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Knowledge Box Archive | home
Interesting Notes
Interesting Notes
EASY VIRTUE
Americas Old West frontier life was perfect for women seeking escape from social morals and family values to do as they pleased,... historians code for loners, prostitutes, alcoholics, petty thieves, eccentrics and adventurers. Some sought escape from a failed past. Others headed West looking for riches. The truly wild women took up life in teepees and adobes, while most of the mail-order brides had nothing to lose in seeking a mate. Idaho in the late 1800s had a reported 16,584 bachelors for 1,426 women.Polygamist sects filled a need, but with so many men outnumbering women the cowboys lined up, and working the line was fast money. Dance hall girls or savvy senoritas could earn hundreds of dollars a night. Most fallen angels worked noon to dawn servicing men who by custom never removed any clothing except for a hat. Camp followers took the trade to cavalry troops in the field. Although madams like Denvers Mattie Silks and Jennie Rogers were welcomed in society there were limits. Madam Mary Miller did 90 days in the county jail for depressing real estate values. Most working girls sought a husband through common law marriages, which seldom lasted... likely leaving them abandoned and even further embittered. Prostitutes were laid to rest in cemetery fields far from the respectable plots. There was a certain romanticism in the business, but also much opium use, violent assault, suicide, alcoholism... and death from a job-related injury known as inflammation of the bowels.
FANNIE
1887 brought the worst winter Montanans ever experienced. Many cowboys and thousands of animals froze to death while a world champion cowgirl was being born on a ranch near Helena. Fannie Sperry grew up helping capture and break wild horses with her father, who saw to it that she became a dead shot. Passing the hat after rodeo rides earned the money to keep her competing, and she became the Womans Bucking Horse Champion of Montana in 1904. Every rodeo promoter sought out the beautiful blue-eyed girl with waist length black braids wearing a vaquero style beaver felt hat and ankle length divided riding skirt. On the meanest of buckers she rode like a man...with one rope, one hand free. Fame came on the big outlaw horse Red Wing at the first Calgary Stampede in 1912. Four days earlier this bronc had thrown and stomped to death cowboy Joe LaMar. In the most dramatic moment of rodeo history, with Red Wings eyes glowing hatred as he thrashed frightened gatemen about, Fannie Sperry delivered an incredible 10 second ride to the whistle on a horse side-stepping on hind legs out of the chute.The crowd exploded. Lady Bucking Horse Champion Of The World was hers. And she did it all over again one year later on a terrifying bronc called Midnight at the Worlds Frontier Days in Winnipeg. Sometimes riding as many as 14 broncs a weekend, Fannie also shot china eggs out of her husbands hand and cigars out of his mouth working the 1916 Buffalo Bill Cody Wild West Show in Chicago. She died at 95 a legend and true champion of the West.
FIRST WHITE WOMAN
She was beautiful, intelligent, gifted, wealthy and married well to a New York doctor... and she was the very first white woman (30 years after Sacajawea helped Lewis and Clark) to cross the impassable Rocky Mountains to reach Americas western frontier. In 1836 Narcissa Whitman, with help from mountain men and fur trappers and her missionary party Indian guides made it all the way to Oregons coast. She was also the first white who came to preach and not to trade. Her project for salvation was the Cayuse tribe, who competed for the honor of having Narcissa live on their land...but turned against her once they heard her message of morality...and her husbands demand that they learn to plant and eat potatoes, rather than rely on fish and wild game. With Indian children attending Narcissas school to learn their ABCs... some Cayuse leaders began to demand money for teaching the Whitmans Cayuse language. Indian ponies trod the potato fields nightly. A gristmill burned down, and a warrior snuck into Narcissas bedroom window. After a fatal measles disease broke out among the Indians Narcissa was blamed. When treatment with medicine failed she was accused of dispensing poison. Finally a raiding party using tomahawks and rifles murdered the beautiful white woman and a dozen other missionaries. Hudsons Bay Company men who reached the site reported wolves eating the bodies. Word of this tragedy, and the value of far west lands where it occured, caused President James Polk one year later to declare Oregon a protected US state-territory.
NELLIE
Many thousands of people stampeded across the 1800s western frontier searching for gold. Overnight boom towns filled with European migrants, Civil War deserters, cowboys, freed slaves and outlaws... all would-be prospectors gambling their lives on a strike. Few had any idea of how to proceed. Many believed mining was picking up nuggets from a streambed or shaking gold from the roots of sagebrush. Irish Nellie Cashman learned the hard way by surviving the 1872 Pioche Nevada silver mining district chaos of claim jumping quarrels and cave-ins to become a knowledgable prospector, mining engineer and geologist. She bought and sold claims and worked her own gold-placer ground at Juneau Alaska. Nellie mushed a sled load of medicine and food to six miners trapped by the severe winter of 1874... gaining world-wide notoriety for their rescue. She opened an 1879 restaurant in the railroad town of Tucson, worked claims at Prescott, Globe, Jerome, and Yuma and established Tombstones first Catholic Church and hospital. She also led 21 Tombstone miners to near death across Mexicos Sonora desert in a failed venture. Nellie took on sole support of 5 nieces when her sister died. With word of the1897 Klondike strike she made the grueling trek over Chilkoot Pass to Dawson, working claims for 20 years in the harsh Yukon climate. And she died a true pioneer woman who proved she could brave any challenge of man or nature and triumph... earning wide respect and maintaining a womans dignity in a tough community of outlaws, drunks, prostitutes and con men.
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