western women

Sarah Louisa Dutcher was the first woman to make her way to the top of Half Dome. Historians believe the intrepid young woman accomplished the feat in 1875.

“The gambler is a moral suicide.”Reverend Charles Caleb Colton – 1832 On July 9, 1871, two ragged, down-and-out prospectors walked into the Bank of California in San Francisco and approached a dignified looking clerk waiting behind a giant oak desk. The two hungry-looking men quietly inquired about renting a safe deposit box. The clerk eyed...

“The West is overrun with bawdy houses and soiled doves.” Gold miner Charles Bartlett in a letter home to his family in Virginia – 1872 Madam Laura Bell McDaniel’s broken body lay in a ditch beside a snowy thoroughfare conjoined with the twisted rubble of what was once her pristine Mitchell sedan. It was late...

Ellis Meredith was the daughter of pioneers. Born in Montana Territory, in 1865, she was the daughter of Emily R. Meredith, a well-known advocate for woman suffrage, and Frederick Allison, a journalist. The family had been drawn to the gold-rush boomtown and territorial capital of Bannack Montana, living there for a couple of years before...

In September 1884, six weary journalists spent three unusually hot and humid days loitering around the New York harbor waiting for the world-famous entertainer Lotta Crabtree to arrive.  Lotta was on her way to the city where she had perfected her career.  The moment her steamship docked, the scribes rifled through their pockets for pencils...

In 1847 the western territory of the United States was a sleepy wilderness populated mostly by Indians and Mexicans.  But when word reached the eastern states that there were rich deposits of gold in the mountains of the frontier, the region changed virtually overnight.  Two hundred thousand restless souls, mostly men, but including some women...

Matrimonial clubs date as far back as 1849.  Lonely hearts from Syracuse, New York to San Francisco, California joined such organizations in hopes of finding a suitable mate with whom to spend the rest of their lives.  The New Plan Company based in Kansas City, Missouri was a matrimonial club that claimed to have more...

More than two dozen women adorned in black poplin skirts with matching blouses, stiff white collars and aprons and sporting sleek, shiny hair fashioned into a tidy bun, busily hurried about a Santa Fe Railroad restaurant in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1879.  The gruff, rugged cowhands who were the patrons of the establishment looked out...