3.6: Women in Westward Expansion

French Colonization

As you can see in the above map, the territory of Louisiana encompassed the Great Plains and northern prairies. The French first sent explorers and fur traders into this region in the 1600s, making alliances with several local tribes in order to hunt and trade fur along the Great Lakes and its tributaries, a trade that they dominated even after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. During these two centuries, fur traders, who were almost exclusively male, often married into allied tribes and had bi-cultural children who often grew up to become fur traders themselves. Some native peoples converted to Catholicism and took on French culture or blended their indigenous cultures with that of the French and French fur traders were usually adopted as members of allied tribes. Perhaps the most famous of these bi-culture marriages was that of Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau.

Sacagawea

Sacagawea’s story is similar to that of Pocahontas and the Indian Princess trope in that it was written exclusively by European men, in this case her husband and William Clark of the Corp of Discovery, and it involves her helping and protecting White men. According to Clark’s diary, Sacagawea was from the Shoshoni tribe, who occupied modern day Idaho along the Snake River and on both sides of the Rocky Mountains but was kidnapped as a child, then sold to Charbonneau. She spoke several indigenous languages and was crucial as an interpreter, particularly since her husband did not speak any indigenous language as well as he claimed when they were hired as a guide at Fort Mandan in modern day North Dakota. She earned the admiration of Lewis and Clark when she saved journals and other important items from a capsized canoe. When the Corp of Discovery came to Shoshoni land, they found that Sacagawea’s brother was chief and she was able to negotiate for horses to carry them over the Rockies. She continued on with them to the Pacific, stayed through the winter, then traveled back to Fort Mandan. Sacagawea had a son while on the journey to the Pacific, so all that she did should take into account that she had a baby with her. However, there are major problems with translation throughout the journey and Clark’s diary is likely inaccurate. Sacagawea is claimed by both the Shoshoni and Hidatsa and each have conflicting stories about her life and death. It is therefore impossible to know for sure who she truly was or what happened to her based upon the wide variety of stories about her. However, it is certain that Sacagawea was a crucial member of the Corp of Discovery.

Spanish Colonization

While Spain’s empire in North America was centered in Mexico City, the former Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, they sent expeditions north into what is today the West Coast and Desert Southwest United States to lay claim to these areas as well. Expeditions to El Norte, as the Spanish called it, consisted of the Spanish Army, Catholic priests, and civilians who supported these groups, including the wives and children of army officers and skilled craftsmen and camp followers. They founded missions and presidios (military forts) then civilian communities throughout the region, the first of which was Santa Fe, founded in 1608 in what is today New Mexico and among the last were the 21 missions along the California coast. Regardless of where they were located, the military, church, and civilian populations worked together to bring the Indigenous populations under control, forcing them to build, then live at the missions, become Catholic, and forsake their own cultures and traditions.

Piu-uina

Native women did fight against the usurpation of their authority and culture. Piu-uina (Josefa) of the Chalon nation in California, lived at Mission Soledad as a young girl and married a Chalon man, then when he died, she remarried a Spanish soldier, Martin Olivera, with whom she had nine children over their twenty year marriage. Piu-uina taught her children the Chalon language and culture while traveling with her husband from Soledad to Carmel to San Miguel, serving the community as a midwife. Although she was killed, along with one of her daughters and grandchild, by Anglo-American men in 1848, the rest of her children survived and continued to pass on the culture and language that Piu-uina taught them.

United States’ Colonization

The policy of the United States towards the various indigenous tribes within its borders would not be much different than its attitude during the colonial era. While some people supported the idea of teaching Native Americans English, converting them to Christianity, and incorporating them into the general population, many more viewed them as people who could never become part of the United States, could never become “civilized.” So while some church groups sent missionaries out to convert the indigenous population and teach them to be White, the government itself developed a program in which Native people would be taken from their ancestral homes east of the Mississippi river and placed on reservations throughout the Great Plains and prairie of the Louisiana territory. This policy not only disrupted the cultures of the Eastern tribes, but also that of the people who already lived in the Louisiana territory. These tribes, like the Osage and Kansa, would also be rounded up and forced to live on reservations.

This pattern continued across the Great Plains during and after the Civil War, when the government sponsored the extermination of the buffalo in order to bring nomadic tribes like the Lakota and Comanche onto reservations, eventually taking their children into boarding schools in order to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” (Pratt 1892, 46). In California, the Gold Rush of 1849 brought tens of thousands of people from all over the world into the state and its government ushered in a policy of genocide against the Native California population, reducing it from 150,000 in 1848 to less than 30,000 by 1900. While some of this was due to disease, the state government paid bounties for scalps belonging to Indigenous men, women, and children, and looked the other way as women and children were raped and trafficked into prostitution. Indigenous women throughout the Far West were under assault in every form for over a century and they are just beginning to rebuild what was lost.

Frontier Duality

Spanish women rebuilt European style communities on the frontier while navigating the social expectations of their day. On the one hand, they were expected to be soft, feminine, and dependent on men, but on the other hand, circumstances demanded that they be strong, resilient, and self-reliant. Men were often gone serving with the army or away on business, leaving their wives and daughters alone for weeks at a time to care for and defend themselves. These women managed businesses and ranches on their own, often performing men’s chores that would have been considered unfeminine in Europe. Of course, society was still socially stratified and the wives of wealthy men, doñas, usually managed households while poor women performed the housework.

Legal Rights

Spanish law, which would be adopted by Mexico when it became independent in 1821, allowed women more legal rights than did English law. For example, women were allowed to own property and retained control over it after they married. They were also able to access the courts, to sue and be sued, having a legal identity of their own outside of their husband’s and father’s. On the frontier, women could and did hold land grants in their own name, operating ranches and other businesses in many parts of El Norte. Women even owned and operated cantinas without social stigma, very different from the English colonies.

Maria Ygnacia López de Carrillo

Maria Ygnacia was born in San Diego, California, the daughter of a Spanish soldier and a half African, half European mother. She went on to marry another soldier, Joaquin Carrillo, with whom she had 12 surviving children. When her husband died, she took her 9 minor children and moved in with her daughter, who was married to Mariano Vallejo, a local politician and future California governor. With the help of her son and son-in-law, she was able to secure a land grant of nearly 9,000 acres in 1841 on which she established Rancho Cabeza de Santa Rosa, which eventually became the city of Santa Rosa, California. Her children would go on to become prominent in state politics for several decades.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

After the war between the United States and Mexico, the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded El Norte to the United States and guaranteed citizenship to the 100,000 or so Mexican citizens who lived there. However, as the territory changed hands, the laws that governed women changed as well. El Norte had been under Spanish law, which allowed women, regardless of marital status, a legal identity but the law of the United States was still largely influenced by English Common Law, which did not recognize women as legally independent in most cases. As more White settlers moved into the region, especially during and after the Gold Rush in 1849, many Anglo American men married Mexican American women, thus acquiring their property under U.S. law. Still others squatted (illegally built homes) on the lands of Mexican American women, who then had to fight in U.S. courts to remove them.

In addition to the loss of legal rights, the racist attitudes of most White settlers negatively impacted Mexican American women. While wealthy doñas were often viewed as genteel ladies, similar to Southern planters’ wives, poor women were usually viewed as exotic sirens or sexually available, which often subjected them to discrimination and violence. One such woman was Josefa, also known as Juanita.

“Juanita”

Josefa lived in a Sierra mining camp called Downieville during the height of the Gold Rush. Almost nothing is known of her life before the day she was killed by a mob, not even her last name or the exact story of her alleged crime. According to the men who served as her jury and executioners, she was a murderer who had stabbed an Australian man called Cannon in the heart. Josefa and her husband, Jose, claimed that a drunk Cannon had burst through their front door the night before and when they confronted him the following day, he attempted to enter their home a second time when Josefa stabbed him. Josefa was arrested, charged with murder, tried, convicted and sentenced to die by hanging in the space of several hours on July 5, 1851. Before her sentence could be carried out by the law, she was seized by the mob and hung from the span of a bridge just outside of town. Her husband, Jose, was found not guilty but told to get out of town that same day. Josefa’s death is commemorated near Downieville today, where the historical marker refers to her a “Juanita,” which was a derogatory term commonly used in Gold Rush California to refer to any woman of Mexican heritage.

Trials of the Trail

Although gold was actually discovered along the American River in 1848, news reached the world outside of California in 1849 and Gold Fever swept the country and many parts of the world, bringing millions into the newly acquired territory in just a few years. The Gold Rush itself was a very male affair, over 90% of the population of California were men during the early 1850s. When men heard about gold out west, many left their families to seek their fortune, while others dragged them along. One woman set fire to her family’s wagon along the trail and another sat down on the ground and refused to move. But many women looked forward to moving west, either for their health, for a better life for their families, or because of their sense of adventure. Some were able to influence their final destination, encouraging their husbands to go to Oregon for farmland rather than to California for gold. We know this because many women kept diaries of their journey west, either on the California or Oregon Trail. The journey along the trails took between four and six months and were filled with exhausting physical labor, emotional suffering, illness, and death. Life went on for these women, who gave birth to and buried children along the way.

Mining Camps

Although fewer families traveled to California than Oregon, many did choose to try their luck at striking it rich in the gold fields. However, once arrived, most found that there were few jobs in mining but a lot of opportunity in providing services for the miners, such as cooking and laundry, as Luzena Stanley Wilson found out when a miner approached her as she was making dinner for her family outside of Sacramento in September, 1849, ““I’ll give you five dollars, ma’am, for them biscuit.” It sounded like a fortune to me, and I looked at him to see if he meant it. And as I hesitated at such, to me, a very remarkable proposition, he repeated his offer to purchase, and said he would give ten dollars for bread made by a woman, and laid the shining gold piece in my hand.” (Wilson Wright 1937, 10). Luzena and her husband sold their oxen and bought a hotel in which they fed and housed miners until a flood wiped them out. They moved to Nevada City and set up another hotel, which burned down, and so they ended up with a third hotel in the hills between San Francisco and Sacramento, and founded the town of Vacaville.

Dame Shirley

A great deal of what we know of life in mining camps comes from the letters of Louise Clappe, who wrote and published under the pen name “Dame Shirley.” From September, 1851 to November, 1852 she wrote more than 20 letters to her sister Molly in which she described her life in mining camps along the Feather River. Her letters are sometimes serious, often humorous, and filled with details of daily life and the people she interacted with. In January, 1852, Louise wrote to describe the way the winter holidays were celebrated in the camp. She described a party that went on for several days, with dancing, eating, and a great deal of drinking. In another letter, she tells her sister that there were 29 murders the previous month, pointing out that the month had 30 days, and so they were still a day ahead. The fact that she is able to joke about murders as well as parties gives us a window into Louise’s personality but also into the attitude she had to have in such rough conditions.

Farming and Ranching

Most women who moved to the Far West settled on farms or ranches with their husbands and raised families. Like Spanish women before them, they learned to be self-reliant as their menfolk were gone all day in the fields or on business. Running a farm or ranch was difficult work, but it was not much different than what they had done as farmers’ wives in the East. Women took pride in recreating domesticity in the rough log cabins and sod houses they found themselves in, creatively using worn out blankets as area rugs and pieces of old dresses as curtains. Some had carried a single doll or tea pot over the trail and were thrilled to be able to display these symbols of domestic life in their new homes. However, many women commented in their diaries and letters how lonely they were because their nearest neighbors were often 10 to 20 miles away. They talk about the isolation they felt, especially during pregnancy and childbirth, and they lamented that they had no friends. Nellie Wetherbee wrote in her diary: “I have been very blue for I cannot make a friend like mother out of Henry…It’s a bore.” (Sanchez 2000, 65). Sarah Hively wrote simply, “I never was so lonely and homesick in all my life.” (Sanchez 2000, 65).

Some women moved to the Far West with other women to build their own lives separate from men altogether. After the Homestead Act of 1862, several groups of women applied for and acquired homesteads of their own, without the aid of a man, because the law allowed anyone, male or female, to apply. Still others began their lives in the Far West as part of a family but through the deaths of husband or father, inherited a farm or ranch and operated it alone. One of the earliest women to do this was Sally Scull, who moved to Texas while it was still a part of Spain and eventually owned a horse ranch where she employed vaqueros who were skilled in horsemanship. She reportedly wore pants and was an excellent markswoman. Other renowned cattlewomen include Elizabeth Johnson Williams, Margaret Heffernan Borland, and Susan McSween.

Legal Rights

White women who moved to the Far West brought the ideas they learned about true womanhood with them, continued to subscribe to Godey’s, and adjusted the ideal to fit their new surroundings. Local governments trying to create safe, stable communities noted that where there were more women and families, there was less crime and lawlessness. In short, the west was a bit less wild. With this in mind, states and territories in the Far West gradually expanded women’s rights throughout the 19th century, leading for some to even give women the right to vote long before the 19th amendment. For example, when Louise Clapp and her husband decided to separate in 1852, she eventually petitioned and was granted a divorce from a California judge, something virtually unheard of at the time. States began allowing women to own land and businesses regardless of their marital status, giving them a legal identity outside of their husband’s and father’s for the first time. In 1869, Wyoming gave women the right to vote and in 1898, Utah gave women the right to serve on a jury. While these milestones may seem slow and small, they were part of a steady march to social, economic, and political equality that moved from West to East.

Biddy Mason

Born into slavery in Georgia, Biddy Mason and her family were sold to the Smith family in Mississippi, then taken to Utah in the Mormon Exodus and finally to California in 1852. California had outlawed slavery when it became a state in 1850, so it was illegal for Smith to keep Mason and her family enslaved. However, Biddy had to go to court for her freedom, which proved difficult because she lacked money and education, but also because it was illegal in California for a black person to testify against a white person. When she filed her petition, her enslaver failed to show up to court, and in 1856, Judge Benjamin Hayes granted Biddy and her family their freedom. Biddy used her skills as a nurse and midwife in the Los Angeles area, saving enough money to buy land, eventually owning several homes and businesses throughout the area. She was active in her community, helped the poor, and helped to found the first African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. She was well known in the area for her kindness and generosity: “”If you hold your hand closed, nothing good can come in. The open hand is blessed, for it gives in abundance, even as it receives.” (Weiler 2020)

Once the Civil War ended in 1865, the 13th amendment abolished slavery nationwide and over 3.5 million enslaved people became free. Most remained in the South until the early 20th century, when they moved north and west in the Great Migration. However, some moved to the Far West and worked as cowboys and ranch hands while others established communities of the formerly enslaved and their descendants. These communities gave African American women new opportunities as teachers, librarians, nurses, and shopkeepers, allowing them the freedom to control their own lives.