disease, abuse, alcoholism, and narcotic addiction, as well as guilt, suicide, and stigmatization. The rule of respect for women that prevailed in frontier towns stopped at the brothel door. Some unknown percentage of prostitutes escaped the trade by marrying out, occasionally to wealthy and respectable men. But the safer and more conventional marital strategy for an eligible young frontier woman was to shun prostitution and aim directly at a hypergamous marriage, or one in which she married above her social station.
This pattern was established early in American history in the Chesapeake region, the prototypical gender-imbalanced frontier. In 1621 the Virginia Company, "takinge into . . . consideration, that the Plantacon can never flourish till families be planted, and the respect of wives and Children fix the people on the Soyle," promised to ship fifty more single women to its struggling colony. The women were, however, to be married only to freemen or tenants of substantial means, "for we would have theire condition so much bettered as multitudes may be allured thereby to come unto you." This became a standard ploy. Colonial promoters promised prospective female emigrants "of honest stock" that they might "pick their husbands out of the better sort of people." It cannot be said that this promise was entirely false. Poor women had much better marital prospects in America, especially in the frontier regions and southern colonies, than they did in seventeenth-century Europe, where low gender ratios and dowries were the rule.6
Hypergamy persisted in America's remote masculine regions (though not in its longer-settled areas) from the colonial era into the early twentieth century. Irish servant girls were able to marry rising men, widows and divorcees to marry doctors, housekeepers ranch owners, governesses army officers, and teachers prominent politicians and judges. If a single story may stand for many, it is the poignant one of Julia Etta Parkerson, a devout twenty-one-year-old resident of Manhattan, Kansas. Etta, as she was known, faced practically every marital handicap imaginable. She was poor, suffered migraine headaches, and was bent over by scoliosis, a congenital curvature of the spine that left her barely four feet tall. Yet she had a suitor, an older man named Alvin Reynolds, an honorably discharged soldier who worked as a skilled stonemason.
Alvin, tired of his lonely bachelor existence, made it clear that he was ready to tie the knot. Etta held back. In a remarkable journal she kept between January 1874 and July 1875 she poured out her doubts about marrying him. She worried about her disability and the risk of pregnancy, but most of all she worried about Alvin, the adequacy of his religious beliefs and his use of tobacco, a vice with which she was obsessed. "I am afraid if he yields to tobacco he will sooner or later do the same to whiskey. O Father—Jesus help him." As their family photograph attests, Etta eventually overcame her misgivings and married Alvin in 1876. But what is striking, in social historical terms, was that a handicapped woman was calling the matrimonial shots to the point of making her suitor bury his tobacco. This had much to do with the demography of Manhattan, Kansas, where there were six men for every five women. It is hard to imagine a similar drama unfolding in Manhattan, New York, or any other city with a low gender ratio. What the late Tip O'Neill said of politics is equally true of matrimony: all marriage markets are local.7
Hypergamy meant that frontier men often married down or, in the case of poor ones, not at all. This was certainly true of propertyless cowboys, but the most easily quantified example is that of soldiers in the frontier army. A sample of manuscript census returns shows that the majority of officers, but only a fraction of the enlisted men, had wives. In 1870 just three of the ninety-four enlisted men (3 percent) at Fort Larned, Kansas, were married compared to four of the six officers (67 percent). In 1880 some 6 percent of the enlisted men at Fort Sisseton, Dakota Territory, were listed as having wives, but fully 100 percent of the officers. The lowest percentages for both groups were found at Fort D. A. Russell, Wyoming Territory, where 45 percent of the officers were married in 1880 compared to 0.3 percent of the enlisted men.8
The higher a bachelor officer's rank, the more eligible he became. Women who married captains and above had more household income and better quarters, could employ servants, and enjoyed higher social standing, which was specified when they were formally addressed by their husband's rank: Mrs. Lieutenant-Colonel George Armstrong Custer. Gossips wondered whether Miss Betty Taylor, who was taken with a dashing but impecunious young lieutenant named Dick Garnett, would choose him or a more educated and well-to-do suitor, Major William Bliss. In the end Betty chose the major. Prudently so, as he had the firm approval of her father, Zachary Taylor, major general and soon-to-be president of the United States.9
The Lieutenant Garnetts of the world were not without prospects, however. Other officers' unmarried female relations from the East came "husband hunting" at western outposts, where they were enthusiastically welcomed. Matchmaking flourished and was a fixture of officers' dances, segregated, like much else, from the common soldiers. Enlisted men, who earned between $13 and $23 a month and many of whom were foreign-born or black, had to make do with barracks, payday sprees, and prostitutes or, for the few corporals and sergeants who married, a servant girl or laundress on the fort's Soap Suds Row.10
The matrimonial history of the frontier army, and of highgender-ratio western regions generally, was the plot of The Virginian writ large. The winners got the brides—if they moved quickly and decisively. Pretty girls were booked up for dances months in advance. Eligible women could count on determined bachelor "visitors" and were regarded as curiosities if unwed for more than a year. Engagements were short and sometimes risky. Even a frontiersman as formidable as Davy Crockett could find himself cut out. In 1805 Crockett thought he was engaged to Miss Margaret Elder of Dandridge, Tennessee, having gone so far as to obtain a marriage license. When he came calling he learned that she was to wed another man the next day. The record for marital alacrity on the frontier, however, was set by one Henderson Couch in December 1846. The foreman of the jury that granted the first divorce in Dallas, Texas, Couch married the divorcee in question, the former Mrs. Charlotte Dalton, the same afternoon."
(Re)Marriage and Fertility
Widows in recently settled areas could count on quick remarriage if they were so inclined. By remarrying they might acquire not only new husbands and families but, in cases of longevity and repeated inheritance, substantial wealth. Seventeenth-century Virginia has been described only half-jokingly as a "widowarchy." The more long-lived women managed to inherit sizable amounts of property along with an impressive string of deceased husbands' surnames, such as that of the redoubtable Mrs. Sarah Offley Thorowgood Gookin Yeardley of Norfolk County.12
During the eighteenth century widows seem to have encountered financial hardships rather more often than suitors, at least if they lived in settled eastern areas with lower gender ratios. But along the backwoods frontier they had a much better chance of remarriage. Sometimes, as it transpired, prematurely so. The American Martin Guerre was a Kentucky militiaman named McMerter, thought to have been killed in the 1782 Blue Licks debacle, a late battle of the American Revolution. His widow, a young, intelligent, and beautiful woman with two children, married again a year later, whereupon the lost McMerter returned to general consternation. A decent man, McMerter told his wife he attached no blame and proposed to his rival that she be allowed to choose between them "and whoever she said she preferred . . . the other promised, upon the honor of a gentleman, to withdraw and never interfere." She chose McMerter, the father of her children and her first love. The second husband, true to his word, withdrew.13
The more frequent remarriage of western widows and the early marriage of young western women meant that the overall percentage of women with husbands would be higher as one moved toward the frontier. Two surviving colonial censuses include information about marital status. New Hampshire's in 1773 showed that, the lower a county's gender ratio, the lower the percentage of women married and the higher the percentage of widows. Connecticut's in 1774 showed that women twenty and older were more likely to be married if they resided in a recently settled county with a higher gender ratio like Litchfield, in the northwestern portion of the state. Women in Litchfield also tended to marry earlier in life than women in longer-settled counties.14
Census and other evidence strongly suggests that gender ratio differences continued to affect American marriage patterns throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Indeed, the positive correlation between the gender ratio and the percentage of women who are married or who marry early seems to be a nearly universal social pattern.15
Youthful brides were particularly common in regions with very large male surpluses, a pattern that emerged early in American history. Anne Burras, the first woman married in Jamestown, was a fourteen-year-old servant girl who wed a man twice her age. Marriages of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls were not unheard of in the Chesapeake colonies and were noted during the California Gold Rush. In frontier Michigan the legal age of female consent to sexual intercourse was eleven years. Harriet Martineau, the indefatigable English traveler and observer, complained in 1837 of "the early marriages of silly children in the south and west, where, owing to the disproportion of numbers, every woman is married before she well knows how serious a matter human life is." Or how unpredictable and transient. A thirteen-year-old bride in Morris County, Kansas, gave birth to two children before becoming a widow at nineteen. She then married the man into whose hands her dying husband had entrusted her care.16
That contemporaries remarked such cases in their journals and memoirs shows that the marriages of scarcely menarcheal girls and remarriages of teenage widows with children were regarded as unusual. The norm for a first marriage for women in high-gender-ratio regions was closer to the mid-to-late teens. The average age of marriage for women born in Somerset County, Maryland, before 1670 was 16.5 years. The age at first marriage of women in the Peters colony of north central Texas during the period 1841-1850 was 19.4 years, collectively six years younger than their bridegrooms.17
Women who married young produced numerous children, particularly if they lived on farms and in a era or subculture hostile to contraception. Country wives, remarked an anonymous New York colonial official, were "good breeders." They were young, he reasoned, and did not sometimes "Lye fallor" like city wives. While not the sort of person one might wish to come courting, the official expressed a demographic truth. Rural wives who wed early had more years to produce offspring and an economic incentive, their children's agricultural labor, to do so. Land was not a constraint on population growth as it was in Europe. Certainly it was not a restraint along the frontier, where the destruction of the native inhabitants created an economic and ecological opening favorable to the immigrants. Cheap land and rude plenty reinforced the tendency of high gender ratios to produce early marriages and large families. Eventually, as population density increased and the numbers of males and females evened out, the average marriage age of women increased and their fertility declined.18
The life of Margaret Dwight, a niece of a president of Yale and great-granddaughter of the evangelist Jonathan Edwards, was emblematic of these demographic forces. In 1810 she left New Haven to live with her cousins in then-remote Warren, Ohio. A year after her arrival she married William Bell Jr. He was thirty, she was twenty. Although the Bells ultimately moved back to Pittsburgh, Margaret's early marriage made it possible for her to bear thirteen children. Whether it was desirable was another matter, for she died at the age of forty-three.19
Margaret Dwight's life was an unconscious replay of seventeenth-century New England history. Her Puritan ancestors had faced much the same situation she did in Ohio, an initial surplus of men, and had responded in the same fashion, with earlier marriages and hence larger families than had been typical in England. Because infant mortality was low in New England, an unusually large number of these children survived and began their own families, triggering a population explosion in which the white population of Massachusetts more than sextupled between 1640 and 1700.
Population growth of this sort automatically eroded high gender ratios. Since the new children were roughly divided between males and females, they began to even out the gender balance of the population. So did the disappearance of unmarried adult males who either died prematurely or migrated elsewhere as the frontier moved on. As children grew and entered the labor force, there was less need to rely on immigrant workers; hence the bachelor workers who died or left were less likely to be replaced. The death or emigration of unmarried men together with the high fertility of young brides operated as a homeostatic mechanism: the deck-gun "barrel" of the abnormal population distribution eventually dropped off, even as its base was broadening. The result was an increasingly symmetrical population pyramid and, with it, a gradual increase in female age at marriage.
Two decades sufficed to balance most frontier populations, especially those in farming areas where the initial imbalance was less extreme. Washington County, Kansas, a stretch of arable prairie between the Flint Hills and the Nebraska border, had 149 men for every 100 women in 1860, but only 124 in 1870 and 114 in 1880.20 The gender ratios of midwestern farming areas like Washington County seldom dropped below 100 because of the demand for farmhands, but these reproductively "extra" male workers were usually attached to families, which served both to maintain social order and, by their relatively high fertility, to drive the gender ratio downward.
On occasion the homeostatic process broke down. If immigrant women could not marry early because they arrived in their twenties, if they were bound as indentured servants, if they and their children died young, or if male immigrants continued to pour into the community in large numbers, then gender imbalance would persist for a longer period of time. The one region where all of these problems were in evidence was the seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Chesapeake, whose population consequently took much longer to grow naturally and to become balanced.21 The population of Middlesex County, Virginia, shown in Figure 7.1, required thirty-six years to achieve the pyramidal shape characteristic of most premodern populations, and even then there were vestiges of male predominance.
Shortcuts to Population Balance
The speed with which a given population achieved balance was also affected by the rapidity, comfort, safety, and price of transportation and, to a lesser extent, the cost and availability of mass communication. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries women who wished to move to a region with more potential husbands had to make a tedious and dangerous overland journey or, if emigrating from Europe, a long and costly ocean voyage. By the 1870s women in a similar position could simply purchase, at considerably less risk and expense, a ticket on a steamship or a westbound train. Lou Conway Roberts, who settled with her husband, a former Texas Ranger, in New Mexico in 1882, wrote of an influx of "disconsolate widows" and "forlorn old maids." Such persons were able to marry by moving to New Mexico, she observed. They did not have to be attractive so long as they were "American women."22
Of course it did not hurt to be attractive, nor did it hurt to advertise the fact. Newspaper personals were the other technological means of increasing the odds of finding a suitable spouse. In July 1857 Ned Bowers, a twenty-one-year-old bachelor in Douglas County, Kansas, advertised his availability in the local Freeman's Champion, repeating the ad several times. He had been considered good looking when he lived in the States, he wrote, though he admitted to being "somewhat uncouth in my appearance now; am hale, hearty, strong, and full of fun and frolic; have been, and am sometimes now, a little wild, but think I should be steady as a deacon, if I had a congenial partner to love and protect." It was an old line but one with a certain sociological plausibility. Sixteen to twenty-one was the age range he was looking for, Ned explained, and poverty was no bar. Respondents need not have a cent to their name as long as they were lady-like and pretty.
Ned was evidently stronger than he was smart, for he forgot to include an address. This prompted a Miss Lovina Littleton of Peoria City, Kansas, who chanced to read his ad, to write a letter to the editor of the Freeman's Champion, which he gleefully published. Lovina announced that she was a candidate for matrimony, the right age and very good looking ("acknowledged by a host of admirers to be the very ideal of beauty and witticism"). But, she continued, certain things needed to be understood at once: no gambling and no drinking. She was not about to forfeit her happiness to liquid poison nor would she ever unite herself to a drinking man.
A public marital negotiation between two parties is unusual enough, but then the editor himself got into the act. "A capital chance," he opined. "Her letter certainly exhibits indications of good sense . . . and there can be no doubt but what she is worth looking after. Oh! 'pitch in/ Ned!" Whether Ned did so is a mystery which a search of the county marriage records failed to resolve. But if he did not the chances are good that the determined Lovina found an abstemious suitor before long.23
Church Time
The growing presence of women and children changed the moral climate as well as the population structure of frontier regions. In family farming areas where there were fewer extra men the change was less noticeable, particularly in the religious colonies. They were peaceful anyway, always excepting the possibility of Indian uprisings or, in the special case of the Mormons, conflict with Gentiles. But in secular and heavily male domains the homeostatic process of population balancing produced dramatic social changes, widely remarked by contemporaries.
There is in any established community a spectrum of religious temperaments, interwoven beliefs about God, morality, and the self that transcend particular denominations. Devout, churchgoing, self-denying people form one end of this spectrum and more worldly, unchurched, self-assertive people the other, with varying degrees of religiosity and self-control in between. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Americans who might be called, for the sake of brevity, the moral conservatives tended to be native-born Protestant women or married men of the middle class or aspiring lower-middle class who had had a conversion experience. Their temperamental opposites, moral libertarians, were mostly men, especially young men of society's genteel upper reaches or, in ever-increasing numbers, laborers who had not had a conversion experience and who devoted little time or serious attention to religion in any form. These two groups were locked in an emotional and political conflict that centered on public and, to the devout, scandalous male recreations such as horse races, dice and card games, whoring, and tavern and saloon drinking. The last-mentioned emerged as the key issue as the nineteenth century wore on.
There was nothing unique about the conflict between Americans of different religious temperaments, which had then as it has now cultural equivalents in every part of the world. What was unusual about the American case was the way migration and frontier expansion continuously reshuffled the moral deck, giving a temporary advantage in the new settlements to one camp or the other. In the case of the religious colonies, the advantage obviously lay with the moral conservatives. In the cordilleran mining camps and plains cattle towns and other primitive places dominated by transient bachelor laborers, the numerical and interactionist advantage lay with the moral libertarians, a fact that helps to account for their wide-open character.
Open vice was hard for devout frontier women to bear. In 1780 Sarah Peairs survived a nightmarish journey down the Mississippi, a water-borne Donner Party minus the cannibalism but complete with disease, starvation, and a death lottery in which a young girl drew the fatal lot from her own father ("O! daddy will you kill me O! daddy will you kill me"). Peairs intervened, dissuaded the stupid man, and managed to stay alive until they finally reached Natchez. Grateful for her deliverance, she was nevertheless so appalled by the "general corruption of manners" in the frontier river town that she begged passage for herself and her surviving children to return "to a gospel land," eventually sailing via New Orleans to Philadelphia.24
It was much the same in Gold Rush California, from which many a disillusioned moralist likewise sailed home. California women wrote of being sickened by piles of "yallow kivered" (pornographic) literature, of their revulsion against drunkenness and violence, of their unease at newly rich men throwing jewelry and coins at the feet of young actresses of doubtful virtue.25 Even though they might personally be treated with respect and well paid for their work, there was no hiding the fact that they lived in a land of moral eyesores, another and not the least hardship borne by pioneer women in predominantly male lands.
Or temporarily borne, for the ineluctable balancing of the population brought with it progressively better chances for moral counterrevolution. The presence of women and children made men more self-conscious of and embarrassed by commercialized vice. A brothel or saloon may have been tolerable in a mining camp but not in a town or neighborhood teeming with children. Married, middle-class men with children were particularly apt to have reservations about the propriety of open vice, not to mention their own participation in it.26
The demographic shift likewise encouraged the formation of churches. Boom towns with overwhelmingly male populations were visited by preachers who declaimed against sin in the midst of the sinners, but theirs was an itinerant ministry. The establishment of permanent churches (in Newton, Kansas, one took over a former saloon, bullet holes and all) with full-time clergy depended on the growing presence of women. They made up the majority of regular worshipers in Protestant congregations throughout the West as in the rest of the nation.27
These new churches became the local bases from which masculine vice was attacked, if not necessarily driven from its economic and political lair. Clergymen, female moralists, and their respectable male allies (generally husbands, converts, and Masons) used a variety of means, from petitions to sit-in demonstrations, to protest Sabbath breaking, brothels, dance halls, gambling palaces, and saloons. Reformist newspaper editors, anxious to better their towns' reputations, assisted the moral conservatives by writing anti-vice editorials and by what one historian has called dingbat moralizing. Dingbats were the ubiquitous column-filler and separator lines like "Whiskey Brings Men to Jail*."28
One of the best known of the reformist editors was James King of William, a colorful character who devised his unusual patronymic to distinguish himself from others who bore his common surname. In 1856 King, then editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, was shot to death by James Casey, an Irish election fixer who did not care for King's brand of investigative journalism. The murder created a sensation. It catalyzed the formation of the famous 1856 Vigilance Committee, which was dominated by mercantile interests and strongly backed by respectable women. One lady reportedly said that if the men did not hang Casey, the women would. She need not have worried. He and three other malefactors were soon dispatched. A score of others, mostly Irishmen of suspect politics, were forced out of town.29
Women in the maturing western cities and towns did not confine their efforts to ad hoc protests but organized elaborate "home missions." These involved such projects as a house of refuge for Chinese prostitutes in San Francisco, one for unwed mothers in Denver, and another for Mormon wives fleeing plural marriages in Salt Lake City. Western women were also quick to join in statewide and national reform organizations, the best known of which was the powerful Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which claimed 176,000 members by the turn of the century. What these groups had in common was hostility toward the worst aspects of masculine culture and, some historians believe, a tendency to encourage protofeminist consciousness in their members. Women whose reform efforts were delayed or blocked by male businessmen and politicians linked to the vice industry were not blind to the possibilities of enfranchisement. Some, like WCTU president Frances Willard, openly espoused the vote for women.30
Motives and means are seldom pure in history, and the women's reform movements were no exception. Though religious conviction was always a key factor, women had various reasons for joining the anti-vice organizations that mushroomed after 1870, status seeking and female companionship among them. In the interests of achieving their goals they were willing to build coalitions, beginning with their husbands. On occasion they also joined forces with men who, for purely self-interested reasons, wished to attack the foundation of the local vice industry.
The classic case of a mixed reform alliance was that of Abilene, Kansas, the original cattle town. Abilene was the brainchild of Joseph G. McCoy, a visionary cattleman who in 1868 saw the sleepy hamlet's possibility as a collecting point for Texas longhorns, which could be shipped east via the railroad that had just reached the town. McCoy's scheme was realized over the next three years as vast herds were driven up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, bringing rapid growth and a measure of prosperity. But with the cattle and their fever ticks came the cowboys and their vice parasites, scandalizing the respectable settlers in and around the town. Though cowboys deferred to ladies, the tipsy whores who paraded about in gaudy dresses sometimes insulted them. The situation was not improved when the whores' employers erected a brothel near the schoolhouse."
The most celebrated scandal was the 1869 affair of the Bull's Head Saloon, whose flare front was emblazoned with a crude painting of a "big red bull in all its grandeur." That citizens should be so offended by a painting of a bull's penis and testicles when the real thing could be seen in action everywhere around town struck some as amusing. But we live by symbols and this one managed to encompass just about everything that the townspeople hated about the Faustian pact with the cattle trade, not to say an affront, as they put it, to the modesty of women and innocence of children. The proprietor of the Bull's Head, a Texan, told the protest committee to go to hell and made a little speech of his own: "I'm not to be dictated to by the mealymouthed or scared off the trail by girly fellers." In the end, though, he gave in and painted out the offending organs.32
By 1872 the moral reformers had managed to paint out the cattle trade altogether. They made common cause with agricultural land speculators, who wanted the cattle gone so that they might sell more acreage, and with farmers who were sick of having their corn trampled and their own livestock killed by imported Texas fever. This mixed but formidable coalition issued a manifesto that the county residents would "no longer submit to the evils of the trade" and persuaded the state legislature to fix the cattle quarantine line farther west, making it impossible to ship from Abilene. The cowboys and their wages disappeared. The town reverted to its orderly and considerably less prosperous self, sunflowers sprouting in the quiet main streets."
Elsewhere the course of reform was less dramatic, a matter of incremental change and political seesaw. Laws enforcing Sunday closings or suppressing prostitution would be enacted in towns like Cheyenne or Wichita only to provoke an angry reaction and repeal a short time later. The resistance to the moral counterrevolution occasionally assumed an ironic form. Three saloons were named for the hatchet-minded prohibitionist Carry Nation; she managed to wreck one of them. The general drift of anti-vice legislation and enforcement from 1870 on was clearly in favor of the reformers, however. When they failed to secure ordinances specifically outlawing commercialized vice they were usually able to achieve its spatial and temporal segregation. In 1890, for example, the town of Ballinger, Texas, made it unlawful for men to be seen in public with a prostitute between four in the morning and nine in the evening or for prostitutes to enter any public building during the daytime, so that they would not be seen by and give offense to respectable women.34
Other towns solved the problem of moral eyesores by confining prostitution to a single neighborhood, typically on the fringe of the central business district and overlapping with the entertainment district and the local Chinatown. The prevailing wisdom was that segregated prostitution provided a regrettable but necessary sexual outlet for lower-class men, although even this rationalization was rejected during the 1910s when reformers and clergymen finally managed to end official acquiescence to redlight districts. By that decade most of the western states were also solidly in the prohibition camp, owing to the progressive balancing of the population, the enfranchisement of women, and the reasoned appeals of a new, less strident generation of temperance advocates that won over some Catholic and labor voters."
Education, Recreation, and Cultural Life
Beyond serving as a catalyst for anti-vice reforms, the presence of families, women, and children expanded the range of educational, recreational , and cultural activities. The life of the mind was not a priority on the raw frontier. "One fifth of the men out here cant right or cipher," admitted John Ferguson, an early resident of Washington County, Kansas. "I was elected last spring as Justice of the Peace in this township so you may know by that the men out here isent non the smartest or I wouldent been picked on to fill that office for I am sure I ent fit for it." Ferguson bore his own limitations cheerfully but was deeply worried about the educational prospects for his children.36
This was a common concern, particularly among Protestant settlers who understood literacy as the key to the Bible and salvation as well as to worldly success. Energetic women like Helen Chapman, the wife of an army officer stationed in Brownsville, Texas, worked hard to gain support from community leaders for primary education, arguing that their communities could not pretend to respectability until they had schools and churches. Western women also acted as educators in their own right, whether as home instructors or private tutors or as teachers in the Sunday and public schools that were eventually established.'7
The progress of public education was steady though difficult. Because of the thin tax base, schools were an expensive proposition. Underfunding, primitive facilities, transient students, and recruitment of teachers were chronic problems. The citizens of one mountain town had to lure away the community's besteducated woman from her job as the piano player in the local saloon. But a rudimentary system had been established almost everywhere in the West by 1880, a development that had as important implications for social control as it did for literacy. Assignments, bells, deadlines, and the constant requirement of sitting still and paying attention helped the rising generation of students, particularly boys, to acquire self-control and master their impulsiveness. Their common texts, the graded McGuffey's Readers, stressed the Victorian imperatives of self-discipline, punctuality, and hard work and inveighed against disobedience, debt, and drunkenness. It is of some interest that the Readers were originally designed for students in the newly settled lands of the West and South, though they were so successful that they were adopted nationwide, selling 122 million copies between 1837 and 1920.38
Social reformers understood that moral improvement entailed more than building schools and enacting thou-shalt-nots. Bachelor laborers gravitated to saloons and gambling dens and brothels because they were lonely and bored. They wanted companionship, news, and such basic amenities as light, warmth, food, and toilets. Women's church and WCTU chapters began developing alternative resorts like dry lunch rooms and small libraries where men could gather to converse, read, relax, and hear occasional lectures on such self-improving topics as "Hygiene." Dashaway Hall, a San Francisco temperance establishment that flourished during the 1860s, featured Wednesday night dances and Thursday evening socials where sober-minded men could mix with the Ladies Dashaway Association. The ice-cream parlors and soda fountains that sprang up in western cities and towns were another respectable alternative, popular with married and courting couples, who were increasingly common as the population became more balanced.39
The growing presence of women transformed the higher cultural life of western communities. Nineteenth-century American men, especially frontiersmen, were notorious for their anti-intellectualism and indifference to the arts, which, like religion, they took to be the domain of women. This prejudice was so entrenched that the greatest composer of his generation, Charles Ives, felt compelled to pursue a career in business to avoid seeming abnormal. A reporter in Chicago once counted the number of men attending a lecture by Henry James. He found two, one of whom was asleep.40 Given the prevailing masculine lack of interest, no community could regularly support sophisticated artistic and humanistic enterprises without a critical mass of women, who were indispensable as audiences, critics, performers, and instructors. Women organized lectures and debates, joined reading and discussion clubs, patronized and staffed libraries, put on amateur theatricals and attended professional performances, wrote books and articles, studied and taught music, collected and preserved artifacts, genealogies, and historical materials. To recast a cliche, women civilized western communities in the sense of reducing violence and squalor while at the same time enhancing their aesthetic and intellectual lives. The history of the maturation of frontier towns is the history of women turning them into places actually worth living in.
The restoration of a more normal age and gender distribution entailed moral, political, and cultural changes that reduced the violence and disorder characteristic of heavily male frontier populations. Even where the reformers and cultural improvers were frustrated politically the growing presence of women and children affected, in an elementary statistical sense, the local rates of violence and disorder. The incidence per 100,000 of a problem like homicide or alcoholism or venereal disease was bound to decline as the number of women and children and older persons in a community's population increased. That is one important reason why the rates of homicide in eastern cities were so much lower than those in western mining districts and cattle towns. Late-nineteenth-century Boston and Philadelphia had plenty of young, unmarried men strutting around with guns and flasks, but they made up a much smaller proportion of the total municipal populations, ensuring, by the laws of probability and long division, much lower rates of murder.
By the same logic, and by reason of the association between men and violence, population balancing brought greater social peace to frontier regions throughout the world. The passing of the colorful but bloody gaucho era on the Argentine Pampas is a parallel case, though the best-documented example is that of New South Wales, Australia, founded by the British in 1788 as a penal colony to replace their lost American dumping grounds. Immigration gave New South Wales a heavily male population. Men initially outnumbered women by four to one; this ratio fluctuated between three and two to one over the next half-century.
The result was widespread drunkenness, prostitution, corporal punishment, and lethal violence, both among the colonists and against the Aborigines. New South Wales was an early version of the tumultuous world of the American Gold Rush. In fact, the "Sydney Ducks" who remigrated to California during 1849-1852 had bad reputations by California standards, which is saying a lot. But the same inexorable demographic forces that tamed California tamed New South Wales, turning it into a civil place by the late nineteenth century. Peter Grabosky, who compared criminal statistics from New South Wales during 1826 to 1893 to economic conditions, gender distribution, urbanization, police manpower, and police expenditures, came to the conclusion that rates for serious crimes against persons and property were almost solely a function of the oversupply of men in the population. The other variables virtually did not matter. In New South Wales as in nonfarming areas of the American frontier, social problems grew out of a skewed, largely male population. As it became more normal so did the amount of violence and disorder.41