THE CONTRADICTIONS OF WESTERN AMERICAN MANHOOD

AS SEEN THROUGH 1858-1866 IMMIGRATION TO PIKES PEAK

by

STEPHANIE MCGUIRE

B.A., University of Colorado at Boulder, 2012

A thesis submitted to the

Faculty of the Graduate School of the

University of Colorado in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

History Program

2016

This thesis for the Master of Arts degree by

Stephanie McGuire

has been approved for the

History Program

by

William Wagner, Chair

Rebecca Hunt

Thomas Noel

July 30, 2016

ii

McGuire, Stephanie (MA., History)

The Contradictions of Western American Manhood as Seen Through 1858-1866 Immigration to Pikes Peak

Thesis directed by Assistant Professor William Wagner

ABSTRACT

This paper will analyze the complexities of mid nineteenth-century western manhood

by focusing on a case study of migration to Pikes Peak during the late 1850s through the

early 1860s. The western environment, far from home and luxury, created many tensions in

defining manhood, and thus a western man was often full of contradictory traits. The family

man left home to provide for his family yet he continued to maintain familial duties despite

distance or hardship. Migrants often despised vulgar, drunken men and valued more

restrained and polite qualities, and yet the western man strove to remain brave and physically

tough to withstand the journey. Part of his toughness entailed the performance of intense

physical work, and yet a western man often simultaneously took charge of “womanly”

household tasks. This man often felt pure joy in the fruits of the wilderness, and yet his hopes

remained set on a fully civilized region. Defining manhood in the West was neither simple

nor single-faceted, and we must bear in mind the complexities of the western man.

The form and content of this abstract are approved. I recommend its publication.

Approved: William Wagner

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION 1

II. PROMOTING WESTWARD EXPANSION 9

Brave Hearts 12

Foolish Travelers 18

III. THE CONTRADICTIONS OF BEING A FAMILY MAN 21

Leaving Comforts to Gain Comforts and Maintaining Patriarchal Duties 23

Staying Emotionally Connected from a Vast Distance 31

IV. RUGGED OR RESTRAINED? 36

Westerners Must Remain Gentlemen 36

A Good Man is Carefree and Makes a Good Cook 40

The West Calls for Grit 44

A Distaste for Drunkenness and Vulgarity 49

V. DOES A MAN EMBRACE OR CHANGE THE WILDERNESS? 53

Men Rule the Wilderness 54

Men Embrace the Wilderness 56

Be Warned: The West is Uncivilized 58

Westerners Create Their Own Unique Civilization 60

VI. CONCLUSION 63

BIBLIOGRAPHY 65

iii

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Martha Maxwell journeyed to Pikes Peak from Wisconsin in 1860 on a quest for gold

with her husband James and four other men.1 She was the only woman traveling in her party,

and with no female companions to assist her, she greatly appreciated the men’s help with

tasks generally assigned to women of the time such as cooking and cleaning. She exclaimed

in a letter home, “David generally gets breakfast sometimes washes the dishes and is as

handy as a girl. I consider myself fortunate in having him in the company.”2 Her statement

about one of her co-migrants, David Brown, illustrates the nuances of defining manhood in

the American West during the westward migration of the mid-nineteenth century. As

easterners and mid-westerners left their homes along with most of their luxuries for an

unfamiliar territory, they grappled with conflicting definitions of manhood.

As different people travelled west, they formed differing and often conflicting

opinions of what constituted manhood. Based on personal letters and journals of migrants

during the mid-century migration to Pikes Peak, construction of a western man was

complicated, contested and highly contradictory. Maxwell’s gratitude toward her male

helper’s willingness to help out in the kitchen, a quality she viewed as feminine, reveals that

defining masculinity in the West was not simply a matter of foregoing gentlemanly restraint

1

1 Throughout this paper I will use the term “Pikes Peak” to refer to the area of North America that now comprises the current state of Colorado for the sake of being concise as well as appropriate to mid-nineteenth century notions of the area. Easterners at the time referred vaguely to regions of present-day Colorado as “Pikes Peak.” The mountain had gained fame with Eastern audiences due to Zebulon Pike’s westward journey and thus, the mountain stood as a marker for an “unknown” region as opposed to an actual site of migration. Most westward migrants followed the South Platte River into “Denver City” and Auraria where they stayed or dispersed from there into the mountains or along the front range of the Rocky Mountains.

2 Maxine Benson, Martha Maxwell, Rocky Mountain Naturalist (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 53.

and resolving to adopt a hard ruggedness. To Maxwell, a good western man had less to do

with a display of refinement or roughness and more to do with his performance of

housekeeping duties, which Maxwell deemed necessary due to the absence of other women.

A man who cooked and cleaned complicated any simple definition or dichotomy of

masculinity, and he added new dimensions to defining manhood in the West. When we

unpack the nuances revealed in promotional sources as well as personal writings of those

involved in the westward movement, we begin to grasp a complicated, and often

contradictory western masculinity.

To analyze the complexities of mid-nineteenth century western manhood in detail, I

will provide a case study that focuses on migration to Pikes Peak between 1858 and 1866.

These dates comprise the beginnings of a mass westward migration to Pikes Peak from the

East, in which migrants rushed for gold, made settlements, and took part in other ventures

such as religious trips and field reporting prior to Colorado’s statehood, and in which these

migrants tackled the complexities of defining a good man in the West. I will look at the ways

western newspapers hailed specific men to their regions while refusing others during this

migration and the ways personal letters and diaries complicated the regional pulls and yet

similarly revealed a contradictory western masculinity.

Significantly, these personal sources include documents written by both men and

women, as gender definition required both sexes to deliberate and determine an outcome. A

large amount of literature exists on western womanhood as well, including breakthrough

studies such as The Women’s West by Susan Armitage that brought women into the western

story in the 1980s, and more recent additions such as Annette Kolodny’s The Land Before

2

Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers about pioneer women’s views of the

West as a cultivated garden as well as Brigitte Georgi-Findlay’s discussion on the various

ways women grappled with national expansionist narratives in The Frontiers of Women’s

Writing.3 Histories such as these of women pioneered histories of gender, and my research

will essentially expand on these authors’ ideas about gender as a construction, and how we

may use this framework to comprehend mid-nineteenth century western history through the

formation of masculinity in the West.4

Historians for generations have thought of Frederick Jackson Turner as the

grandfather of Western American history. In his 1893 frontier thesis, Jackson not only

incorporated the West into American history, but he argued that the West actually made

America unique as opposed to an offshoot of old Europe. He glorified the West as a military

training school where men developed the rugged qualities of the individualistic frontiersman

while focusing on an overall narrative of white progress.5 Turner’s emphasis on the white

rugged individual certainly drew attention to a region not yet fully accepted as part of

“civilized” America, but it crucially left the many nuances of western manhood hidden in

history.

3

3 Please see also: Karen M. Morin, Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Nineteenth-century American West (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008); Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken, Home Lands: How Women Made the West (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2010); and Sandra L. Myers, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1982).

4 Further research should be undertaken on constructions of western femininity, as well as on migrants from different areas of the world and during different time periods, but such examinations are beyond the scope of this study.

5 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (El Paso, TX: Academic Reprints, Inc, 1960), 3, 12.

Although Turner’s thesis went largely unchallenged well into the twentieth century,

recent western historians have challenged his progressive and glorified narrative of the West

and its frontiersmen. Historians Monica Rico and Susan Lee Johnson somewhat endorsed but

also complicated Turner’s thesis by describing the West as an escape from the restrictions of

eastern society and a world in which individuals partook in the reconstruction of manhood.

Rico asserted that European men romanticized the American West as a place to “establish,

elaborate, and defend masculinity” during an era of profound economic and social

transformation.6 Johnson delved even deeper into this study of the West as a place to redefine

masculinity, stating that Easterners who travelled to California for gold enjoyed being freed

from the refinement of the East and the “skewed sex ratios” and unsettling of traditional

social norms caused the gold rushers to socially improvise and it often led to intense

violence.7 Rico and Johnson abandoned Turner’s progress narrative but they both understood

the West as a place of important gender construction in which a certain “ruggedness” was

crucial.

I aim to complicate Rico’s and Johnson’s arguments about a repressed class of men

that fled to escape into the wild. Although many men likely felt the western pull of adventure

and freedom during the mid nineteenth century, the West was not a place where all men shed

their gentlemanly ways and stepped into a vision of western vigor. Each individual had their

own complicated ideals which remained very much a part of their identities in the West. To

overcome the obstacles of their overland journeys across the plains, migrants necessarily

4

6 Monica Rico, Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 10.

7 Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2000), 100.

grappled with notions of masculinity that usually conflicted with or at least complicated other

manly values. The beauties of the vast western wilderness often sparked in men feelings of

freedom and bliss, but this feeling was never detached from other more restrictive notions of

manhood.

I also aim to challenge historian Amy Greenberg’s conceptualization of restrained and

unrestrained manhoods during the mid-nineteenth century in Manifest Manhood and the

Antebellum American Empire. Greenberg argued that prior to the American Civil War, a split

emerged in which two forms of masculinity competed for dominance. As she asserted,

“restrained manhood” favored family and domesticity while “martial manhood,” which, she

argued, took dominance during the 1850s, reveled in physical strength and aggression.8 My

research suggests that a physical-based masculinity indeed appeared in personal

understandings of western manhood along journeys to Pikes Peak, but I will argue, however,

that this competition between a rugged and restrained man oversimplifies the experiences of

individuals and families involved in the westward movement. A man fit for this journey, and

fit for the West, was neither fully rugged nor fully restrained, and he often embodied the

contradictions of both simultaneously while taking on characteristics that did not fit neatly

into this dichotomy.

I will take further and also complicate the arguments of historian Brian Roberts in his

book on middle-class America during the California gold rush, American Alchemy. Roberts

argued that Easterners who travelled to California for gold remade the middle-class during

what Roberts called their temporary “slum” in the West into something they were both a part

5

8 Amy S. Greenberg. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 8-17.

of and yet rebelled against.9 He explained, “Many would be liberated, for a time at least, but

they would not become liberals.”10 I want to use this claim to analyze a similar

transformation of conflicting values in the decades after the California gold rush, not just in

class but in masculine gender identity, in which migrants confronted rugged ideals but still

did not become entirely rugged. I will, however, reveal the many nuances of creating a

gender identity that challenged a simple definition of either liberal or non-liberal, of rugged

or restrained.

During the mid-nineteenth century migration to Pikes Peak, western and eastern

newspapers promoted their own regions by idealizing specific types of men. Western

newspapers called for a physically strong, brave and enduring hard worker while shunning

those too lazy or unwilling to stick it out. The tough westerner, however, could not be overly

rugged or carefree so as to harm societal growth, so the promoters ideally wanted a man

somewhere between rugged and restrained. They also wanted an individual man to

essentially build a home and civilization without a family, and thus they embraced quite a

contradictory westerner. The eastern papers, however, with their own promotional aims,

criticized the West and its immigrants for what they felt were stupidly obvious contradictions

which abounded the traveler who left a good life for a miserable one.

Personal experiences by individuals and families who participated in this movement

also implied the contradictory nature of defining manhood in the West while also revealing

the actual complexities of clarifying this man in day-to-day life along the westward journey.

6

9 Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and the Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 219.

10 Roberts, American Alchemy, 15.

We can see these contradictions through three broad categories in which men and women

contemplated masculinity: 1. familial relationships, 2. character traits, and 3. a man’s duty to

and relationship with the environment and larger society. In each of these categories,

individuals and families grappled with conflicting ideals of what it meant to be a man in the

western American landscape. Each example from a letter or diary is meant to illustrate the

variances in masculine identity in the West, but also string together some common threads

throughout to make sense of a larger narrative.

It is the goal of this study to stress the multifaceted nature of western manliness and

to upset the common notion of the untamed male Westerner as a rough and rugged bachelor

who broke free of eastern ties and embraced the Wild West with guns blazing. I also want to

discourage a simplification of manly ideals defined by either rugged or restrained, and to

encourage an investigation of the varieties of characteristics each person debated and

accepted or rejected. The western environment, far from home and luxury, created many

tensions in defining manhood, and thus a western man was often full of contradictory traits.

The family man left home to provide for his family yet he continued to maintain familial

duties despite distance or hardship. Migrants often despised vulgar, drunken men and valued

more restrained and polite qualities, and yet the western man strove to remain brave and

physically tough to withstand the journey. Part of his toughness entailed the performance of

intense physical work, and yet a western man often simultaneously took charge of household

tasks typically assigned to women at the time. This man often felt pure joy in the fruits of the

wilderness, and yet his hopes remained set on a fully civilized region. Defining manhood in

7

the West was neither simple nor single-faceted, and we must bear in mind the complexities of

the western man.

8

CHAPTER II

PROMOTING WESTWARD EXPANSION

Boosters of the Pikes Peak region took advantage of the gold hype that sparked the

Pikes Peak Gold Rush of 1859 to publicize and, they hoped, to populate the new territory.

Prior to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, gold seekers travelled beyond the Central Rocky

Mountain region toward California in a movement known as the California Gold Rush. After

the United States government acquired the Kansas-Nebraska Territory that encompassed

present-day Colorado, prospectors began chasing down rumors of gold in the Pikes Peak

country. Pikes Peak country, so named for the peak’s long-standing publicity, encompassed

the gold mining region of present-day Colorado along the Rocky Mountain front range, then

located in western Kansas Territory and southwestern Nebraska Territory. American gold

mining camps and settlements populated the soon-to-be cities such as Denver, Auraria,

Boulder, South Park, and Golden, and the miners travelled north and south along the

mountain range to mine for gold.

The Pikes Peak region was not merely for miners, however, as many types of

travelers sought opportunities in this newly acquired territory. As leading Colorado gold rush

era historian Elliot West explained, a financial collapse in 1857 shook Americans in the East

and Midwest, leaving many men desperate for change and hopeful that Pikes Peak was the

answer to their problems.11 For many men with new financial troubles, the West presented

new opportunities for success. Newspaper editor and traveler himself, Horace Greeley

described these types of travelers as the “men of broken fortunes from the dead mushroom

9

11 Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 101, 115-116, 125.

‘cities’ of Nebraska and Kansas.”12 “Broken” men from the Midwest appear most prevalent

among letter-writers and diarists who travelled to Pikes Peak during the mid-century

migration. Many of these writers expressed hopes of a better life in the West and for a change

in fortune, just as West argued. The promoters of the Pikes Peak region, too, focused their

energies on luring these desperate men out to dig up gold and help create a new society in the

West.

This great westward movement sparked a rivalry among economic interests across the

nation. Self-interested writers from the East and West competed to convince the public of

their region’s superiority. While boosters in the West profited from luring the population

westward, eastern towns felt a twinge of fear for their economies, as West explained, and

they fought back with promotions of their own.13 The struggle for capital in America is

evident in newspaper publications of the late 1850s and early 1860s, in which each editor

advocated for their respective region, and they did so largely by advocating for or rejecting

specific types of men.

To lure people out to Pikes Peak, western newspapers not only boasted about gold in

the area but they also promoted a specific manhood that was quite contradictory in character.

The goal for these promoters of the West was to encourage men living toward the East to

come, work, stay and settle in the Pikes Peak region. Settlement was the end goal and

western boosters worked hard to discourage the returning migrants, or “go-backers,” who

10

12 Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey, from New York to San Francisco, in the Summer of 1859 (San Francisco, CA: H. H. Bancroft & Co, 1860). https://archive.org/details/overlandjourneyf00gree, 140.

13 West, Contested Plains, 116, 123.

went back to their eastward homes for any number of reasons.14 To achieve their goals,

writers of the early Pikes Peak papers encouraged men to leave their homes, leave their

families, and get to work to create a new home near the Rocky Mountains. To convince these

men to settle here, they advised lazy men to remain home with their families in the East, and

they called out for brave, enduring, physically strong miners to come tough it out and stay

put. They insisted that only through hard labor would an individual have a chance at finding

gold and making a better life for themselves.

But a settlement necessitated all types of men, not just physically tough miners, and

most importantly, settlement necessitated women and families, not just brave single men.

When the papers requested men, and men alone, they accepted not only a contradictory man,

who left home and family to essentially come out to create home and family, but a

contradictory society of tough, independent male workers free of other necessities of

settlement, such as women. While they encouraged a population of physically tough men to

Pikes Peak, they were not, however, looking for an unruly, ruffian town since civilization was

the goal. Promoters, therefore, did not encourage men to detach themselves from civilization

enough to become vulgar, sinful, or lawless, and they often simultaneously stressed the

importance of “honest men” with a strong morale. They grappled with the fine line between a

tough, independent worker and a rowdy, carefree thug who would have challenged society.

To encourage a new population in the West, newspaper writers embraced and promoted a

man with often conflicting and contradictory traits.

11

14 Jolie Anderson Gallagher, A Wild West History of Frontier Colorado: Pioneers, Gunslingers and Cattle Kings on the Eastern Plains (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2011), 21; many travelers returned eastward when hardships were too many and a “better life” seemed nonexistent, or at least not worth the trouble. Many turned back before even arriving in Pikes Peak upon hearing bad news from others along the trails that Pikes Peak was all a “humbug.”

Whereas the western promoters embraced and encouraged this contradictory man and

contradictory society, the papers that encouraged more eastward settlement in the far East

and Midwest in a sense confronted the Pikes Peak boosters’ claims and pointed out the

contradictions of their requests. They mocked westward travelers for their foolish and naive

endeavors and for leaving better familial and societal circumstances behind to willingly enter

hardships. These conflicting political agendas not only shed light on a mid-nineteenth

century economic panic in America, but also on competing notions of masculinity in

promotional sources at the time.

Brave Hearts

Before the Pikes Peak region produced newspapers of its own, the Kansas territorial

newspapers, based near Topeka, Kansas, stood as the major source of promotional reports on

Pikes Peak. The Kansas Herald of Freedom published letters from lucky miners who boasted

about the abundance of gold along the South Platte River. In addition to correspondence on

their region’s riches, the Herald printed sections of poetry with an equally promotional effect,

encouraging men to be daring and courageous if they wish to tackle this region. One such

poem, called “In the West,” describes the West as a region of “promise” and “glory” where

“success, and joy and honor” await anyone strong enough to leave their home toward the

East.15 The poem exclaims, “And the soul looks up and onward, With a bold, insatiate quest,

Hoping always - weary never - Daring all things - in the West.”16 The poem paints a majestic

12

15 George Washington Brown, ed., “In the West,” Kansas Herald of Freedom, January 1, 1859, accessed November 5, 2014, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82006863/issues/1859/, 1.

16 Brown, ed., “In the West,” 1.

picture of the West, assuring any bold adventurer the rewards of “freedom” in their new

territory.

Other poems printed in the Herald with the same purpose praised brave men while

focusing specifically on the importance of a man’s strength and individualism. Although the

newspaper hoped to boost the western region and draw out settlers, they applauded

individuality and bravery over family or society. A poem exclaimed, “Be firm, be bold, be

strong, be true, And dare to stand alone; Strive for the right, what e’er you do, Though

helpers there are none.”17 This poem invited men to “dare The battles brunt” and face

hardships as an individual, free of “helpers.”18 The Herald editors celebrated the potential

contradictions of a man who stood alone and yet would soon help build them a community.

To be daring and hard-working was crucial to the Herald promoters, who used

another poem to declare, “Dream not, but work! Be bold! be brave! Let not a coward spirit

crave Esca[p]e from tasks allotted!”19 A bold, brave man, however, could not run amuck in

the West according to this publication. He had to simultaneously exhibit morale and

contribute to society by combating bad character, evidenced when the poem went on to

encourage men to stand up against “sin and wrong.”20 Although the editors promoted a tough

man who could conquer the West alone, they discouraged an excess of ruggedness by

reminding men to fight against wrongdoing. The westerner could not be all rugged, or all

13

17 Brown, ed., “Dare to Stand Alone,” February 5, 1859, 1.

18 Brown, ed., “Dare to Stand Alone,” February 5, 1859, 1.

19 Brown, ed., “Dream Not, but Work,” February 5, 1859, 1.

20 Brown, ed., “Dream Not, but Work,” February 5, 1859, 1.

refined, to the Herald editors, and thus they seemed to encourage a man with both seemingly

contradictory traits.

Admiration for a bold man became extreme in propaganda from the first newspaper

of the Pikes Peak region, the Rocky Mountain News. Founder and editor William N. Byers,

who left the midwest to eventually settle in Denver in 1859, clarified his goal to promote the

Denver area in his paper’s initial issue. He glorified his region, recalling the “wild beasts and

wilder Indians” of yesterday that inhabited the land in contrast to the “Anglo-Saxon

enterprise and civilization” of today, and he predicted the future of his region as “a great and

powerful state.”21 He printed countless success stories of gold mining and he recalled his

own attempts at prospecting, claiming he had found “gold in every pan.”22 Through Byers’

first publication, he clarified his goal of civilization, which will be crucial to his assertions

about the ideal western man.

Beyond glory and gold, Byers used masculine identity as a tactic to populate the area

by calling out for men of particular, strength-centered characteristics while ridiculing other,

less persistent men. Many weary travelers to Pikes Peak returned home in the East and

Midwest after experiencing firsthand or hearing stories of hardship and disappointment along

their journeys, causing a problem for promotors of Pikes Peak. Byers was one of many who

worked to fix the problem of the “go-backers,” and one of his strategies was to insult this

type of man through the Rocky Mountain News. He asserted that fleeing men were

undesirable, “restless spirits who are of no advantage to any country.”23 He told of a man

14

21 William N. Byers, “Salutatory,” Rocky Mountain News, April 23, 1859, accessed October 10, 2014, http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org, 1.

22 Byers, “Returning Immigration,” 2.

23 Byers, “Returning Immigration,” 2.

who returned to his eastward home, spreading stories of horror along the way, which were,

according to Byers, “lies, which from the first [w]ere false as his own black heart.”24 He

continued to promote Pikes Peak by claiming that the turn of migration was “an infection”

and “it is only brave hearts that can withstand it.”25

Byers wanted “brave hearts” to help him build up his civilization, who could tough it

out in a difficult region that so many “restless spirits” gave up on. But Byers, in a sense, also

called out to restless spirits, anxious in their own current homes and eager to make a new life

and a fortune in the West. A “brave heart” had restrictions, as he could not brave the

westward journey and then flee on another journey while spreading rumors. Byers grappled

with tensions in defining western manhood between one who was restless enough to leave

home and who had enough grit for the West, and someone who was indeed too restless to

stay. He wanted a man tough enough to bear Pikes Peak longterm, but restrained enough to

stick around and build a society, and although these qualities may appear contradictory, Byers

embraced them as a definition of masculinity.

In agreement with Byers on the incorrect western man, H. P. A. Smith, a probate

judge appointed by the territorial governor of Kansas, also condemned the “go-backers” by

critiquing their manly identities in a letter to the editor. He wrote passionately,

[Men] expect to find the precious metal on the surface or to dig it as they do potatoes at home and one days’ prospecting in the most improbably localities is enough for them, they hurry back to the home - the wife and children they

15

24 Byers, “Returning Immigration,” 2.

25 William N. Byers, “Returning Immigration,” Rocky Mountain News, April 23, 1859, 2, accessed October 10, 2014, http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org.

never should have left - we do not need nor want such a class of population, what we want is the resolute, energetic man who comes to stay and work.26

Smith condemned “the loafer” but he also made jabs at the family man who returned to his

home. The judge did not want a population of men who “hurry back to the home.” Although

his, and Byers’, end goal was civilization through “perseverance and industry,” neither Smith

nor Byers encouraged a man to have, or bring, a family.27 Just as Byers embraced the

potential contradictions of a man bold enough to come west and yet restrained enough to

remain, both Smith and Byers, as well as the Herald editors, promoted a contradictory

society without families, and a contradictory man who should civilize the West alone with his

bravery and endurance.

A New York-based paper titled Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper contained an

1859 article that praised physically hard working western men while demeaning supposedly

weaker men who could not tolerate the area. Though the majority of newspapers advocated

for their own regions, the unknown author of this Pikes Peak article identified himself with

the western country and wished to promote this region. A gold-rusher himself, the author

spent time in the West and argued for a similarly complex western man. He described exactly

the kind of westerner he approved of, and exactly the kind he wished would stay toward the

East:

The voyager himself was one of those insouciant, devil-may-[c]are sort of fellows that seem to take life very easily, and find it all the more pleasant for doing so. These are the right men in the right place, more fit for the work than the white-handed store clerks who come out here expecting to become

16

26 H. P. A. Smith, “Correspondence,” Rocky Mountain News, edited by William N Byers, April 23, 1859, 2, accessed October 10, 2014, http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/Default/Skins/Colorado/Client.asp?skin=Colorado&AW=1413309758710&AppName=2.

27 Smith, “Correspondence,” 2.

millionaires in a few months, and then because their expectations are not gratified, have gone back to the cities with lugubrious countenances, cursing the country and the fates that brought them out.28

The unknown author applauded a rougher, carefree and persistent attitude as opposed to the

more well-kept and uptight men who were unwilling to put in physical labor. As other

promoters elevated a strong, independent man over a family, the author of Leslie’s also

embraced a contradictory society of men in which they all performed the same physical

labor. He condemned the clerk despite the probable necessity of clerks to the western society

envisioned by these promoters.

Despite the fixation on strength and bravery, the newspaper writers were unwilling to

allow men to become fully rugged, and they tackled difficult issues of defining a man who

necessitated both a carefree and a more refined attitude to be able to make it in the West.

Paralleling other Pikes Peak boosters, the unknown author of Leslie’s article chastised

returning migrants. He expressed that “if some [reports about the West] are unfavorable, all

the better, as they will probably deter some lazy, good-for-nothing loafers and rowdies from

coming out, a blessing most devoutly to be wished for.”29 He held nothing back in

discouraging laziness and instead requesting men with “a strong arm, a strong constitution,

and stronger moral courage,” asserting, “Let honest, working men come here, and they will

be heartily welcomed.”30 While he promoted a rough, tough, enduring man, he also

condemned “loafers and rowdies,” making sure not to let that rugged, carefree attitude go too

17

28 N.A., “Pike’s Peak - the New Gold Region,” in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Frank Leslie, ed., New York, NY: April 30, 1859, accessed October 10, 2014, http://digital.denverlibrary.org, 343.

29 Leslie, ed., “Pike’s Peak,” 343.

30 Leslie, ed., “Pike’s Peak,” 342, 343.

far. To the author, a man good enough for a new western civilization was not only physically

strong but he necessitated “honesty” and morale as well, for the betterment of a society.

Foolish Travelers

Eastern newspapers during the mid-century migration promoted the opposite story

which usually encouraged men to stay in their eastern homes while condemning those who

went west to Pikes Peak. Rather than glorifying the physical strength of men who persevered

and aggressively conquered the land, the writers of eastern papers criticized rather than

embraced the contradictions of the western migrant. According to many eastern promoters,

only fools believed the western success stories and they argued that all travelers to Pikes

Peak would inevitably fail. Many articles advised everyone to “stay at home” and many

mocked the whole movement with poems and jokes calling it a “humbug.”31 These

competitive articles provide an illustration of the economic tensions in America at the time

and reveal a need for regional boosterism even in the longer-established cities and towns of

the East and Midwest. Additionally, they reinforce competing notions of manhood in

promotional literature, in which editors from the East discouraged all men from becoming a

contradictory westerner.

In contrast to the positive imagery of brave migrants from western promotional

literature, many eastern sources conveyed the message that no matter how “brave” their

readers think they may be, the realities of leaving the comforts of home are far harsher than

the western papers suggested. One such statement was clear in an article with a series of

18

31 Elwell, Pickard & Co, ed., “Another Peek at Pike’s Peak,” The Portland Transcript, July 16, 1859, accessed November 10, 2014, http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.skyline.ucdenver.edu, 119; Gabriel Ravel, ed., “Pike’s Peak Jokes,” Comic Monthly, November 1, 1859, accessed November 10, 2014, http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.skyline.ucdenver.edu, 6.

illustrations published in Harper’s Weekly from New York. The drawings were of

discouraged, starving, sick men returning to the East. The unknown author reported a bleak

side to westward expansion, stating, “During the past ten days we have met thousands of the

deluded and suffering gold-seekers retracing their steps to the quiet farms of the West. Many

of them were in a starving condition, bare-footed, ragged, and penniless.”32 One sketch of

these miserable men depicted two sitting on the ground, looking exhausted and sorrowful

with an empty gold pan in the foreground, while another image showed men and horses

hanging their heads with depictions of animal bones cluttering the dry wasteland. The author

even described instances where migrants survived only by means of cannibalism.33 Bravery

and strength do not exist in this concept of the migrants’ identities. Harper’s discouraged the

contradictory nature of leaving eastern comforts, and in doing so attempted to convince the

public to stay at home.

In another effort to critique the West and its immigrants, Harper’s Weekly printed an

illustrated short story about a farmer named Abner who travelled from the East to Pikes Peak

to make a better living selling groceries and liquor to the new immigrants. He struggled

through his journey, and made no money in the West. He finally returned home in a poor

state, and concluded that “there are worse cares in life than those of a farmer.”34 The pictorial

story was meant to help readers visualize the inevitability of failing in the West and that it

19

32 Harper & Brothers, ed., “The Pike’s Peak Gold Mines,” Harper’s Weekly, August 13, 1859, accessed November 10, 2014, http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.skyline.ucdenver.edu, 516.

33 Harper & Brothers, ed., “Pike’s Peak,” 516.

34 N.A.,“Ye Pictorial Historie of Honest Abner Howe’s Journey to Pike’s Peak in Search of a Rapid Fortune,” Harper’s Weekly, Harper & Brothers, ed., May 7, 1859, 292, accessed November 10, 2014, http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.skyline.ucdenver.edu.

may be a contradiction to leave something pleasant at home for something unknown in the

West.

Along with marking the West as a place of unnecessary hardship, many Eastern

journalists shamed and mocked the westward migrant himself. In Comic Monthly from New

York, the editors told a joke of a “humane individual” who asked a band of western travelers

whether they wanted any grass.35 When the migrants asked what they wanted with grass, the

“humane individual” responded, “‘Why seeing that you have made asses of yourselves, I

don’t know why you don’t want grass as well as any other beast.’”36 Comic Monthly

chuckled at a savage western man whose glaring stupidity entertained the ideal, “humane,”

man. As the eastern and western newspapers competed for the population, they created

conflicting ideals of masculinity in which the West promoted an embrace of certain

contradictions while eastern papers discouraged such nonsense.

20

35 “Pike’s Peak,” Comic Monthly, 3.

36 “Pike’s Peak,” Comic Monthly, 3.

CHAPTER III

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF BEING A FAMILY MAN

Promoters of the Pikes Peak region certainly perpetuated a specific, strong, conquest-

oriented western manhood during the mass migration, who was also somewhat restrained;

they called out for an individual to leave his home and family and yet they meant for him to

build a home and a society. Eastern promoters, however, jabbed at the emigrants’

masculinities to point out his contradictions and persuade people to stay. With competing

ideals of western manhood circulating through the papers, we must question how the

migrants themselves viewed their own masculine identities and the identities of other men.

Did they fit the papers’ western standard of manhood or did they agree with eastern

publications that the western man ideal was a joke? We will now turn away from newspapers

to personal letters and diaries to understand the ways westward migration affected

individuals and families who took part in this experience, and the ways they grappled with

different ideas of masculinity. Each man’s unique experience complicated the newspapers’

idealistic narratives, and yet they also illustrated a very contradictory manhood.

Personal documents help us uncover the subtleties of defining masculinity along the

westward journey and they reveal that most western men fell somewhere between, or

nowhere near, a simple definition of bravery or strength or refinement. These men did not

cross the frontier and become rugged individuals as the papers might have suggested based

on their competing values. Men and women involved in the migration grappled with

opposing versions of masculinity and they embraced the tensions and competing values of

what it meant to be a western man. Letters and diaries of individuals and families tended to

21

use three broad categories to define manhood: 1. familial relationships, 2. character traits,

and 3. a man’s duty to and relationship with the environment and larger society. In this

chapter we will delve into the ways individuals and families embraced conflicting masculine

ideals surrounding a man’s personal relationship with his family.

Popular culture and histories alike often portray westward migrants as rugged

individuals free of any relational or societal ties, yet many men who immigrated to the West

had families with whom they maintained close relationships throughout their journeys.

Husbands and fathers often left their families or sometimes brought them into harm’s way in

order to take care of them and provide for them a better life, and these family men preserved

their familial duties despite distance or hardship. They stayed connected to their wives,

children and other family members in the East through mail and conveyed the difficulties of

separation, despite their choices to migrate west.

The westward movement brought up many tensions for individuals and families in

their attempts to grapple with their own familial relationships in this western environment.

Men and women both struggled to define a good western family man. As travelers either left

their families behind or sometimes forced them into danger or discomfort, individuals

questioned and reconsidered the roles of a western family man. The contradictions of this

experience necessarily created conflicting visions of manhood wherein both men and women

embraced a family man who was quite contradictory in character. A proper family man

maintained loyalty to his family and led his household despite the burdens of the journey, and

he connected with his family as often as possible even as he traveled hundreds and hundreds

22

of miles away. He embodied a contradictory family man who abandoned his family or forced

them into hardship for the sole purpose of caring for them.

In this chapter we will explore the intricacies of manhood based on a man’s familial

relationships. We will look in detail at the expectations for how a man should treat his family

in this western setting and the consequences of maintaining these relationships while

traveling on a westward journey. I will first describe the struggles between maintaining

familial duties and the actual hardships of the West or of leaving family, and the assumptions

about a man’s role during this experience. This discussion will be followed by one on the

significance of mail communication to maintaining these duties and the emotional aspects of

keeping connected to home despite the intent to leave. Contradictions abounded in the

formation of manhood when his relationships were held in tension or torn apart due to the

conditions of his migration.

Leaving Comforts to Gain Comforts and Maintaining Patriarchal Duties

The mid-century mass migration to Pikes Peak offered a new start for many families

in the East and mid-West who were struggling to make ends meet or at least searching for a

“better” life. “Better” meant something different to each migrant who travelled to Pikes Peak

in pursuit of gold, adventure, settlement, religious work, trade, or exploration. Despite many

objectives, the West often symbolized to migrants a new experience of freedom, an

opportunity for improved finances, and a challenge to create a new self-made world. With

these hopes for a brighter future, many easterners took off on a journey across the plains.

Many of these easterners were fathers and husbands who set out toward the West with their

23

families solely in mind. Sometimes whole families left the comforts of their home together in

the hopes of reaching a land of “milk and honey.”37

Diarists and letter writers of the mid-century migration to Pikes Peak described their

decisions to leave for the West to benefit their families and the difficulties of this decision. In

the spring of 1859, gold rusher John Gibson explained as he took off from Iowa with his

band of “devil-may-care fellows” that he aspired to take advantage of the “suitable

opportunity” in Pikes Peak for the good of his family. He believed few men would turn down

such an opportunity except for those “schooled in th[e] condition” of being poor, and he felt

there were great prospects in the West for “the industrious man.” Despite Gibson’s positivity,

he expressed the tensions underlying his decision to leave home. As he described the various

men’s intentions for traveling, he explained, “Some like myself, leaving a comfortable home,

a loving wife and family for the sole purpose of placing them in easier circumstances... none

however with any very extravagant hopes.”38 From Gibson’s account, we get a sense of an

internal struggle over guarding the home and yet seizing an opportunity miles away.

Although he felt a loss over leaving home, his persistence was strong to strike it rich for his

wife and children.

With the objective of God over gold, Reverend Alexander Rankin revealed a similar

conflict when the time came to decide whether he could leave his family in Philadelphia for

the West. In an 1859 letter to his wife, he explained that the board of domestic missions

aimed to send him to Kansas Territory and he considered the journey not just for the good of

24

37 Mollie Dorsey Sanford, The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford in Nebraska and Colorado Territories, 1857-1866, ed. Donald F. Danker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959), 126.

38 John McTurk Gibson, Journal of Western Travel, edited by Weldon Hoppe (1997), accessed April 16, 2016, http://www.wjh.us/journal/.

the mission, but for the betterment of his family.39 Rankin expressed his worry about the

rising prices of land in “the Old Settlements” and he hoped that if he moved his family to

Kansas, his children might have a chance at owning land.40 To comfort his wife, he included

her in the decision-making process, stating, “he [himself] ought not to decide without

consulting you... you will write what you think about the matter.”41 As with Gibson’s remarks

on leaving his family, readers may perceive in Rankin’s letters the predicaments of

withdrawing from the home to support it.

Some mid-century family men who enlisted in westward migration chose not to leave

their families behind, but to instead bring them along, and migrants’ writings also reveal the

struggles in accepting a head-of-house who often forced his home into hardship. Newlywed

Sarah Hively from Indiana wrote about the contradictions of her new spouse imposing a

westward journey on her in her 1863 journal. She declared her discontent in being torn away

from “all that is near and dear” to “go with him who claims me for his own.”42 Hively’s

husband hoped to gain them more home comforts by essentially leaving home comforts, and

through her words we see the dilemma of such a journey. Also torn from her home in

Indiana, Mollie Dorsey Sanford traveled toward Pikes Peak some years before Hively, first

with her family under the instruction of her father and later with her new husband. Her father,

she explained, “has met with reverses, and is obliged to make a change. It is very hard in a

city like this for one pair of hands to support so large a family.” In times of financial

25

39 From the time of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 until the formation of the Colorado Territory in 1861, Kansas Territory encompassed a large portion of the region that is now the state of Colorado.

40 Alexander Taylor Rankin to Wife Ann, 1859, WH1686, Alexander Taylor Rankin Papers, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO.

41 Rankin, letters.

42 Sarah Hively, diary, March 19, 1863 - July 9, 1865, M 356, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO.

hardship, Sanford’s father marched his family across America to provide for them better

circumstances. And although Sanford admitted her apprehensions, she proclaimed her

simultaneous attraction to the West, stating, “there is something fascinating in the thought of

the opening up of a new life, a change so complete as this will be.”43 Men like Gibson, who

left his home, and fathers like Hively’s, who journeyed alongside their families, maintained

the importance of fulfilling the duties of being a family man who travelled west despite its

seeming contradictions.

Although men often took their families westward in efforts to protect and preserve

them, this act of familial responsibility often had the opposite effect. Homesickness, illness,

and death were common consequences of the migration to Pikes Peak. Though Mollie

Sanford expressed hope for a new life awaiting them in the West, she often complained along

her travels of feeling homesick and missing her friends and family who felt “so far away.”44

Diarist Ellen Hunt travelled from Illinois in 1859 to Pikes Peak with her two babies and

husband, who would later become Colorado’s Territorial Governor, to join in the gold rush.

In her diary, she admitted putting on a happy face for her husband regardless of her true

feelings. She said, “I was homesick and could have cryed, but Cam feels so sadly when I get

discouraged that I try hard to be cheerful when he is about.”45 Hunt not only felt homesick

but her physical health was very poor for most of the journey. In almost every entry she

complained of not feeling well and she noted that she was “attacked in the night with cholera

26

43 Sanford, Journal, 3.

44 Sanford, Journal, 38.

45 Ellen E. K. Hunt, “Diary of Mrs. A C. Hunt, 1859,” Colorado Magazine 21, ed. Leroy Hafen, September 1944, 161-170, accessed March 2, 2016, http://www.historycolorado.org/sites/default/files/files/Researchers/ColoradoMagazine_v21n5_September1944.pdf, 169.

morbus.”46 The reality of the migration often opposed the family man’s intentions and

responsibilities.

In addition to homesickness and illness, death was a very real repercussion of

traveling West. Sanford and her family raised money for a poor woman with a dying child

and they witnessed a man who almost bled to death. Reflecting on these dismal

circumstances, she stated, “with all our pleasures the sad has come, showing us that there are

two sides to life, the grave and the gay, a good lesson too.”47 Some families even wrote about

losing their own loved ones, like Charlotte Ronk who traveled with her parents and siblings

to Denver from Wisconsin in 1860. She complained of homesickness throughout her letters

and she described the death of her little brother and later her mother. She expressed severe

loneliness and exclaimed in a letter to her cousin, “oh Louisa it is so lonely without a

mother’s kind words to tell us what is right or wrong or to cheer our lonely hearts it is hard to

part with those we love.”48 In trying to fulfill their patriarchal duties, some men who brought

their families out for a better life during Pikes Peak migration essentially brought them out

into serious hardships. If the head-of-house was meant to protect his family, the western man

contradicted this value while simultaneously fulfilling it.

The family man’s duties were far from complete upon arriving in the West with his

wife, children, parents, or siblings. In addition to choosing a route for a better life, the family

man was expected to, above all, take care of his family and manage his role as patriarch

while out in the western landscape, regardless of hardships. One man’s westward migration

27

46 Hunt, “Diary,” 164.

47 Sanford, Journal, 10.

48 Charlotte J. Ronk to Cousin Louisa Russell, Dec 15, 1861, WH2262, Charlotte and Anna Ronk Papers, 1856-1866, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO.

exemplified this manly ideal to place family at the top of the priority list. Calvin Perry Clark

went to Pikes Peak in 1859 from Illinois with a group of men, including his father, to stay

and mine for gold. He relayed many adventures throughout his diary of taking off on his

own, shooting wild animals, getting lost, tumbling down a steep hill, and somehow managing

to locate his party again later. On a particularly rainy night, his independent adventures came

to a halt so that he could tend to his father and keep him fed and out of the rain. He “got out

Fathers Overcoat for him” and “got Father under the cart” where he could keep dry. He then

gave him food while Clark went out in search of firewood. The hardships forced Clark to

take on a caretaker role and set aside his more selfish curiosities for a while.49

Clark sent for the rest of his family back in Illinois after settling in Pikes Peak, and

his sister Helen Clark revealed similar expectations of patriarchal duties in the West along her

journey to meet Calvin in 1860. She hinted at a certain familial assumption in her diary when

she described the way her “Aunt H.” quarreled with her husband. She said, “Aunt H. says

because Uncle Porter did not wait for her when she told him she couldn’t walk, that he may

get dinner,” revealing the subtleties of a man’s duties to his wife.50 Similarly, Clark

mentioned meeting a woman along her journey who had been abandoned by her husband,

and Clark offered her own opinion on husbandly responsibilities: “I don’t see how a man can

leave a woman in such an emergency as that. I should laugh, I think, to see such a man in

trouble. I don’t believe I could pity him.” To Clark and her aunt, the West was not a country

28

49 Calvin P. Clark, “The Diary and Journal of Calvin P. Clark, 1859,” in Two Diaries, 1859-1860 (Denver, CO: Denver Public Library, 1962), 33-34.

50 Helen E. Clark, “The Diary of Helen E. Clark, 1860,” in Two Diaries, 1859-1860 (Denver, CO: Denver Public Library, 1962), 4.

for reckless independent men to cut their family ties, but rather it was a place where men

under no circumstances should disown or disobey their wives.51

Even from hundreds of miles away, loyalty to family remained an important

masculine trait. Many letters between families torn apart during the mass migration express

similar expectations for husbands and fathers. Alexander Rooney from Iowa cared for his

fiancee, Emeline Littlefield, along his westward journey by reassuring her via letters that

Iowa was the most suitable environment for her to remain sheltered while he endured the

harsh climate of the West. Although he wished she could join him, he protected her from afar

as he made his way toward Pikes Peak for gold. Rooney’s faithfulness to their monogamous

relationship was another important topic to the couple that was necessary for sustaining

familial loyalty evidenced by Rooney’s request that “Ema” be understanding of his new

female acquaintance and by Littlefield’s words of warning: “A little of my love to Hanna,

without encroaching on your rights.”52 The western family man, regardless of distance, must

maintain his patriarchal role and duty to his family.

Many men who left their families in the East also used money and patriarchal

instructions sent through the mail to fulfill their husbandly or fatherly roles across country.

Rooney, who reassured his fiancee of his loyalty, also sent her a “sample of the gold” from

the mines and Rankin, while on his mission trip to Pikes Peak, reminded his wife in a letter,

“I sent you $20 the 22nd instant which I trust you have received ere this.”53 Remarks such as

29

51 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 16.

52 Alexander Rooney to fiancee Emeline, 1859-1862, WH1700, Rooney-Littlefield Papers, 1859-1862, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO; Emeline Littlefield to fiancé Alexander, 1859-1862, WH1700, Rooney-Littlefield Papers, 1859-1862, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO.

53 Rooney, letters; Rankin, letters.

these about the importance of sending money home touch on the expectations of remaining

the head-of-house despite distance. In another message sent to an undisclosed home toward

the East, John Hartzell, who traveled in 1859 to Golden and Denver for riches, wrote to his

wife that he would send her gold, but more as a trophy of her husband’s adventures. He wrote

to her, “Send you a sample of the gold we washed out the first day we went to work you had

better put it in a small Phial - so that it will not be lost in showing it to your friends.”54

Although this gold souvenir likely boosted his family’s hopes and possibly status rather than

finances, Hartzell, like Rooney and Rankin, took care of the home by reassuring his family

that his venture was worth while, and that he had gold to prove it.

Mail enabled family men to transfer not just money but fatherly or husbandly

instructions as well to their families while away. In the same letter to his wife about shipping

home gold, Hartzell also took advantage of the post to teach and discipline his children. He

ordered, “tel them [the children] to be kind to there Mother and obay her for she knowes

what is best for you... if anything should prevent my return tel them to always to love respect

and obay there mother.” Through the letter, he temporarily transferred the head-of-house role

to his wife while he was away, and more permanently in the instance of his death. He also

requested that his wife remind the children that their “pap” loves them and to teach their

youngest to say “papy is coming home.”55 The post allowed Hartzell to advise his family and

continue his duties, and it fulfilled the same function for Reverend Rankin, who instructed

his wife on caring for their baby, stating, “you tend the baby, kiss it, nurse it & carry it about

30

54 John Hartzell to wife Augusta, June 21, 1859, -M334, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO.

55 Hartzell, letter.

as much as possibly.”56 These men refused to give up their patriarchal responsibilities despite

not being physically present at home, and they continued to convey their fatherly and

husbandly duties in the West through their letters.

Staying Emotionally Connected from a Vast Distance

Historian David Hankin argued in his book about nineteenth-century mail

communication in America, The Postal Age, that the postal service changed relationships and

made users dependent on distant communication. He described the “new forms of intimacy

and alienation” that accompanied this connectedness that spanned vast distances.57 These

tensions between intimacy and alienation are evident in mid nineteenth-century

correspondence between migrants to Pikes Peak and their families, and the importance of

mail to separated families is unmistakable. As we have already seen, letters were important

for allowing travelers to maintain their family obligations, yet they were crucial on an

emotional level as well. The family man who abandoned his family to provide a better life for

them often felt the torment of separation and used mail as a tool to stay emotionally

connected to his home. This section will focus on mail correspondence and delve into the

contradictions of physically withdrawing yet remaining emotionally connected to the East.

Much of the correspondence between families during the migration focused on the

importance of receiving letters and conveying to the recipient where to send the next letter. In

the same note about money and instruction to his children, Hartzell revealed his dependence

on letters from home when he wrote that hearing from his family was “one of the greatest

31

56 Rankin, letters.

57 David M. Hankin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), x.

Blessings we can be blessed with.”58 Similarly, the newly engaged couple Rooney and

Littlefield expressed their anxieties over receiving correspondence from one another. Rooney

described to his fiancee the men’s nervousness leading up to the next town where they prayed

they would receive news “from our hearts brightest treaseur.”59 He lamented that he

impatiently stood “behind a long file of men waiting in breathless suspense,” and he

portrayed a sense of desperation to hear from his fiancee, stating, “I am poor but I would

freely give twenty dollars to hear from you.”60 Littlefield, his betrothed, echoed his

dependence on the mail when she urged Rooney to write due to the “dumps” she got in when

she heard no word. She exclaimed, “Just see what inspiration your letter has given.”61

Hearing from loved ones was crucial to the families torn apart and the mail symbolized, as

historian Hankin described, both a closeness and an anxious division to these families.

Despite the family man’s intentions to abandon his home for the greater good of the family,

he and his loved ones deemed a complete detachment unacceptable.62

Westward migrants and families in the East often used a good amount of letter space

to describe the technicalities of this postal transmission, offering locations and timing for

retrieving letters and explaining how and when their next letter would go out. Littlefield used

portions of her letters to describe her troubles in timing her letters correctly with her fiancé's

movements, and to remind him she was trying her best. She explained, “I would have sent a

32

58 Hartzell, letter.

59 Rooney, letters.

60 Rooney, letters.

61 Littlefield, letters.

62 Other instances of the desperate dependence on mail correspondence include passages in the Charlotte Ronk letters in which she begs for messages from every family member and in the Mollie Dorsey Sanford journal when she described receiving much-needed mail.

letter there [at Fort Kearney] but had no opportunity... I did not know the distances nor the

rate of your traveling so I just guessed the best I could.”63 In a similar treatment of shipment

details, Reverend Rankin instructed his wife to send her future letters to specific cities and he

made a point to remind her of the time it would take him to journey there, writing statements

such as, “consequently shall not get letters from you till then.”64 In multiple letters he

mapped out his projected timeframes for each of his journeys to the next city so as to prepare

his wife and streamline their postal communication. Such remarks about the details of

sending and receiving mail highlight the importance of a man’s duties to stay connected to

family during this migration and the worries that came not only with separation but with this

broad communication network.

Families used letters not only to ensure communication remained smooth and reliable,

but to keep emotionally connected to each other during the family man’s journey. Writers of

family correspondence expressed discontent at the separation, yet they put a great deal of

effort into comforting one another from afar to maintain closeness. Many migrants made a

point to “send love” home in their letters, and Ronk, who described the deaths of her

relatives, also exemplified these expressions of affection by including many sentiments such

as, “they all send about a ton of their love to you all to divide among one and another.”65

Reverend Rankin also sent soothing words home, stating to his wife, “You must have

patience; time flies; three months are gone; and nine will soon pass away.”66 We get a sense

33

63 Littlefield, letters.

64 Rankin, letters.

65 Ronk, letter, July 13, 1860.

66 Rankin, letters.

from these statements of affection the difficulties in and importance of maintaining families

from a distance. John Hartzell wrote many lines to comfort his wife, stating his good health

and good food, and that should he ever go back West again, he would “bring my family with

me.”67 Just because the vast West tore families apart physically, they often refused to part

emotionally.

Newly engaged couple Rooney and Littlefield used romantic language to maintain

their loving relationship through the mail despite the distance between them. Rooney

comforted his fiancee by reminding her that although they were miles apart, she was his

“constant com[pany],” and he reminded her to “look forward to a bright future whear thear

shal be no breaking asunder those cords of afection.” Rooney also helped preserve their

romantic relationship by gushing to Littlefield that “in evry beutiful flower I see your image

is impresed,” and that every night he kissed her “ambrotype [photograph].”68 Littlefield

returned the romance in a description of her many “fancy flights” she took to Pikes Peak to

be with Rooney in her imagination. She told of the times she would “take supper” with him

and how she would “see how things look at the Peak.” When she awoke from her daydream

she was disheartened and “kiss[ed] the shadows.”69 The betrothed couple did not do away

with romance while Rooney journeyed far to the West, and this emotional connectedness was

crucial to the families involved in migration.

Family men, and their female counterparts, felt it was their duty to make the

westward journey for their families and most crossed the plains with the assumption that the

34

67 Hartzell, letter.

68 Rooney, letters.

69 Littlefield, letters.

West held the possibilities for a better life. The expectations of the migration, however, did

not always match the reality of hardships, and many men ended up creating difficulties and

miseries for their families in the process. A western family man essentially formed out of the

contradictory actions of men attempting to care for their families either in hardships or from

afar, and this man both reinforced and opposed patriarchal values. Similar tensions and

contradictions abound western manhood in individual writings that describe manly character

traits and environmental relationships.

35

CHAPTER IV

RUGGED OR RESTRAINED?

Men and women involved in westward migration defined masculinity based on more

than just personal relationships. In this chapter we will unravel the human characteristics that

defined western men and the challenges both men and women faced in defining these men as

rugged, restrained, and both or neither of these qualities. We will look at the distinct

characteristics men took on, and the types of masculinity that both men and women either

idealized or discouraged. We will attempt to understand whether migrant men and women

expected men to be rough, brave, and enduring, as the western papers encouraged, or to stay

put as part of a family or community, and remain content on a farm, as the Eastern papers

hoped. The result will be a man who is somewhere between.

I will first discuss the necessity of maintaining a more restrained manhood in the

West, the characteristics that contradicted this simple definition, the importance of

simultaneously practicing a physical toughness and endurance, and finally the general dislike

of the rowdy western caricature which, once again, required from men a certain level of

refinement. This narrative will reveal the tensions in designing a western man and the

nuances involved when “vulgarity” was looked down on while characteristics such as

cooking were accepted. The western man was not just rugged or restrained. He embodied a

definition of manliness that used opposing ideals and was full of questions and tensions.

Westerners Must Remain Gentlemen

As we have seen in the importance of family connections, these migrant men were not

the rugged individuals glorified in western lore. Not only did many of them maintain

36

relational ties in the East, men and women involved in the movement enforced many

qualities of a more refined-type man. Even in the West, where physical and mental struggles

abounded, many continued to value gentlemanly restraint. Prior to his promotional

endeavors, newspaperman William Byers wrote a memorable quote to future travelers in his

guidebook to the mines: “Carry your principles with you; leave not your character at home,

nor your Bible.”70 Later in his newspaper, as we noted above, principles were still important

to Byers’ ideal western man, but in his less promotional and more instructional guide, he

stressed even more to men the importance of keeping a certain level of refinement.

Although popular culture might suggest otherwise, the image of a refined gentleman

is far from absent in Pikes Peak migrants’ writings. Sentiments similar to Byers’ ideals

abound descriptions of western masculinity. One particularly adventurous woman, Julia

Archibald Holmes, moved across the plains from Massachusetts to Kansas, and then in 1858

at age twenty she travelled to Pikes Peak with a small group of men where she endeavored,

and succeeded, to climb and summit the Pikes Peak mountain. She intended her writings

along the way to Pikes Peak for a feminist journal, The Sibyl, where they were published

after she returned, and thus her journal expounded the rights of women to wear bloomer

costume and to be freed from the “feminine impotence” forced on them by their “sphere.”71

Despite her flamboyant displays of feminism in her writings, she accepted the roles of the

men in her company as leaders of the group and she appreciated their chivalrous gestures of

sleeping outdoors while she resided in the covered wagon. She was also grateful for their

37

70 William Byers, Handbook to the Gold Fields of Nebraska and Kansas, 1859, accessed February 3, 2016, http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/4535, 113.

71 Julia Archibald Holmes, A Bloomer Girl on Pike’s Peak, 1858: Julia Archibald Holmes, First White Woman to Climb Pike’s Peak, ed. Agnes Wright Spring (Denver, CO: Denver Public Library, 1949), 16.

noble natures as she stated in a letter home to her family: “the most of them very pleasant all

of them very respectful to me.”72 Although she primarily focused on women’s rights, Holmes

also revealed, as so many others did, her expectation for proper men in the West.

Appreciation for a refined manhood particularly flourished in times of western

courtship. Sanford, who experienced the toils of the West due to her father’s insistence of a

better life, refused to marry except for love, and she certainly expressed fondness of Byron

Sanford’s gentlemanly ways. One of the first times she saw “By,” she declared her approval

of his strapping appearance stating, “He is fine looking when rigged up in his suit of black,

and stove pipe hat.”73 She also later praised his sense of humor and deep love for his mother,

and she cherished his role as caretaker when “he bathed my fevered face” after she fell ill.74

Sanford illustrated an idyllic western man who contrasted the popular image of rough,

physical men from the Pikes Peak papers, and from popular culture even to this day. She

expressed her preference for a western man in a suit and top hat, who held strong family

values and who put his husbandly duties above the rest.

The gentlemanly appearance valued in the West also included a restriction on the

types of women a man might associate himself with. In a particularly revealing passage,

Helen Clark described a group of “slovenly” women from another camp which one of her

group leaders went to investigate.75 Although Clark and her group were interested to hear of

other women in the area, their leader refused to join together camps based on these women’s

38

72 Holmes, Bloomer, 28.

73 Sanford, Journal, 24.

74 Sanford, Journal, 59.

75 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 24.

poor outward appearances. A western gentleman’s appearance relied not only on his own

sophistication but also on the looks of others in his company. Men often had to uphold a level

of exterior refinement even in the West.

Religiosity, too, defined the gentleman, and it was often an equally important

characteristic for a western man. As Byers revealed when he reminded travelers to bring

along their Bibles, many migrants to Pikes Peak valued men with a Christian background,

and especially one who fervently practiced his faith. Libeus Barney, an 1859 gold seeker

from New York, criticized the “genuine specimens of border ruffianism” in Denver who,

“having not fear of God nor man,” littered the western population with rudeness.76 Similarly,

Reverend Rankin boasted the importance of God in the West along his mission trip and the

“able and energetic” men who “are doing great work in the Territory” as well as his

disapproval for those less enthusiastic. He believed, “women will be my most efficient

helpers in the work [as they] evince more zeal than the men,” noting his disappointments in

the less passionately religious men.77 Helen Clark would likely agree with Barney and

Rankin as she noted the “niceness” of fellow Methodists and the “bright intellect” and good

nature of a young preacher she encountered.78 The ideal western man longed for in these

39

76 Libeus Barney, Letters of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush, 1859-1860, ed. Thomas Hornsby Ferril (San Jose, CA: The Talisman Press, 1959), 59.

77 Rankin, letters.

78 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 9.

narrations was not free from the refinement and restraint of Christianity, and these writers

indeed frowned upon a lack of church and worship.79

A Good Man is Carefree and Makes a Good Cook

Although many individuals and families involved in westward migration refused to

let go of more restrained masculine values, they also embraced some contradictory traits.

Alternative versions of manhood opposed a refined gentleman while both men and women

simultaneously attempted to reinforce it. The ideal man was often thought to be carefree,

often dressed in “western” attire, and willing and able to perform traditionally feminine tasks.

Significantly, these characteristics threw a refined gentlemen into question, and yet many on

their journeys to Pikes Peak happily accepted them as suitable additions to manhood in the

West. Here we can see the complications and contradictory nature of a western man when

migrants attempted to bolster notions of a restrictive and proper masculinity while

simultaneously breaking them down.

Manly restraint only went so far to many migrants, and a carefree attitude was often a

highly desirable masculine trait to the westward migrants. Sanford, who praised her soon-to-

be husband’s fashionably polite appearance, conversely fawned over his demeanor which she

felt was specifically western. She detested the gallantry of most men who attempted to court

her with too much “flattery” and she appreciated “By’s” easygoing approach. She explained,

“It is wonderful how free and easy people become in this country. I would once have thought

40

79 Further implications of the importance of religion in the West can be found in the many descriptions of devotion to Christian activities on Sundays despite the roughness of the journey. Many parties refused to travel on Sundays as a display of faith, and when leaders made decisions not to rest on the Lord’s Day, diarists and letter-writers often complained. Many also regarded an indifference to Sunday worship in the Colorado towns and cities as appalling. Such examples may be found in writings by Helen Clark, Alexander Rankin, Julia Archibald Holmes, Charlotte Ronk, Mollie Dorsey Sanford, Libeus Barney, and more.

it too presuming for a gent to make himself so much at home on so short an acquaintance.”80

While previously admiring his gentlemanly dress and family values, she later favored

qualities that she deemed opposite to the “gents” she was more familiar with.

Also a supporter of an easy manly attitude, Elizabeth Keays travelled to Camp Collins

from Illinois in 1866 to live with her “Auntie Stone,” and she revealed her feelings toward

western masculinity in her diary. During a leisure period when her group gathered to play a

game of cards, she reflected on men’s rights when one of the wives refused to let her husband

participate. Keays exclaimed, “Mem. to write a book on Mens rights, for no Man would think

it his place to forbid his wife so innocent a thing as a game of cards in their own company.”81

In a similar fashion to Sanford, Keays advocated for a certain manly freedom on her journey

despite the tension with keeping restraint.

Westward migrants John Gibson and John Fletcher, who both left their loved ones

behind in search of gold, similarly endorsed the appeal of a carefree western attitude. As

Gibson took off on his journey with a group of “devil-may-care fellows,” he exclaimed that

“every one appears to enjoy himself and throws all care to the winds.”82 Several times he

described the joy of kicking back with the boys and enjoying their freedom, having “a jolly

time” and getting “pretty mellow.”83 John Fletcher left Wisconsin for the gold in Pikes Peak

with a team of eight men, who he said all displayed “spirits light and free.”84 Upon his return

41

80 Sanford, Journal, 39.

81 Elizabeth Keays, “Overland Diary of Elizabeth Parke Keays, 1866,” in The Saga of “Auntie” Stone and Her Cabin, ed. Nolie Mumey (Boulder, CO: Johnson Publishing Company, 1964) 64.

82 Gibson, Journal.

83 Gibson, Journal.

84 John W. Fletcher, Colorado Odyssey: The 1859 Gold Rush Diary of John W. Fletcher, ed. Gregory M. Franzwa (Tucson, AZ: The Patrice Press, 2001), 1.

home, he concluded that a carefree attitude is necessary in Pikes Peak, arguing that the

“future adventerous ones” would succeed in the West and find gold.85

One specific mark of a carefree western man was a certain western attire. Many

migrants to Pikes Peak expressed their admiration for men dressed in handmade skins, and

many even preferred it to the gentleman’s uniform. In opposition to Sanford’s glee at her

future husband’s formal suit, Byers proposed in his guidebook to Pikes Peak that travelers

hold onto their morals but he did not recommend bringing refined clothing. He urged men to

leave “all kinds of fine clothing” at home, and instead regarded wool and leather as crucial

western wear.86 Other travelers to Pikes Peak supported Byers’ recommendation, as Calvin

Clark described the comfort of his “moqisons,” which he wore through his whole trip, and

gold miner George Andrew Jackson from an unspecified region boasted about his skills at

making and gambling for pants and coats of animal skins.87 Calvin’s sister Helen similarly

approved of this western-type garb, apparent when she described the couple she traveled with

as “fine.” She wrote that the woman “seems a real lady... Her husband is a pilot and cook and

drives a team, besides his father is President of the Co, and is already in Gregory - Rocky

Mts. Mr. W. wears buckskin pants and antelope skin vest (with the hair on) - all fine

appearing people.”88 Rather than praising the man’s “ruggedness” or his “restraint,” Clark

illustrated the complexities of defining an ideal western man who took on multiple roles,

some more restrained than others, and the fashionability of wearing animal skins as an

42

85 Fletcher, Odyssey, 126.

86 Byers, Handbook, 27.

87 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 27; George Andrew Jackson, Diary of George Andrew Jackson, 1858, trans. William N. Byers, 1896, -M 393, Diary, 1858 Dec 26-1859 Mar 7, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO, 9, 13.

88 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 25.

expression of a carefree western attitude. Individuals grappled with the tensions of defining

western manly attire; whereas some preferred a more gentlemanly appearance, many

embraced a rougher look of animal skins.

A lack of women, luxury, and stability created the necessity for a men participating in

westward migration to at times disregard the boundaries of traditional nineteenth-century

masculine roles, which assigned the “public sphere” to men, and the “private” to women. As

Martha Maxwell suggested by praising David Brown for being “as handy as a girl,” good

western men often took on tasks usually deemed feminine in American culture such as

cooking, sewing, and washing. Calvin Clark described the necessity for himself and the other

men in his group to perform active, and more traditionally masculine, roles of hunting and

catching fish, but they did not have the leisure of passing the cooking portion onto their

wives or daughters. Accordingly, one of the men “bot some flower and meat” and they all

“went to cooking.”89 Gibson, who left his family to provide them more comforts,

sympathized with women who traditionally tended to washing when he and his group had to

take on the task. He exclaimed, “we all realized in part, what the women have to endure in

order to make a home comfortable and tidy.... I don't think any of us will ever forget our first

acquaintances with the wash tub.”90 In a similar acceptance of “feminine” tasks, to George

Jackson, who gambled for buckskins, “graining skins to make coat and pants” was a

necessary and typical activity in the West, and he made jabs at his friend Tom for sewing

together the “wrong side of buck-skin.”91

43

89 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 55.

90 Gibson, Journal.

91 Jackson, Diary, 9, 11.

While Jackson, Gibson, and Clark cooked, sewed, and washed to account for the

missing women on their trips, many men, like David Brown, stood up to help even when

women were available to take charge. When Helen Clark and her mother became sick, the

men went into town for some food, and Mollie Sanford’s friend Ned assisted her in cooking

supper.92 Whether traveling apart from their families, in a group of single men, or along with

their wives and children, these men made feminine tasks a part of their masculine identities

while journeying to Pikes Peak.

The West Calls for Grit

Despite an approval of refined men, who, albeit, were also carefree and even took on

feminine roles, the farmers of eastern papers content to stay put did not have the same draw

for many migrants during the mid-century movement to “Pikes Peak.” These travelers were,

after all, the ones who decided to make the journey away from home, and thus, active

leading, hunting, and fighting usually took precedent for these westward migrants over the

reserved farmer. Physicality and endurance were often important to male nature in the West

and strength, usually coupled with hardship, equated to manliness. While this part of western

manliness indeed supported the Pikes Peak boosters’ claims from the newspapers about a

physically tough man, just as the papers’ ideal man comprised of opposing traits, it is

important to view “ruggedness” in conjunction with other nuanced traits. Gentlemanly

restraint, feminine roles, and family morals all worked in tension with carefree and rugged

behaviors and an animal skin wardrobe. It is additionally nonsensical to view physicality as

entirely opposed to gentlemanly qualities, as many physical ventures by westward migrants

44

92 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 24; Sanford, Journal, 125.

contained a chivalrous element in which men took charge to protect the group. Chivalry in

the West embraced both physicality and the role of men as familial protectors. Manliness was

often a complex blur of opposing and multifaceted characteristics.

Crucial to constructing a western manhood was the quality of remaining tough despite

hardships. To many men and women who journeyed across the plains, a man had to maintain

a certain grit to overcome the western world which brought some contradictory

characteristics to the men who was also meant to retain some level of restraint. For many

family men, for example, the West was not merely a place to find a better life for the family,

but to also conquer the perils of the wild with some aggression. John Hartzell, who remained

affectionately and dutifully connected to his home, also provided, specifically to his sons, a

very “rugged” account of tackling a deer, exclaiming, “I shot a deer one day and [c?] it I went

up to it. it made fight with me I had a bayonet on my gun and when it came to me I hit it with

the bayonett and kild it.”93 He bragged to his boys about the importance of toughing it, and

the strength it took to fight with wild animals. Reverend Rankin also illustrated the harshness

of the West when he wrote matter-of-factly, “Every man who crossed the Plains carries his

bed with him or sleeps without one.” While sending money and instruction home, he also

sent comments on the difficulties of the environment and his need to “buy a Buffalo robe” to

tough it out.94 John Gibson, who journeyed for his family, boasted of his stamina in his

journal, stating that although they met many obstacles that “tended to dishearten the timid,”

he exclaimed, “we think we are made of sterner stuff, and are determined to see the Peak,

gold or no gold.” He said that after a while they got used to roughing it, and, as he said, “We

45

93 Hartzell, letter.

94 Rankin, letters.

live like fighting cocks, and are now capable of almost any amount of physical endurance.”95

As these family men trekked through hardships to provide for their families, staying

physically strong in times of hardship became key to their identities.

While family men braved the western turmoil, feminist Julia Archibald Holmes also

remarked on the physical strength of men. Holmes, who felt gracious for the respectable men

in her company, also associated grit in the face of hardships with manliness, a trait she hoped

to take on in order to fulfill her feminist goals. She explained, “Believing, as I do, in the right

of woman to equal privileges with man, I think that when it is in our power we should, in

order to promote our own independence, at least, be willing to share the hardships which

commonly fall to the lot of man.” Although she enjoyed the comforts of sleeping inside the

covered wagon, she forced herself to walk rather than ride to gain strength to climb the Pikes

Peak mountain. She believed her bloomers symbolized a sense of freedom and power to

conquer the land “as much as if I had been one of the favored lords of creation.”96 As an avid

feminist she hoped for the same physical and powerful ideals given to men, and although, to

Holmes, this was an act for the rights of women, in it she revealed her beliefs about a

physical masculinity.

The notion of bearing difficulties using masculine vigor held significance for migrant

men as well, like gold rusher Libeus Barney from New York, whose letters written for The

Bennington Banner provide an example of the necessity for men to toughen up and endure no

matter the misery. Noting the bleak scenes of exhaustion and starvation in Pikes Peak, he

explained, “although their labor paid them but a miserly pittance, they were obliged to ‘root

46

95 Gibson, Journal.

96 Holmes, Bloomer, 17.

man or die,’ work or starve.”97 He claimed to approach his own work-or-die situations with a

similar endurance, stating, “notwithstanding these discouraging evidences staring us in the

face, we pitched our tent and began prospecting.”98 Although Barney and his men had to

“screw our courage to the sticking point,” several times to make it through, he still praised

gentlemanly morals.99 In one description of a typical “western” fight, he explained of the

quarreling men, “Both seemed full of nerve, perfectly composed, and stood manfully up to

the perilous work... Both are gentlemen, and esteemed by all who know them.”100 In this

scene, “gentlemen” fought physically with bravery, all while maintaining their polite

“esteem.”

The ruggedness of the West and western men was also praised by traveller George M.

Willing, who wrote home to his wife in Missouri on his 1859 trip over the plains. He toiled

hard, but expressed with delight “man’s fiercer nature” that came alive in the West, in which

men were “released from all the restraining influences of society, wildly do his passions

riot.”101 Horace Greeley, who journeyed from New York to Pikes Peak in 1859 before writing

promotions for the Rocky Mountain News, also emphasized a tough western man in his hopes

for the future population of Pikes Peak. He believed the area would soon “swarm with a

hardy, industrious, energetic white population” of “men in the full vigor of their prime... fully

47

97 Libeus Barney, Letters of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush, 1859-1860, ed. Thomas Hornsby Ferril (San Jose, CA: The Talisman Press, 1959), 28.

98 Barney, Letters, 33.

99 Barney, Letters, 31.

100 Barney, Letters, 59.

101 George M. Willing, “Diary of a Journey to the Pike’s Peak Gold Mines in 1859,” ed. Ralph P. Beiber, Reprint from The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol XIV, No. 3 (December, 1927), 366.

able to protect and govern themselves.”102 Greeley’s ideal western man boasted a physical

strength and independence while Willing glorified the wild freedom of men in the West, both

reminiscent of Turner’s rugged frontiersman.

Physical strength and vigor was not solely for men who traveled alone or in groups of

other men. Men were expected, by both themselves and their families who accompanied

them, to perform active leading roles and to protect the group from harm, and this type of

familial physicality often contained a chivalrous, gentlemanly quality. Hunting symbolized

one manly duty in which men physically took charge to provide for the group. As Sarah

Hively begrudgingly left her loved ones to follow her new husband to Pikes Peak, she wrote

many times about Andrew’s hunting ventures while she maneuvered the oxen. The men in

Julia Holmes’ group similarly took on the role of hunting and they endured physical

discomfort by sleeping outdoors to take care of Holmes and the other women.103 As noted

previously, Holmes appreciated their polite gestures, which also included a rough physical

element. Strength-centered activities were not merely outlets for men to break free from

restraint, and they often fulfilled patriarchal duties.

This expectation for men to take charge in physically demanding situations was a

crucial part of defining manhood in the West. Traveler Helen Clark remarked on a number of

difficult circumstances that called for the men’s bravery and chivalry to their families and to

the rest of the group. She explained that during a terrible thunderstorm, the men rushed

48

102 Greeley, Overland, 137.

103 Many journals note similar sleeping arrangements in which men slept out in the elements while women stayed warmer and dryer inside more closed in areas such as wagons and tents. Elizabeth Keays noted multiple floods in which the men scurried around to fix tents and stay out of the rain while she and the other women continued to sleep soundly in their covered quarters. Mollie Sanford expressed the same situation when she and the other women in her company rested in their tent while the men took off to hunt.

around to fix the tents, and during two instances in which the women spotted some fierce

wild animals, they cried out to the men who “chased it quite a distance” with their guns.104

Mollie Sanford wrote of a similar situation, but instead of wolves and buffalo, the men in her

group prepared ammunition for the robbers they heard were lurking ahead. Strenuous manual

labor also fell on the men such as the work of building a cabin, as Sanford’s father undertook

for his family, and the cultivation of farms, which calmed Sanford’s nerves as she witnessed

the men working away. A western man might be praised for his physical strength or

ruggedness but not always for its ability to free him from restrained qualities. This physical

type of manhood often linked directly to a man’s own restraint toward protecting his family.

A Distaste for Drunkenness and Vulgarity

Although strength and endurance were key to western manhood, the overtly “rough

and tough” westerner as we know him from myth was most often despised by both men and

women involved in the migration. Traits such as drunkenness, vulgarity and lawlessness were

considered hyper-masculine behavior in the West that symbolized the consequences of too

much freedom, physicality and independence. Most travelers to Pikes Peak refused to accept

this type of man, and men and women alike viewed this excess of ruggedness as improper

and harmful to society. Here we return to the ideals of a more restrained type of masculinity

in which the values of a gentleman opposed this western ruffian. Migrants to Pikes Peak

grappled with the fine line between the charms of a carefree, physical man and the

distastefulness of a man who became vulgar in the West.

49

104 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 23, 33.

John Fletcher, who valued the free-spirited nature the West brought to him and the

adventurous types who could succeed in the gold mines, conversely complained of the

beastly transformation that the West forced upon good men. He explained the “Sudden

change which takes place in Many, as Soon as they leave the Frontier,” in which they

“assume or take upon themselves the actions and looks of ferocious wild beasts.”105 He

described the continual “growling, and grumbling” of their new Western negative mindsets,

criticizing rugged men for crossing the line from manly to beastly. Reverend Rankin revealed

a similar transformation in men that reflected an excess of freedoms. He contended, “there is

no law, no jails, no penitentiaries, & no courts in this country; the consequence is that there is

no restraint on human passion. The public morals are deplorable. Men who were moral in the

states, some who were professors of religion here swear, get drunk, gamble.” With a lack of

restraint, gentlemen became ruffians and even beasts.

Calvin Clark noted a similar negative transformation in men that was specifically

centered on intemperance. He argued that in the West, gentlemen get drunk and forget to pay

up on what they had promised in their belligerent state, and thus the gentlemen turn into bad

men. He explained that these “drunken sots” often “tell you that they wir drunk when they

promised to ever pay it.”106 In a narration of a row with a “drunken gentleman” who refused

to pay him due wages with the reason that Clark’s employer was a horse thief, he contended

that “the drunken gentleman turns out but one graid loer than his particular friend, a Horse

50

105 Fletcher, Odyssey, 128.

106 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 89.

Theif as he pleased to term him.”107 Western men could be carefree, physically strong men in

buckskins, but a complete absence of refinement remained unacceptable.

The idea that drunkenness encapsulated the ruffian attitude in the West was not just

Clark’s. His sister Helen similarly remarked on her distaste for the “drunken, half naked beast

(called man),” whom she encountered on her arrival at Fort Kearney. She complained that

this “beast” was “kicking, yelling & swearing and howling. Rather a poor looking

advertisement for Kearney City.”108 Mollie Sanford also declared her intolerance for Dick

Gregory, a hotel bar tender they meet along their journey. She “lectured him for ever selling

liquor [and] treated him real shabbily, been saucy and rude even,” as she refused to associate

with “that class of men.”109 She disapproved overall of the vulgarity of many westerners, and

of her friends who learned to live with “drunken roughs” and pistol fights, and she declared,

“I think if people would not get used to such things, there would be less of it.”110 Ruggedness

in the West was a contested issue and defining a rugged western man was no simple matter.

Cursing was considered another inappropriate western male behavior, and Mollie

Sanford and Elizabeth Keays in particular made a fuss about their contempt for this rudeness.

Although both Sanford and Keays expressed their hopes that men could experience freedoms

in the West such as card games, they equally felt strongly that there was a limit to that

freedom. Although Sanford enjoyed that “By” was “free” and less “sentimental” than other

men, she cried upon hearing him swear at the “cows,” and she lamented that it was “the first

51

107 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 76.

108 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 23.

109 Sanford, Journal, 17, 20.

110 Sanford, Journal, 21.

time I ever heard a profane word come out of him.”111 Keays also disapproved of male

swearing, and she insisted that women be treated with respect by men. Despite her assertions

about men’s rights, when she met another woman along the way who complained of the man

she travelled with, Keays shuddered at the “profane language and disagreeableness altogether

of her escort.” She praised her own co-migrants, as “not an angry or profane word have they

uttered” and she felt glad that her company contrasted this woman’s.112 Although both

women proved they did not entirely conform to a refined masculine ideal, they

simultaneously demonstrated their apprehensions to accept a complete lack of gentlemanly

respectability.

Westward migrants faced competing masculine traits head on and often fully accepted

opposing characteristics simultaneously as a definition of a good man, such as freedom along

with restraint. Individuals in their personal writings rarely, if ever, advocated a single-faceted

man who should be, for example, a polite, family-oriented gentleman and never a rough and

free individual, or vice versa. The western man was also rarely, if ever, free of any limitations

to such singular qualities. Many migrants saw restrictions on both freedom as well as on

restraint as crucial to a good western man. Western men exhibited a substantial variety of

personal characteristics and concurrently displayed a level of polite refinement, a carefree

attitude, the ability to step into feminine roles and wear animal skins, a knack for physical

strength in arduous circumstances, and the potential for a surplus of vigor to the point of

repulsive vulgarity.

52

111 Sanford, Journal, 120.

112 Keays, “Overland,” 68.

CHAPTER V

DOES A MAN EMBRACE OR CHANGE THE WILDERNESS?

In struggling to define the West as a transient world full of travelers and temporary

shelters that was in the midst of a transformation toward settlement, migrants deliberated the

importance of the wild landscape over civilization. The shifting composition of Pikes Peak

communities caused new inhabitants to question the ways a man should deal with civilizing

the West and the type of relationship he should have with the western environment and its

new society. Personal writings of migrants reveal that defining the West in its transition

between hasty and temporary encampments toward what they viewed as a more stable

community was understood and debated in terms of a man’s relationship to his environment.

As historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued, throughout American history the

frontiersman conquered the western wilderness by first reverting back to primitive ways and

then transforming the wild into a civilization distinct from Europe. Turner indeed captured

the contradictory nature of adopting yet conquering the wilderness, but I will argue that the

migrants grappled with far more complexities about whether or not a man should embrace or

change the West. Here we will explore the ways men and women defined masculinity in

terms of place including men’s relationship to the environment and society. Throughout this

chapter I will explain the popular ideal of conquering wilderness by means of power and

work, the equally attractive standard of embracing the wilderness through sight-seeing and

adventure, the distaste for western crudeness and the rejection of wilderness as a barbaric

place not suitable for society, and the simultaneous feeling that despite its crudeness, men

would make the West its own civilization complete with its rougher qualities. Migrants often

53

believed that a man should simultaneously control, embrace, reject, and accept the western

landscape.

Men Rule the Wilderness

Many migrants to Pikes Peak during the 1850s and 60s expressed their belief that a

man should rule the wilderness and work the land to improve it. Horace Greeley argued in his

letters recounting his journey that “the Rocky Mountains... are destined to be a favorite resort

and home of civilized man.”113 He explained simply the goal of conquest in the West and his

hopes that the wilderness would soon become “home” to the “civilized” instead of remaining

a curious landscape free of the marks of society. Calvin Clark too remarked on the prospects

of men one day owning this land, and his following discussion on cultivation and civilization

summarizes this common ideal:

The vallies in this vicinity will one day be dencely populated and brought under a good state of cultivation, they now call up in the mind of the spectator images of rural ease, and plenty to be realized beneath the scepter of civilization, when the poor old Indian shall be clostly girted with bands of white brothers hoo shall teach him by example the nobility of toil and morality...114

Clark reflected on an ideal society of “rural ease” that would be laid down by the “scepter of

civilization.” He knew that white men would not only civilize the West, but they would also

lead Indians to be noble and moral, and a part of white male society. Ruling the wilderness

was the eventual goal, and Indians were part of this wilderness.

To many migrants, Indians were more one with the wild and less a part of civilized

humanity. Writers made distinctions between men and Indians, ensuring a separation between

54

113 Greeley, Overland, 136.

114 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 18.

themselves and the other, which not only grouped Indians in with the wilderness but also

distanced the writers themselves from this wilderness. As a group of Indians approached him,

Clark revealed his perception of Indians as unmanly, stating, “we soon came in sight of a

cople of men or indians and I could not sez positively which as they wir about one mile

off.”115 Julia Holmes made a similar distinction when she woke up to the sounds of “yelling

and screeching,” and she asserted that “civilized man has his prototype in the noisy Indian, so

the canine domestic has his lupine prototype, which can make comparatively savage

sounds.”116 Holmes viewed man as a progression from the savagery of the Indian, and, to

Holmes, civilization was key to turning a primitive being into a man. Many writers of the

mid nineteenth-century migration made similar remarks on the vulgarity of Indians and their

seeming oneness with the wild while distancing themselves from the whole scene. Mollie

Sanford made this distinction clear when she described Indians as “creatures” who “looked

too filthy to live.”117 To many migrants, men were not Indians, and Indians were not men,

and in this view, wilderness was a mark of unmanliness.

Often key to a man’s relationship with the wild West and his efforts to civilize it was

his ability to work the land. Greeley emphasized a hard-working class of men as the type fit

to live at Pikes Peak. He wrote that the “right men will gradually unearth” the gold in Pikes

Peak, and that these men were “hardy, industrious, energetic [and] white.”118 George Willing,

who described the wild passion of men in the West, revealed in action the ideal of working

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115 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 54.

116 Holmes, Journal, 18.

117 Sanford, Journal, 122.

118 Greeley, Overland, 136-37.

the wilderness. He explained that despite “all these discouragements starting me in the face”

that he had chosen a claim and, he stated, “at all events, I mean to gouge into it extensively,

and probe it thoroughly.”119 His journey was not about reveling in nature’s beauties, but

about remaining determined to work the land and retrieve the gold he had set out for.

Similarly, Elizabeth Keays, who travelled to Fort Collins and disliked male vulgarity,

appreciated seeing men plowing and raising “splendid crops,” and she complained that “it

really seems incredible that this country does not settle faster.”120 Keays, like other travelers,

wished for a cultivated and civilized western landscape that would squash the savagery of the

wild.

Men Embrace the Wilderness

Although travelers wished to conquer the land, many conversely wrote about the

wonders and pleasures of embracing it. The wilderness offered leisures such as hunting,

sight-seeing, adventuring, and being a part of a stunningly vast world. Although Calvin Clark

dreamed of the day these “vallies” would be cultivated by men, he also embraced the

wilderness for its curiosities and adventures. Much of his diary narrates the individual

escapades he took away from his team where he climbed mountains, explored caves, shot at

wild animals, tumbled down a hill and was saved by his own moccasin, and only caught back

up with his group to get sustenance and shelter.121 He explained that he could not help

“letting [his] curiosity” take him into the wilderness. Similarly, Libeus Barney delighted in

his distance from society, stating, “though far from civilization, and high on the Rocky

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119 Willing, “Diary,” 377.

120 Keays, “Overland,” 68.

121 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 25-27, 33.

Mountains, still even here on such a night, there was much to fill the soul with reverent

gratitude, pious humility and heart prompting praise.”122 Just as Clark felt alive on his

adventures, Barney felt fulfilled after summiting the mountain, and he exclaimed that “never

shall I forget its solitary beauty.”123 In such accounts, men accepted the wild West as a place

of freedom, pleasure, and excitement, and not necessarily to be altered by society.

Many western men like Clark and Barney found leisure and freedom in the

wilderness, especially in embracing sight-seeing and hunting. Editor and migrant Horace

Greeley relished in the beauty of the Rocky Mountains, noting “the pines,” which “though

stunted and at first scattered, give variety, softness and beauty to the landscape, which

becomes more rolling, with deeper and more frequent valleys, and water in nearly all of

them...”124 Reverend Rankin too described to his wife the serenity he felt in viewing the

“eternal snow” that sat atop the mountains from the fair weathered streets of Denver. He

wrote, “The scene is splendid, & the contrast, to stand on the street... & look up to the region

where winter eternally reigns, is impressive & grand.”125 The pristine wilderness that these

men idealized would not likely remain intact after civilization took over, but both the beauty

of the wild and the urge to conquer it defined men in the West.

Travelers, such as John Gibson, who boasted of his group’s stern character and their

“acquaintances with the wash tub,” embraced the wilderness but simultaneously conquered it

in a sense by taking pleasure in the hunt. He said that he and his men “have a glorious time

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122 Barney, Letters, 31.

123 Barney, Letters, 32.

124 Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey, from New York to San Francisco, in the Summer of 1859 (San Francisco, CA: H. H. Bancroft & Co, 1860) accessed October 10, 2014, https://archive.org/details/overlandjourneyf00gree, 134.

125 Rankin, letters.

generally, feeding on the fat of the land,” and he listed the “tender” and “juicy” wild animals

he and his fellow hunters enjoyed.126 Helen Clark similarly remarked on the highlight of the

journey for one man in her group, stating, “Tom has begun to have some of the comforts of

Job - went hunting over the bluffs yesterday and wore moccasins and today he is sore footed

enough.”127 The act of hunting in the West contained its own contradictions as both an

embrace of a wilderness sport, or of wilderness foods and comforts, and yet hunting

simultaneously equated to a conquest of the land and it’s creatures.

Be Warned: the West is Uncivilized

Although men often cherished their opportunities to delight in the scenic wilderness,

sometimes conditions looked bleak to the migrants and they mentioned in their writings some

more discouraging conditions of the uncivilized region. Many travelers longed for the

comforts of home and they complained of a general crudeness that plagued the West. To his

wife back home, John Hartzell wrote as he arrived to “Golden City” that it is “a City in name

only.” He grumbled that “the City is composed of about one hundred houses or cobbles the

greater fashion of them are small thing... and covered with clay in place of shingles.”128

Hartzell’s account of an unpolished “city” contrasted the more hopeful claims about a future

civilization and the more pleasant feelings about the beauties of wilderness. Similarly,

Elizabeth Keays believed the “vegitation is very backward” in the West due to the “sandy”

soil and lack of water, and the fact that the population “depend[ed] on freighting in things.”

She, like Hartzell, criticized the few houses in town as they were “made of sod or adobe,”

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126 Gibson, Journal.

127 Helen Clark, “Diary,” 31.

128 Hartzell, letter.

and Helen Clark also jabbed at western building materials, stating, “I was very much

disappointed when I beheld Ft. Kearney. The houses are mud bricks, adobes.”129 Although

many travelers to Pikes Peak hoped for civilization and even embraced the fruits of

wilderness, many still detested the vulgar appearance of the West.

Many migrants also found fault with the western town’s overall character as a

lawless, ruffian place. They frowned upon the brawls and duels that they felt defined Denver

and other western cities and contrasted them against proper civilization. Horace Greeley

described the overall behavior in town, stating, “I apprehend that there have been, during my

two weeks sojourn, more brawls, more fights, more pistol-shots with criminal intent in this

log city of one hundred and fifty dwellings... than in any community of no greater numbers

on earth.”130 Calvin Clark also provided a general description of the crudeness of the West

when he wrote, “in town drunkards, fights, Dewells, swaring, taking shots at someone that

someone has taken a dislike to is generaly the order of the day.”131 When Reverend Rankin

described the transformation of moral men to drunks who gamble, he also reported the

ruffianism that encompassed Denver as a whole, complaining to his wife of the complete lack

of laws, courts, and churches. Just as most men and women both found a vulgar man

intolerable, they too disliked the vulgar western town.

Libeus Barney offered another expressive description of Auraria’s and Denver’s

corrupt character, and he even warned others through his letters not to make the trek. He

explained, “There is scarcely a day revolves, but some one crime or another is committed;

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129 Keays, “Overland,” 72; Helen Clark, “Diary,” 23.

130 Greeley, Overland, 159.

131 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 88.

theft, robbery or murder... Lawyers and doctors, or, more correctly speaking, shysters and

quacks, are more plenty here than clients and patients.”132 Barney illustrated a town

consisting of only the worst kinds of men. Even as one of the migrants himself, he initially

did not recommend the trip to Pikes Peak, stating, “even now I would not encourage any one

to leave anything like a respectable living in enlightened New England.”133 Despite the

West’s draw as a future civilization or a free wilderness, travelers like Hartzell, Keays, and

Barney turned their noses up at the region’s lack of sophistication.

Westerners Create Their Own Unique Civilization

Writers of the Pikes Peak westward movement sometimes accepted and sometimes

rejected the West, and often simultaneously, but as emigrants began to populate Pikes Peak

country permanently, many set out to make their own civilization out of something perhaps

uncivilized. Like the western man who exhibited some rugged qualities, some restrained,

some brutish, and some others that do not fit nicely into these categories, the western city

featured the contradictory qualities of a civilization and a wilderness, of a region of ruffians

and lawmakers. Many determined to live in the Pikes Peak region embraced a contradictory

combination of characteristics in order to make do with a unique type of civilization, and yet

it was still a civilization to these western men.

Although Barney asserted his distaste for certain unrefined qualities of the western

town, he claimed after a few months of living in Denver that it was transforming into a

“civilized” region. He said, “we reflect that the first emigration to this wild, mountainous,

and but for its mineral products, uninviting region... with a retrospection of only a few

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132 Barney, Letters, 48, 49.

133 Barney, Letters, 57.

months we behold these mountains unexplored, save by wild beasts and the wilder savage

tribes... [the region is] now known by civilized thousands.” He boasted that the city had

established a Provisional Government, “a circulating library containing fifty volumes of

choice literature,” and that “Building in Denver [was] progressing very rapidly.” He

concluded, “In many respects, separate from speed in building, our town is a marvel of

‘Young America.’”134 Barney boasted about the civilized qualities of his city despite his

previous feelings against it.

To Barney, Denver and Auraria still, however, reflected some rugged characteristics

of his previous descriptions, with its many brawls and duels including one in which two men

fought each other at gunpoint but neither wished to mortally harm the other. As soon as one

dueler shot the other, Barney explained that “‘Wounded honor’ [was] now restored.” This

was, according to Barney, the usual way of dealing with conflict in the West and he argued,

“It is nothing to be frightened at, to hear the report of a pistol under your ear, provided the

ball lodges in no vital part; neither is it an evidence we are a community of murderers

because dead men are found in the streets with bullet holes through them.” In this

description, Barney defended his western city as neither uncivilized nor criminal despite its

rougher qualities, but merely the way Westerners lived. He hoped to make a civilization out

of the very crudeness he initially disagreed with.

Horace Greeley similarly noted some civilized features of the Pikes Peak region

despite his feelings against it. When describing new options in food, he stated, “On every

side, I note signs of progress - improvement - manifest destiny...”135 In an account of a

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134 Barney, Letters, 50-51, 54, 89.

135 Greeley, Overland, 164.

“public afare” in which a gang of thieves stole a man’s wagon load of turkeys, Calvin Clark

boasted that “the town organized ‘a vidgillence committy’” to take care of it.136 He illustrated

that roughness and vulgarity existed in the West, but they existed in tandem with more

civilized ways and that the two opposing sides did not hinder the region from being a

civilization. He explained, “the city seems more like a sivilized community than of yore for

they have meetings here now upon the sabbath. altho thare is swarring and pistol shooting

and the hoots and yels of the manneacts... it is still ‘all in the sound of the church.’”137 Even

Reverend Rankin, who contended that “the public morals are deplorable,” still saw Denver as

a civilization with “a great many moral & industrious people.” After some time in the city, he

believed Denver “is a well built Town & growing rapidly.”138

Despite complaints about the impolite and uncivilized nature of western society,

many men accepted these towns as civilized along with other more crude qualities. They took

it upon themselves as men to drive a civilization forward despite some of their own

conflicting ideals about wilderness and vulgarity. A western man could both embrace and

change the wilderness, and he could structure a society based on these contradictory

qualities. Just as a man could be constructed of opposing ideals, so too could a society

containing these western men.

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136 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 89.

137 Calvin Clark, “Diary,” 90.

138 Rankin, letters.

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

Promotional literature may have lured some individuals or families to either stay at

home or travel west, and it may also have pointed out some similar contradictory masculine

traits as those exhibited by travelers, but it neither dictated nor encompassed the nuances of

personal understandings of a western masculinity. Men and women created their own ideals

that were complex and often quite contradictory. Individuals and families contributed their

own varying ideas of what it meant to be a man in the West, and this often entailed the

tensions of feeling pulled between different and often opposing perceptions of manhood that

existed during this period. This way of defining manhood easily complicated simplistic

interpretations. The western man instead upheld family values, exhibited refinement and

chivalry, cooked and cleaned, mustered up grit during hardships, tackled the wilderness,

became one with the wilderness, and even accepted the West as a somewhat civilized and

savage place. The western man’s complicated nature transcended a shallow definition.

It is important to see that western men were not just rugged detached ruffians, nor

were they completely dedicated to maintaining restraint or transplanting civilization into the

western wilderness. These generalizations cloud the complexities of gender invention in the

West that individuals used to adapt to a new environment. Although “rugged” or “restrained”

offers a simple answer to the curiosities of western American culture, it is crucial to realize

the nuances and contradictions that went into creating a western masculine identity so that we

can more wholly understand this important historical construction. Through this study of

westward migration to Pikes Peak between 1858 and 1866, we can begin to grasp the ways

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that identity and gender ideals could be constructed out of the very contradictions that broke

them down. Questioning masculinity, and embracing the often contradictory nature of the

journey, were crucial to defining men in the western world.

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