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Relevant History welcomes historical mystery author Ann Parker, whose award-winning Silver Rush mystery series, published by Poisoned Pen Press, features saloon-owner Inez Stannert in the 1880s silver boomtown of Leadville, Colorado. Ann's ancestors include a Leadville blacksmith, a Colorado School of Mines professor, and a gandy dancer. Ann and her family live in the San Francisco Bay Area (although she'd really really love to move to Colorado), where she slings scientific and corporate verbiage by day to pay the bills and writes historical mysteries at night to satisfy her soul. For more information, check her web site, author blog, and group blog (on alternate Thursdays), and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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"Go West, young man, go West!"
Such was the statement theoretically made by men such as Horace Greeley and John Soule. "The West," the location of which was ever on the move as civilization marched in the direction of the setting sun, was the place where restless, adventurous, and ambitious men could theoretically make their mark.
But what about restless, adventurous, and ambitious women?
As it happens, many of them went West as well.
The West, it was believed, was full of opportunity to those who were willing to apply a little elbow grease and who were lucky. Being in the right place at the right time was as much a factor then as now.
Women—with and without men—flocked to the West to make a future, build new lives, and (I'd be lying to say otherwise) sometimes to find a mate.
Leadville, Colorado, the main location for my Silver Rush historical mystery series, is a case in point. Leadville is located at the 10,000-foot mark in the Rocky Mountains, where winter lasts nine months out of the year. But that didn't stop people from coming to make their fortunes, starting with a mini-gold rush in 1860 and progressing to a very impressive silver rush in the late 1870s.
One of the first adventurous women to set down stakes in this area was Augusta Tabor, who came west in 1860 with her husband Horace Tabor and their tiny son Maxcy. The Tabors headed up to the remote California Gulch in what was to become Leadville, looking to get rich. The Tabors weren't alone. The area was crawling with prospectors hoping to make a fortune. To most, this meant a life of moving from claim to claim, chasing the glitter of precious metals. But others saw the business opportunity in the region. One of those discerning folks was Augusta. According to Edward Blair's book, Leadville: Colorado's Magic City, "She quickly set up her baking business and in addition served meals. She found that some men 'did not like men's cooking and would insist upon boarding where there was a woman.'"
As Leadville developed, more women arrived of the proper and not-so-proper sorts. The latter included women with appellations such as Red Stockings, Sallie Purple, Mollie May, and Winnie Purdy. At the other end of the virtue spectrum were the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, Kansas, who established the first hospital in Leadville in1879. Both the sisters of the red-light district and the Sisters of Charity received a fair bit of press as to their activities—the good, the bad, and the ugly, as you might imagine.
But what about the rest? What were they up to?
When trying to get a grip on the lives of women during this timeframe, the newspapers are one source. There are miles of column inches written about who attended what soirees, what they wore, and the music they danced to and what they ate. But there are also letters, diaries, and journals. One of my all-time favorites in this genre is A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote. Mary Hallock Foote was a writer, an artist, a mother, and the wife of a mining engineer. Her writings and drawings serve up many details of the life of a proper woman in the wilder parts of the West in the late 1800s.
The 1880 census is also a gold (or perhaps that should be silver) mine of information as to the occupations of women in the silver-mining boomtown. Besides the Sisters of Charity (13 in all) and prostitutes (52 owned up to that profession to the census takers), there were actresses and dance hall employees (at 53, they outnumbered the prostitutes by one), domestic servants (185), laundresses (130), teachers (15), restaurant keepers and cooks (55), and dressmakers and milliners (76). What I always find interesting in analyzing a census are those professions where just a few women hold forth "in a man's world." For 1880, such professions in Leadville included journalist (1 woman/30 men), saloonkeeper/bartender (3 women/228 men), miners (4 women/3,204 men), physician/surgeon (4 women/69 men), and (and hostler/teamster (1 woman/255 men). To me, "the numbers tell the tale." Women looking for opportunity could find it, but they were tough and determined.
Life was not easy in those days and in those places. The law was hard put-upon to keep the lawless element in hand, and sometimes the citizens—including the women—took matters into their own hands. For instance, a local postmaster in the Leadville area, A.R. Brown, told the following tale concerning two proper Leadville matrons, Mrs. Bradt and Mrs. Updegraff. The women were passing two city lots recently purchased for building a school and noticed that one of the school lots had been jumped and the trespasser had put up a shanty on the grounds. (In 1879, real estate speculation was rife downtown, and prime lots were regularly being "jumped" by scoundrels who would simply move in and take over the lots at gunpoint.) According to Brown, Mrs. Bradt's and Mrs. Updegraff 's "western fiery spirits of justice to schools and school property led them to take the law into their own hands," resulting in their tearing down the lot-jumper's shanty and calmly walking away.
Now that's the spirit that won The West!
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A big thanks to Ann Parker. She'll give away one copy of her latest release, Mercury's Rise, to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I'll choose the winner from among those who comment by Sunday at 6 p.m. ET. International delivery is available.
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Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne's free newsletter.
Relevant History welcomes historical mystery author Susanne Alleyn. She's the granddaughter of 1960s children's author Lillie Vanderveer Albrecht and is the author of the Aristide Ravel historical mystery series, set in revolutionary Paris, as well as of A Far Better Rest, a reimagining of A Tale of Two Cities. She is currently working on the fifth Ravel mystery; a non-mystery historical novel, also set in eighteenth-century France; and a nonfiction project. Visit her at her author website, and at her blog, where she chats with fictional sleuths from across the centuries. Make sure you check out her entertaining and insightful interviews of sleuths Hetty Henry (from Relevant History author M. E. Kemp), Annie Fuller (from Relevant History author M. Louisa Locke), Mary Wollstonecraft (from Relevant History author Nancy Means Wright), and Lt. Michael Stoddard (my fictional sleuth).
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Most people’s knowledge of the French Revolution is pretty much limited to 1789, Bastille Day, and howling mobs, illustrated with snippets from The Scarlet Pimpernel. Guillotines, lots of gore. So what should make all that stuff Relevant History? We in North America don’t have kings and queens to overthrow. There’s no palace of Versailles, no Marie-Antoinette swanning about with a three-foot hairdo.
Well, just about everything we think of when the words “French Revolution” come up (aside from Bastille Day) actually happened as a result of the second revolution.
Eh?
The second French Revolution?
1789 is the date most people learn about, and “the Revolution” seems like a highly compressed event (Bastille falls, mobs in streets, Antoinette loses head, mass guillotinings, all within a few months). But “the Revolution” actually went on for five years, from 1789 to 1794. And during those five years, France had, not one, but two revolutions, the relatively peaceful 1789 one—and the 1792 one, which initiated the messier and much more violent chapter known as the Terror.
The 1789 revolution? It began with a financial crisis, and a polite rebellion of middle-class delegates who had come to Versailles to make suggestions to Louis XVI about how to fix the financial crisis, and climaxed with the attack on the Bastille, after which Louis (mostly) caved in. It was responsible for legal reforms, and transformed France from an absolute monarchy to a limited, constitutional one. The bourgeoisie (rather than the nobility) now were firmly in charge under the king, in an elected assembly. Everyone who wasn’t a hidebound, tight-assed ultraroyalist was overjoyed by the changes. (Until Louis proved himself to have no allegiance to the new constitution by unsuccessfully trying to escape.)
With the many reforms that the 1789 revolution brought, optimistic citizens probably pointed to their new constitution and parliament and claimed that France was halfway to a rather conservative democracy. But it was still, undoubtedly, a democracy for the bourgeoisie and the bankers. The constitution created in 1791 favored the wealthy: rich financiers and industrialists, the upper middle class, and the landowning aristocracy, who had lost their titles and their nastier feudal privileges, but none of their property. Men who paid a certain amount of taxes were called “active citizens” and were able to vote and run for office. But it won’t come as much of a surprise that most ordinary people didn’t pay enough taxes to qualify, and thus were “passive citizens” and effectively muzzled, kept out of any participation in government—which suited the aristocracy of wealth very well. The short version: the ruling class, with some new blood in it, kept on ruling.
Well, surprise, surprise: It didn’t take the urban blue-collar population, the lower middle classes and the working classes—known as sansculottes—long to realize that, ultimately, they had gained no power and few material benefits from the revolution of ’89. A few key events mark where that first hopeful, happy revolution began to go wrong, and where the sansculottes began to grumble. The first was Louis XVI’s bungled attempt to flee; that fiasco made plenty of people permanently distrustful of their chief executive. Then the new constitution disenfranchised about 70% of the population. And then there was the war, with France’s old enemies Prussia and Austria—possibly one of the stupidest wars ever blundered into, with the starry-eyed but unworkable idea that Liberty should promptly be exported to the rest of Europe, which cost many lives and a lot of money, and never seemed to end. And so the sansculottes grew steadily angrier and more frustrated, particularly with the new, “democratic” ruling classes who weren’t sharing the benefits of their nice, moneyed, bourgeois revolution.
Perhaps this story begins to sound familiar?
We in the United States have been lucky. The outcome of our first revolution, our bourgeois, capitalist, conservative democracy that was established in 1789(!), has lasted well over two centuries, while the first French Revolution and its bourgeois, capitalist, conservative constitutional monarchy lasted barely three years. Our bourgeois republic, with reforms and regulations tweaking it over the centuries, has worked pretty well.
In France, though, it didn’t take long for the overpressured system to crumble. In the summer of 1792, the sansculottes of Paris had had enough; they held their own blue-collar revolution, toppled the monarchy, went in for participatory government in a big way, and demanded many more rights, including quite a few measures intended to promote economic, as well as social, equality. The leaders were, of course, middle-class professionals (as ever), but this time they were going to pay some attention to the sansculottes and do what “the people” demanded.
Yep, it’s sounding familiar.
Our system in the USA is growing more and more corrupted in favor of the wealthy and powerful. Our “99 percent”—our sansculottes—are beginning to realize how, as many previous reforms have been whittled away over the past few decades, the bourgeois republic has failed them. Are we, too, on the way to a second revolution, the 1792 revolution, a revolt against the greed and indifference of the one percent who do nothing for their millions but shove money around?
Let’s hope, if it happens, we can manage it better. Because the real 1792 revolution, under conditions of war, paranoia, and squabbling factions, led soon enough to the unforgiving emergency dictatorship called the Terror—and then political infighting and show trials and guillotinings (and more paranoia). Which eventually led to an exhausted population that said “To hell with it,” and let a certain charismatic young general named Bonaparte take over and clean up the mess.
Will the 99 percent rise up in a second American Revolution against the tyranny of Wall Street, giant corporations, lobbyists, and venal politicians?
It sounds kind of attractive, doesn’t it?
And perhaps, if it happens, it may lead to something better. But let’s hope we’ve learned some lessons from history, because, under similar conditions, the Second American Revolution might lead us straight to the Terror—and finally Napoleon—instead.
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A big thanks to Susanne Alleyn. She’ll give away one hardback copy of The Cavalier of the Apocalypse to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I'll choose the winner from among those who comment by Sunday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available within the U.S. only.
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Did you like what you read? Learn about downloads, discounts, and special offers from Relevant History authors and Suzanne Adair. Subscribe to Suzanne's free newsletter.
