Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past Read online

  RE-DRESSING AMERICA’S

  FRONTIER PAST

  John Runk (1878–1964), Loc#1719 Neg#1719, Minnesota Historical Society. John Runk grew up in Stillwater, Minnesota. As a youngster, he worked in various phases of the logging industry but also always demonstrated a creative side. He opened a photography business in his hometown in 1899 and over the next several years introduced inventions and innovations to the art. He never married and was known as something of a loner, but was also involved with the lives of the members of his extended family. A large collection of his photographs, including a series of himself in female clothing, ended up at the Minnesota Historical Society. More on his life can be found in Allison Drtina, comp., John Runk, Photographer: The Life, Family and Legacy of John Runk, Jr. (Stillwater, MN: Washington County Historical Society, 2008).

  RE-DRESSING

  AMERICA’S

  FRONTIER PAST

  Peter Boag

  University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

  University of California Press

  Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

  University of California Press, Ltd.

  London, England

  © 2011 by The Regents of the University of California

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Boag, Peter.

  Re-dressing America’s frontier past / Peter Boag.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-520-27062-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. Transvestites—West (U.S.)—History—19th century.

  2. Gender identity—West (U.S.)—History—19th century. 3. Homosexuality—West (U.S.)—History—19th century. I. Title.

  HQ77.2.U6B63 2011

  306.77′8097809034—dc22

  2011009443

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

  John A. Baures

  1962–1996

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction. A Trip Along the Pike’s Peak Express: Cross-Dressers and America’s Frontier Past

  PART ONE. “Females in Male Attire, and Males in Petticoats”: Remembering Cross-Dressers in Western American and Frontier History

  1. “Known to All Police West of the Mississippi”: Disrobing the Female-to-Male Cross-Dresser

  2. “I Have Done My Part in the Winning of the West”: Unveiling the Male-to-Female Cross-Dresser

  PART TWO. “The Story of the Perverted Life Is Not Attractive”: Making the American West and the Frontier Heteronormative

  3. “And Love Is a Vision and Life Is a Lie”: The Daughters of Calamity Jane

  4. “He Was a Mexican”: Race and the Marginalization of Male-to-Female Cross-Dressers in Western History

  5. “Death of a Modern Diana”: Sexologists, Cross-Dressers, and the Heteronormalization of the American Frontier

  Conclusion. Sierra Flats and Haunted Valleys: Cross-Dressers and the Contested Terrain of America’s Frontier Past

  Notes

  Index

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Harry Allen, 1912

  2. Milton Matson, 1895

  3. Jack Garland, 1897

  4. Bert Martin, 1900

  5. Joe Monahan, 1904

  6. Idaho’s Owyhee Mountains gold-rush district, 1869

  7. Pearl Hart, 1899

  8. Tom King, 1895

  9. Jennie Stephens, 1897

  10. Mrs. Nash, 1878

  11. Mexican cart, 1869

  12. Narrative of Lucy Ann Lobdell, 1855

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I started imagining Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past while working on Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). That book was about men. My research turned up relatively little on women, though I did come across some tidbits about female-to-male cross-dressers. I planned that one day I would use that material as the basis for an article, which I did. But as I immersed myself in that project, I expanded my regional and temporal scope and soon turned up more material on female-to-male cross-dressers than I had anticipated. To my great surprise, considering how few male-to-female cross-dressers I came across doing my research for Same-Sex Affairs, I found a remarkable amount of source material on them as well. Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past is the result.

  This project has been a great deal of fun, made much more so by those who helped me along the way. I owe much to my friends Ross Bunnell and Clayton Koppes. They read early drafts of my entire book, offered thoughtful comments, and made perceptive suggestions that I incorporated herein. Early on Kristine Stilwell, Tom Cook, and Robin Henry shared some of their own research with me. Lori Lahlum identified some illustrations for me, including those that appear on this book’s cover and as its frontispiece. Dee Garceau, Catherine Cocks, Gregory Nobles, Susan Armitage, Matthew Sutton, Lisa Duggan, Louis Warren, Renée Laegreid, and the late Peggy Pascoe provided comments on different portions or iterations of this book or its proposal. Elizabeth Jameson took a great deal of care with a later draft. Her wonderful insights crucially influenced this book.

  A number of people provided me moral support, wrote recommendations for grants, made available their considerable knowledge and imagination as I discussed with them my ideas, helped with research questions, or otherwise afforded me all manner of inspiration. These include Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Martha Hanna, Mark Pittenger, Marcia Yonemoto, Fred Anderson, John Wunder, Anne Butler, Richard Maxwell Brown, Lisa Pollard, James Potter, Sandy Schackel, Judy Austin, Brian DeLay, Susan Kent, Catherine Mason, and my parents. Thea Lindquist, history librarian at the University of Colorado, Boulder; Lou Vyhnanek, humanities and social science librarian at Washington State University; and John Doerner, historian at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, all supported my research. David Rich Lewis and Colleen O’Neill published my article out of which this book grew, “Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History,” in Western Historical Quarterly 36, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 477–97. That article is reproduced in bits and pieces throughout this book with permission. I especially thank Niels Hooper, my editor at the University of California Press. He pushed me over several years to write this book. Likewise, the editorial staff at California, which has now seen me through three books, has been a pleasure to work with. My life partner, Brent Owens, has now endured the research and writing of two of these. Through each he has been boundless in his encouragement and support.

  Finally, throughout this project I gathered most of my inspiration from the memory of a boy I once knew. He was a gentle soul and deserved a world far gentler than ours. It is to him that I dedicate this work.

  INTRODUCTION

  A Trip Along the Pike’s
Peak Express

  Cross-Dressers and America’s Frontier Past

  In the mid-nineteenth century, the New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley exhorted young American men bereft of family and friends to go West to build their homes and make their fortunes.1 In 1859 the journalist traveled to the region to observe the fruits of his advice. He did not necessarily find there what he had hoped. On the Great Plains en route to the Rocky Mountains, for example, he learned that hundreds of prospectors had recently gone bust at the Colorado gold-diggings, deserted the region in droves, and consequently faced unemployment and other sufferings. Greeley reported his encounter with only one such individual, a young clerk with whom he had supped at Station 9 of the Pike’s Peak Express and who, “having frozen his feet on the winter journey out, had had enough of gold-hunting, and was going home to his parents in Indiana.” The morning following Greeley’s repast with the clerk, and only after they had departed in opposite directions, the New Yorker learned something astonishing about his new acquaintance: “I was apprised by our conductor,” exclaimed Greeley, “that said clerk was a woman!”2

  Horace Greeley’s clerk and other people like him are my subjects in Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past. I focus on the era 1850 to 1920—roughly from the heyday of the California gold rush to just after the last of the western (continental) territories became states in the union. I have two principal goals. One is to re-dress America’s frontier past—recovering its cross-dressers and exploring what their transgressive sexual and gender identities meant to their societies and communities. In doing so, I reveal that cross-dressers were not simply ubiquitous, but were very much a part of daily life on the frontier and in the West. I suspect that readers will be as amazed as I was with the number and variety of cross-dressers who found a home on the proverbial range—as astonished perhaps as Horace Greeley claimed to be when he encountered the gender-changing clerk in 1859 along the Pike’s Peak Express. In fact, my surprise led me to a self-reflexive project that metamorphosed into the second goal of my study: how and why did such a large group of people so visible and so much a part of daily life in the nineteenth-century West become so forgotten that their rediscovery was such an unexpected thing?

  I was prompted to this question during the early phase of my research when a high-profile public event occurred that starkly exposed the relationship between the American West and transgressive sexual and gender activities. That event was the Hollywood release of the full-length motion picture Brokeback Mountain, based on Annie Proulx’s short story by the same title, in the late fall of 2005.3 The film depicts a love and sex affair between two Wyoming cowboys (they are really sheepherders but are popularly identified as cowboys) during the second half of the twentieth century. The film sparked something of a national debate: everyone from late-night Hollywood talk show hosts to New York Times reporters sought answers to the question—some through what passed as humor and others needing “investigative” journalism—as to whether there really was such a thing as a gay cowboy.4

  And why not? Generations of these Americans had grown up on Hollywood’s hyper-masculine and hyper-heterosexual western actors and characters—actors such as Tom Mix, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Alan Ladd, Glenn Ford, Kirk Douglas, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, and Chuck Connors, to name but a few; and characters such as Jesse James, George Custer, Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill, Davy Crockett, “Wild Bill” Hickok, Butch Cassidy, Wyatt Earp, and a string of entirely fictional lawmen, gunslingers, and especially cowboys. They had also been imbued with Madison Avenue images of the Marlboro Man and the pulp heroes of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour novels. Through these fictional and real-life characters and people, popular cultural outlets had long shaped the American imagination about the masculine, heterosexual West. After years of such fare, popular audiences who considered Brokeback Mountain simply found it incongruous and therefore uproariously laughable that homosexuality could exist within what was popularly understood to be the classic West—not just as a place, but as a culture represented by the iconic cowboy.

  And yet fully two generations before Brokeback Mountain, Alfred Kinsey found and reported in his eyebrow-raising Sexual Behavior in the Human Male that the highest frequencies of homosexuality in America that he uncovered were in fact in rural communities in the most remote parts of the country, particularly in the West. Ranchmen, cattle men, prospectors, lumbermen, and farmers—the most virile and physically active groups of men—Kinsey found, commonly engaged in same-sex sexual activities, probably, Kinsey further remarked, much like their pioneer forebears had. “This type of rural homosexuality,” Kinsey concluded, “contradicts the theory that homosexuality in itself is an urban product.”5

  The sexual reality of the American West that Kinsey uncovered and made publicly known in the 1940s differs considerably from popular understandings and memories about sexuality and gender in the Old West and on the frontier. My second goal, then, is to explain how and why this is so. In redressing America’s frontier past, I posit that the roots of the answer can be found before Hollywood stepped into the fray and, more precisely, in the history of cross-dressing. Cross-dressers linked two monumental events that occurred at the tail end of the nineteenth century. One was the so-called closing of the frontier. The other was the development of our modern gender and sexual system—that is, the creation of the categories of homosexual and heterosexual, the division of people into these categories, and the identification of cross-dressing with the former. At the intersection of these two events at the turn of the twentieth century, cross-dressers crossed from one to the other: from the frontier to modern homosexuality. In doing so, they left behind them a wholly heterosexualized and unambiguously gendered American West. It is worth outlining these events here.

  After all the facts and figures were in from the 1890 U.S. federal census, the superintendent of that enterprise declared that population growth and redistribution made it impossible for him to trace, as he had in previous years, an unbroken frontier line from north to south across the western portion of the continent. This signaled to him that the American frontier had vanished.6 Later historians have shown time and again that the superintendent’s 1890 definition of what constitutes the frontier was entirely arbitrary (he had defined it as a line marking off an area where population density dropped below two people per square mile). The same historians have further demonstrated that the frontier of late nineteenth-century popular imagination was nothing more than the product of popular imagining. Still, what happened in 1890 and the years surrounding that date was very real and meant a great deal to a large and influential sector of the American populace. By 1890 Americans were grappling with all sorts of troubling issues that seemed to be products of the same forces that caused the imagined frontier to disappear: rapid urbanization, industrialization, the rise of impersonal corporations, terrible economic depression, the depletion of natural resources, and any number of social problems and worries, such as women’s growing independence, mass immigration of peoples of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, frightening labor unrest, and the spread of extreme squalor in the shadow of growing fortunes of unprecedented vastness.

  Reeling from and trying to make sense of all this, many Americans looked into their own past—their so-called frontier past—for solace, escapism, and in some cases examples of alternative ways of living that might be useful in the modern era. Some did these things through purchasing, reading, and thus fueling the mass market for western dime novels and other regional literature that sensationalized frontier life. Others did so through attending any number of the era’s live shows that depicted the wildness of the West and that sported bison herds, real live Indians and cowboys, shooting demonstrations, and even reenactments of Custer’s Last Stand. Yet others found escapism and celebration of the nation’s western past through viewing and patronizing the growing number of artists who filled galleries and museums with paintings and sculptures depicting monumental western landscapes and romanticized ver
sions of western life. And a host of Americans began traveling to the West to experience what they felt were the last vestiges of its wildness, woolliness, and pristine environmental conditions, elements of the frontier that were just then receding into memory. Such responses show that however real or imaginary it was, the frontier epoch could be identified and separated from the dawn of the twentieth century—that is, from the modern era that had only just commenced and was defined by its complexities, changes, uncertainties, and hard realities.

  At the very moment when Americans memorialized the frontier, social understandings of gender and sexuality were undergoing profound alteration, so much so that by the last years of the 1800s there emerged what historians have termed the “modern” sexual and gender system. Prior to the nineteenth century, the western world held to what is known as the one-sex model, as the historian Thomas Laqueur has ably demonstrated.7 Accordingly, males and females were viewed as just different forms of the same sex. They had, it was believed, the same sex organs; only the addition of a certain measure of heat turned them to the exterior of the body, forming a male, while sex organs that remained inside denoted the body of a woman. Significant alterations in knowledge systems as related to political developments led to the two-sex model replacing the one-sex model by the year 1800. The two-sex model maintained that the sexes were not different in degree, but rather they were so different as to be complete opposites. This set up in our “modern” thinking the notion of a binary sex system—that is, a system composed of two distinctly different sexes.