The California Gold Rush. The very words evoked the strong reaction of an American populace driven by adventure and a lust for easy riches. Drawn inexorably west in the wake of the Jan. 24, 1848, strike at Sutter’s Mill were argonauts from every walk of life—shopkeepers, former soldiers, fallen women and those willing to parade their talents onstage for bemused hardscrabble miners. Among the latter was the Robinson Family, a husband-and-wife acting duo with four kids in tow. The youngest of the brood would become one of the most celebrated performers in the annals of Victorian theater in the American West. With her onstage portrayals Sue Robinson brought to a viewing public the humor, angst and subtle realities of everyday life in that time and place.

The “Fairy Star”

Born in suburban Chicago on Jan. 14, 1845, Robinson moved west at age 6 with her parents and siblings, who were soon performing for Gold Rush audiences composed primarily of young men starved of family life. The Robinson Family trouped the length and breadth of the mother lode settlements, from northernmost Georgetown south through Coloma, Angels Camp, Murphys and countless other hamlets since lost to history, their names—Bottle Hill, Poverty Bar, Limerick, etc.—reflecting both the struggles and humor of the era.

The touring life held little of the perceived glamour of the entertainment world. On July 4, 1855, the Robinsons found themselves performing atop a giant sequoia stump for a raucous crowd in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Three years later the family drew such a throng to Poverty Bar’s Treadway Hall that its main stringer and floor joists gave way. Even when performances fell short of expectations, Sue in particular garnered flattering notices from the various camp presses, which regularly lauded her as the “jewel” of the family troupe. One reporter ascribed her popularity to a combination of factors:

“She is only 8 years old, yet she appeared to understand all the fascinating qualities of her sex of a more experienced age. This in connection with her sprightly and graceful dancing, as well as her natural beauty and sweet disposition, is sufficient not only to make her a favorite among us, but also to endear her to the hearts of all with whom she is acquainted.”

Recognizing the appealing innocence of their star attraction, Sue’s parents billed her alternately as the “Fairy Star” or “La Petite Susan.” Yet, the endless trouping in the rough-hewn mining camps scarred the young girl’s psyche. At age 8 she was severely injured while exiting a stage in Grass Valley when she brushed past the open flame of a footlight and caught her clothes on fire. Rushing to her rescue, her parents themselves were scorched in the effort. Fortunate to have survived, the Fairy Star was soon back onstage, though from then on she was prone to fleeing the stage at the mere hint of trouble.

From an early age the youngest Robinson recognized the importance even a few coins could mean to the survival of her struggling theatrical family. One evening, as she completed the Scotch lilt for an appreciative audience of Placerville miners, the men showered the stage with coins. Ignoring a bouquet of flowers thrown to her, Sue didn’t exit till she had retrieved every last coin, even filling her shoes with them.

The multitalented young girl’s singing embraced everything from sentimental ballads to grand opera, while her dance specialties included jigs, flings, clogs, the cancan, “La Cachucha” (performed with castanets), “Fisher’s Hornpipe” and a double “Sailor’s Hornpipe” performed with older brother Billy. Among her most popular numbers was a burlesque of Irish dancer and actress Lola Montez, who had reportedly taught both Sue and contemporary child star Lotta Crabtree the infamous Spider Dance, during which Montez would writhe and cavort to rid her flimsy costume of spiders, to the delight of appreciative male audiences.

Tragedy and a Rivalry

Sue was only 10 when her mother fell ill and died on Aug. 22, 1855, while on tour in Diamond Springs, sending the family fortunes into a tailspin. Economic uncertainty was and remains a stressor in the acting profession, but his wife’s death pressured Joseph Robinson to take dire measures to provide for his children. In addition to trying his hand at theater management, Sue’s father opened a dance school in Sacramento, advertising his daughters, “La Petite Susan” and Josephine, as potential dancing partners for gentlemen customers. As survival took precedence over propriety, father Robinson—characterized by one period newspaper as a peripatetic “bilk,” a Victorian-era term for an untrustworthy individual—appears to have abandoned any feelings of paternal responsibility for his daughters’ welfare.

Another formative factor in Sue’s childhood was an ongoing, unspoken competition with Crabtree, who rose to become a nationally known actress and variety star. Both girls experienced insecure childhoods spent relentlessly touring the mining settlements to perform before mostly male audiences. They occasionally crossed paths. Sue played the hand organ in a troupe that supported Lotta’s first professional performance, and in the mid-1850s Robinson performed in a saloon opposite Crabtree in a neighboring saloon. In a painful memory for Sue, the miners abandoned her performance, crossing the street en masse to watch the charismatic, slightly younger Lotta. Dressed in green and wielding a miniature shillelagh onstage, Lotta became the darling of the newly immigrant Irish then fueling the labor force in the camps.

While both girls learned the basics of stage presence, Robinson struggled with less emotional and financial support than that afforded the more celebrated Crabtree. The disparity prompted one contemporary actor to remark that had Sue been given proper theatrical training, she would have equaled any other actress of the time. Yet, the multitalented Robinson persisted in the face of adversity. Celebrated as a “child of extraordinary promise,” she sang, danced, played the banjo and, as she matured, excelled in the genteel comedy pieces and farces that followed the featured melodramas. By age 14 Sue was receiving top billing in show posters promoting the Robinson Family.

Growing Celebrity

In 1859, after remarrying a captivating performer scarcely 10 years older than his oldest child, Joseph Robinson moved his family to the Pacific Northwest, where recent gold discoveries augured a new gold rush. Playing their way through Oregon and Washington by 1860, the family spent a year in Victoria, British Columbia, headquartered in a building Joseph leased and converted into a theater. Trouping back to Portland, Sue appeared onstage with the handsome Frank Mayo, a regional actor and comedian who went on to national fame. Like Sue, he had come West as a young hopeful during the gold rush.

In some ways Sue’s life was typical for a member of an acting family prone to chasing the next theatrical opportunity and dollar. Generally ostracized from polite society, actors were clannishly protective of their own. On May 4, 1862, 17-year-old Robinson married fellow thespian Charles Getzler in Walla Walla, Wash., where she soon gave birth to Edward, the first of their two sons. Though Getzler was 12 years Sue’s senior and not her first love, he professed his adoration for her. Seeking stability and a parental figure to help assuage both the loss of her mother and her father’s veiled exploitation, Robinson almost certainly hoped for a stable married life. Sadly, it was not to be. Much as the Fairy Star had been the breadwinner for her vagabond gold camp family, so Sue shouldered the support of her husband and boys as a young adult.

Complicating matters was her growing status as a celebrity, which carried its own perils. A few months into the couple’s marriage a smitten theater patron approached their home, threatening to kidnap Sue. As Charles wrestled the deranged fan to the ground, a concealed gun in the man’s clothing discharged, killing the would-be kidnapper. On another occasion, when fistfights and gunshots erupted in a theater audience composed of enamored Union soldiers and citizens desiring decorum, a panicked Sue ran offstage. “Susie never seemed quite the same afterward,” recalled one eyewitness to the fray. “A slight commotion in the audience would attract her attention in the midst of her best song, and in her best play she always looked as though she was just a little afraid someone was going to shoot.” That nervous strain hovered just beneath the surface. When an earthquake struck during a performance of The Soldier’s Bride at Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, Nev., Sue bolted from the stage, only returning when the aftershocks had subsided. The tremulous quality of her closing song betrayed her lingering fear.

In her best moments, absent such disruptions, Robinson exuded a calm, professional demeanor—quiet by theatrical standards. Feeling more comfortable onstage than off, her pursuit of acting as an adult after a childhood spent before the footlights was her most logical, if not only, career choice. Empowered by her celebrity status and the ability to earn a living, Sue continued performing even after marriage and the birth of sons Edward and Frederick. As a dramatic actress she often executed men’s “breeches” roles, perceived in that time and place as both sensational and erotic. Clearly, Robinson didn’t feel hemmed in by conventional gender boundaries.

For Victorian-era actresses the theater was a paradox. By entering what was traditionally a male space, they breached societal norms, a transgression that discredited their work. Yet, the theater was a place where women could earn an income equal to that of a man and maintain a degree of autonomy over their lives. The theater also had the power to overturn prevailing gender stereotypes that bound women to domesticity, keeping them indoors, protected, frail and helpless.

Stardom in San Francisco

Sincerity was a hallmark of Victorian ideology, and Robinson’s realistic acting—deemed “finished, truthful and good” by one critic—continued to reap positive reviews. Another critic found the “young but promising actress possessed of far more real talent than many who are lauded before the public as stars of the first magnitude.” Though the charismatic Crabtree had outshone Robinson in childhood, Lotta never grew beyond the song and dance routines that were her bread and butter. Sue attained a higher level of recognition as a legitimate actress in classic dramatic roles opposite the leading male actors of the day.

During her tireless theatrical career Robinson is thought to have played more than 300 different roles and performed before tens of thousands of people. Her first stage appearance in the growing entertainment mecca of San Francisco was at the Union Theater in 1855. Sue was praised for her Ophelia, played opposite the Hamlets of Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough and Edwin Adams, three of the era’s best tragedians. She appeared for almost two seasons as Sacramento’s leading lady, executing Desdemona, Lady Macbeth and Portia in other Shakespearean plays, as well as comedies, melodramas and farce. In December 1868 Sue accepted a one-year contract with Maguire’s Opera House in San Francisco, and by the early 1870s she was regarded as one of the best, if not the best, comedic actresses in the West.

Still, mainstream Victorian mores inevitably seeped into the life of the successful, assertive actress, who was often billed under her husband’s last name. Getzler accompanied his career wife to San Francisco, where in 1869 a domestic dispute led to violence. A year later she filed for divorce. Sue’s accolades may have threatened the insecure, underperforming Charles, whose job as saloonman also may have contributed to alcohol abuse. The divorce papers charged that “without cause or prevarication…he committed a violent assault and battery…by beating and bruising her severely, telling her at the same time that she was only a thing to use for his own convenience.” In colorful testimony Getzler accused Sue of being unchaste, called her a “bitch and strumpet” and insisted “all actresses are whores.” In an era when courts weighed a woman’s chastity, the judge accepted his assertion the couple’s younger son, Frederick, was not his and split custody. Sue kept Frederick, Charles kept Edward.

On the Move

After the divorce, though the loss of the companionship of son Edward grieved her, Sue continued to tour with her own theatrical company. Three women and five men constituted the Sue Robinson Company, which closed its run in Virginia City, packed up a mud wagon and pushed on to Reno. Actors were challenged to find paying customers, and the quest kept them constantly on the move. A ticket speculator in Reno charged theatergoers 75 cents to take in Robinson’s performances and pocketed a tidy profit, while the troupe lost money on the deal, having covered the hall rental. After performances in Truckee and Dutch Flat, Calif., the troupe performed on dusty stages in gold rush towns long past their heyday, out of necessity skipping town with unpaid hotel bills.

The company’s luck changed in North San Juan, a Sierra Nevada hydraulic mining camp where Sue had performed as a child 12 years before. On July 4, 1870, the day of the troupe’s arrival, the settlement suffered a devastating fire. Without hesitation, two of Robinson’s leading men manned a fire hose from the vantage of the hotel roof. Thanks in part to their efforts, the blaze was confined to a small section of town, and that night the company’s performance of Camille set a new theater attendance record in North San Juan. Grateful townsfolk rewarded the troupe with several ovations and curtain calls.

Though Robinson reportedly earned more than $80,000 ($1.5 million in today’s dollars) in the 1860s—largely while touring through Washington, Oregon and Idaho—and though she had announced her retirement on several occasions, each time she was compelled to return to the stage in support of her family. One biographer blamed her “worthless” husband for having forfeited her earnings on faro tables across the West. When not touring, Sue performed menial labor to supplement the family income.

According to friends, such persistent financial concerns, coupled with overwork and continued threats by Getzler that she’d never again see son Edward, contributed to her decline in the summer of 1871. Uncharacteristically, Sue canceled several performances, calling in sick. In early June her vindictive ex-husband sent her sheet music to a song entitled “You’ll Never See Your Boy Again.” Whether the sentiments of the lyrics pushed her over the edge is uncertain. Regardless, on June 17 Robinson succumbed to an unspecified illness while on tour in Sacramento. The epitaph on her tombstone in that town’s New Helvetia Cemetery reads, A fallen rose, the fairest, sweetest but most transient of all the lovely sisterhood, suggesting the fleeting nature of the acting profession and the ephemeral status of the characters she’d portrayed onstage.

Sue’s career had been in ascendance, as she had recently agreed to appear as leading lady at McVicker’s Theater in Chicago, one of the nation’s leading playhouses. Though just 26 at the time of her death, she had already spent 20 years in show business, her career having paralleled the glory years of economic prosperity with professional highs before appreciative audiences.

“Not All Sunshine”

Much of Sue Robinson’s life has been lost to the greater drama of the California Gold Rush and its substantial effect on the settlement of the American West. Forced into a performing life by her parents, she made the best of her significant talents, as both a child entertainer and as a stellar adult comedic and dramatic talent. Her early theatricalities before rough, mostly male audiences provided them welcome respite amid dangerous, demanding lives. She was rewarded with a successful career. Fittingly, her last role was in a play called Ambition, an emotion that had driven her to persist through many trials and setbacks.

Ironically, in their time the Old West figures that today capture the lion’s share of popular interest seldom captured headlines beyond their immediate locales, while the popular actors of the Victorian era were familiar to untold thousands nationwide. The male and female celebrities of their day, such performers informed behavior, fashion, society and politics. Robinson herself often starred in melodramas steeped in morality and devoted to the Irish experience, thus helping homesick immigrants deal with the realities of a new world. Her dramatic choices underscored her fame, earning her the adoration of audience members, though on occasion the latter’s emotions got the better of them. For example, years after Robinson’s death a deranged fan, still distraught over the loss of the cultural icon, tried to dig up her grave in the New Helvetia Cemetery.

Among Robinson’s many mourners was Gold Hill News editor Alf Doten, an ardent fan and returning audience member for many of Sue’s Virginia City performances, who in his notice of her death correctly surmised, “Her path through life was not all sunshine.” On learning of her death, Doten rushed to a local photographer’s studio to purchase three pictures he’d taken of Sue, taking comfort in the images of the actress he’d admired from the flip side of the footlights. His gesture was a fitting tribute to a woman who had been thrust into the challenging life of a performer in the American West and risen to the top of her profession.

California-based writer Carolyn Grattan Eichin adapted this article from her 2020 book From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West. For further reading Eichin also recommends Troupers of the Gold Coast: The Rise of Lotta Crabtree, by Constance Rourke.

Originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

Who was Etta Place?

She was the lover and perhaps wife of Pennsylvania-born Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, aka the “Sundance Kid,” and a peripheral associate of the Wild Bunch, the outlaw gang headed up by Robert LeRoy Parker, aka “Butch Cassidy.” But little is known about her origins and less about what happened to her after Sundance and Butch were killed in South America.

Larry Pointer, author of the 1977 book In Search of Butch Cassidy, wrote that Etta’s identity is “one of the most intriguing riddles in Western history.”

Place was likely born in 1878 and as an adult was described as having “classic good looks,” with a nice smile and a refined bearing, a description confirmed by a full-length portrait of her and Longabaugh—some say the couple’s wedding picture—taken in February 1901 at Joseph B. De Young’s photo studio at 815 Broadway in New York City. She spoke in an educated manner and knew how to handle a rifle.

She had met Longabaugh a year or two earlier and may have been involved in some of the Wild Bunch robberies, scoping out a bank in advance or holding the group’s horses during a heist. But the New York City picture, historian Thom Hatch wrote in his 2013 book The Last Outlaws, “hints of proper high teas, Central Park carriage rides and evenings at the theater.”

Even her name is probably false. “Place” was the maiden name of Longabaugh’s mother, Annie, and Sundance sometimes used the alias “Harry Place.” It has been suggested she took to using the first name “Etta” in South America after Spanish speakers mispronounced “Ethel,” which may or may not have been her actual first name. The Pinkertons variously referred to her as Ethel, Eva, Rita, Etta and Betty Price.

In a letter to friend David Gillespie shortly after the gang’s June 2, 1899, train robbery near Wilcox, Wyo., Longabaugh enclosed a copy of the portrait of himself and Place, whom he described as his wife and a “Texas lady.” The Pinkertons, who spent a lot of time and effort pursuing the Wild Bunch, always believed Etta was from Texas, which fits with her noted skills with horses and firearms. In 1906 William Pinkerton, his detectives having traced Place to Fort Worth, asked that city’s police chief to “find out who this woman is.”

Based on the theory Etta’s real name was Ethel and she hailed from Texas, researcher Donna Ernst compiled a list of all women named Ethel born in or around Fort Worth and San Antonio between 1875 and ’80. Over time she eliminated each as a contender for the youthful Etta Place.

Except one.

That one was Ethel Bishop, who resided with four other women in what was probably a brothel near notorious madam Fannie Porter’s San Antonio pleasure palace, a known Wild Bunch hangout. Another oft repeated story suggests Butch rescued Etta from a brothel when she was 16. Longabaugh biographer Ed Kirby believes Place was the daughter of one Emily Jane Place of Oswego, N.Y., who was related somehow to Sundance’s mother. Still others have suggested Etta was in fact Colorado rancher Ann Bassett, a Wild Bunch associate known to have vied with sister Josie for Cassidy’s affection.

Could Bassett have won Sundance’s attentions as well?

Probably not. By 1903 Bassett had married Hirum “Hi” Henry Bernard and that same year was arrested (and later acquitted) on a charge of cattle rustling while Place was in South America.

On Feb. 20, 1901, after posing for their portrait, Place and Longabaugh boarded HMS Herminius in New York, disembarking in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 23. Traveling with them was Cassidy, using the alias “James Ryan” and claiming to be Etta’s brother. In 1902 Place and Longabaugh returned briefly Stateside for Etta to seek treatment of an unknown disease, and again in 1904, when Pinkerton operatives believed she visited family in Texas. In 1906 Place returned Stateside for keeps, possibly due to her illness. Sundance returned to South America, where most historians believe he and Butch died in a 1908 shootout with soldiers in Bolivia.

Meanwhile, Etta vanished.

Several researchers have suggested she became a brothel operator in Fort Worth under the name Eunice Gray. But in an article in the October 2010 Wild West Donna Humphrey-Donnell noted she’d seen an alleged portrait of the young Gray, and the woman in that photo definitely “was not the same woman seen in the famous New York City portrait of Etta Place and the Sundance Kid.”

In 1909 an unidentified woman fitting Etta’s description asked a U.S. diplomatic official in South America for help in obtaining Longabaugh’s death certificate. But she never returned to his office. At most, however, the incident only proves Place was alive in 1909.

Other theories have since surfaced: that Etta was the wife of legendary boxing promoter Tex Rickard; that she relocated to Paraguay and remarried; that Longabaugh had survived the 1908 shootout in Bolivia and lived happily ever after with Place in Alaska; that Etta died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; or that she was either killed during a domestic dispute or took her own life in Argentina in the 1920s. In 1970 Cassidy’s sister, Lula Parker Betensen, told Los Angeles Times reporters that her brother had not been killed in Bolivia as thought, and that Etta had lived out her days as a schoolteacher in Denver.

In the end, speculation, guesswork and coincidence aside, we only know for certain she was a pretty woman who once carried on a romance with the Sundance Kid and then disappeared from the pages of history.

Nothing more.

To this day similarly incredible tales circulate about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, stories relating their escape from the Bolivian gunfight and their subsequent lives of anonymity in various locales out West or in South America.

Like the theories surrounding Etta Place, though, they are unsubstantiated and probably false.

But tempting. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

Mention Deadwood and what often pops to mind are sordid scenes straight out of the namesake HBO television series—and to be fair, such scenes aren’t far from the truth. In 1874, on the mere rumor of gold in the Black Hills, prospectors came to the region in droves. Then, in the fall of 1875, such seekers did turn up an especially rich gold deposit in the northern Black Hills. That sparked the stampede to what became known as Deadwood Gulch, as miners staked claims and set up camp in a ravine choked with dead trees.

As happened in many mining camps, Deadwood soon had its share of gambling halls and bordellos. When trail guides “Colorado Charlie” Utter and brother Steve arrived with the first wagonload of prostitutes on July 12, 1876, the sporting women soon had more customers than they could handle. From then on a regular stream of wagons brought prostitutes to town.

Receiving scant regard or care from either their employers or clientele, such women were often subject to abuse. On one headline-grabbing occasion, when a customer started to beat her bloody, a Gem saloon prostitute known as Tricksie (yes, Deadwood fans, there really was a working girl named Tricksie) shot the man through the head. According to Deadwood pioneer and memoirist John S. McClintock, the attending doctor threaded a probe all the way through the shooting victim’s skull. McClintock dubiously claimed to have run into the man on the street some weeks later, though the memoirist didn’t share (or perhaps didn’t know) Trixie’s fate. Such was the miserable welcome prostitutes could expect.

Looking the Other Way

Residents of early Deadwood desperately needed law and order. They got the right man in the spring of 1877 when Dakota Territory Governor John L. Pennington appointed hardware store owner and former Montana lawman Seth Bullock sheriff of Lawrence County. No longer was violent crime tolerated. However, prostitution continued to get a conspicuous pass. After all, it represented a thriving industry in a mining camp where men dominated the population and nine out of 10 women were painted ladies. Thus the brothels of Deadwood became an open secret. The swath of dance halls, gambling dens, saloons and brothels along both sides of lower Main Street, on the north end of town, became known as the “Badlands.” In the typical business arrangement, saloons and variety theaters occupied the first floors, while brothels operated upstairs. By the turn of the century the Badlands occupied an entire block of two-story buildings on the west side of Main.

The district’s prostitutes did not have an easy go of it. Among the worst abusers was Al Swearingen, proprietor of the Gem, who opened his saloon/theater/brothel soon after arriving in the spring of 1876. The women who worked for Swearingen were justly afraid of him, as he was notoriously cruel and domineering. Lured to the Gem on the false promise of respectable employment, unsuspecting women found themselves stranded with no money. Those with no other option were virtually sucked into the life of prostitution.

In the face of violence and degradation, many prostitutes turned to drugs and alcohol, which only deepened their despair. To address their pain and control depression, doctors often prescribed such habit-forming drugs as opium, laudanum and morphine, unintentionally sending the women on a further downward spiral into addiction. In other instances employers drugged their working women to better control them. Suicide attempts became so commonplace among prostitutes in the Badlands that Dr. Frank S. Howe, early Deadwood’s only physician, carried a stomach pump with him on calls to the red-light district.

A Booming Business

By the mid-1880s the boomtown counted more than a hundred brothels. Among the most popular, aside from the Gem, were Fern’s Place, The Cozy Rooms, the 400, the Beige Door, the Three Nickels and the Shasta Rooms. The madams of these notorious establishments included such standouts as May Brown, Eleanora Dumont, Dora DuFran, Belle Haskell, Mollie Johnson and “Poker Alice” Ivers.

DuFran (born Amy Helen Dorothea Bolshaw in England in 1868) was perhaps the best known and certainly the most successful. Dora and her husband, a gambler she met on arrival, operated a string of brothels across the region, from the Dakota boomtowns of Deadwood, Rapid City and Lead to Belle Fourche and Miles City, Mont. Rumor has it DuFran even coined the term “cathouse” for a brothel. Early on she befriended Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Canary), and the pair grew quite close. On occasion Jane worked for Dora, though the former’s refusal to bathe and habit of wearing men’s clothes served to limit her appeal to both customers and the madam herself, who insisted the girls who worked for her practice good hygiene and dress. When a middle-aged Calamity reconnected with DuFran in 1903, Dora hired Jane as a cook and laundress for her Belle Fouche brothel, Diddlin’ Dora’s. By then Calamity was suffering from the effects of alcoholism and a hard life, and Dora cared for Jane up till her death that summer. In 1932 DuFran, writing under the pseudonym d’Dee, published a 12-page biography titled Low Down on Calamity Jane. Of her late friend Dora wrote:

“It’s easy for a woman to be good who has been brought up with every protection from the evils of the world and with good associates. Martha wasn’t that lucky. She was a product of the wild and woolly west. She knew better than anyone where she made her mistakes, and she didn’t rate her virtues as highly as her friends did.”

“Queen of the Blondes”

Another madam with a reputation for charity was Mollie Johnson. Scarcely 23 and already a widow when she arrived in Deadwood, Johnson remarried poorly and was deserted by her second husband before setting up a brothel on Sherman Street in 1878. While there were plenty of prostitutes in town from which to choose, Mollie was partial to hiring those with flaxen hair and became known as the “Queen of the Blondes.” Her establishment soared in popularity, rivaled only by the low-down Swearingen’s Gem.

Like the Gem, Mollie’s joint also provided entertainment. Unlike Swearingen, however, Johnson fancied her bordello as a high-end place and pulled out all the stops. All her girls were talented singers, dancers and balladists. Mollie herself also performed, as a shadow dancer. Wearing very little clothing, she would gyrate behind a screen on which her shadow was projected by a bright light. By all accounts, she brought down the house.

Mollie’s place proved so popular that even respectable society took note. In an 1879 dispatch headlined Sweet Sounds From a Bitter Source, a reporter for the local Black Hills Daily Times warned readers of its temptations:

“At the dead of night, when all nature is hushed in sleep, this reporter is frequently regaled, while on his way home, by the gentle cadence of sweet songs which floats out upon the stillness of the gulch like the silvery horns of elfland faintly blowing. Vocal music, wherever heard or by whatever thing or being produced, is entrancing to this sinner; hence the aforesaid sounds are sure to arrest his step at the corner and compel him to lend his ear to the mellifluent melody which steals out from Molly Johnson’s harem. But he doesn’t draw any nearer, for he knows that Where the Sirens dwell you linger in ease / That their songs are death, but makes destruction please; and he travels on, disgusted with himself because his virtuous life possesses such a skeleton element of fun, yet wonders that such a voluptuous harmony is tolerated by the divine muse of song to issue from such a b-a-d place.”

Reputation aside, its owner set out to prove that good can take root even in such a bad place. The proverbial “hooker with a heart of gold,” Johnson cared for her girls as if they were family. A case example dates from the summer of 1879 when one of Mollie’s favorite girls, Jennie Phillips, fell desperately ill. Author Chris Enss relates the story in her 2023 book An Open Secret. That July 6 Phillips and other girls from the bordello were on a buggy ride in the country when they encountered a tollgate whose owner had chained a feral cat to a tree. When Jennie picked up and tried to soothe the animal, it bit her on the lip, and within days she was bedridden. Though Mollie tended her daily, the young woman died some weeks later.

Beside herself in grief, Mollie had Jennie’s body laid out in a coffin and placed in the parlor of the brothel while she made funeral arrangements.

Then the unthinkable happened: A blaze swept through town, quickly engulfing Mollie’s house of ill repute. Yet the madam refused to evacuate until Jennie’s coffin had been safely removed. The next morning Mollie had Jennie interred in Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery. By Christmas a new $7,000 brothel had risen from the ashes of the old brothel, and Mollie had donated money to churches to buy presents for needy children.

One Happy Ending… and Many Sad Ones

Most soiled doves dreamed of a better life. Annie Hizer, one of Mollie’s girls, managed to realize her dreams. Known to her clientele as “Little Buttercup,” Annie had a regular customer in Black Hills physician Dr. Charles W. Meyer, and before long the two fell in love and were married. Held at the local opera house on March 7, 1880, their ceremony was a town affair, with city officials and military personnel in attendance. Mollie and her girls served as maids of honor.

But Little Buttercup’s happy ending was the exception rather than the rule. Take, for example, the sad fate of Nellie Stanley, a 23-year-old working girl at Belle Haskell’s brothel, the 400. A polite young Chicagoan with a typically hard backstory, she was somewhat of a loner. On the evening of March 19, 1894, complaining of a headache and sore throat, Nellie retired to her room, where she took an overdose of the painkiller Antikamnia. When fellow working girls found her unconscious, Belle summoned a doctor to the 400, but nothing could be done. Nellie was dead. Those who knew her best were certain she’d committed suicide. Sadly, such was a common occurrence in brothels.

Like other houses of ill repute, Belle Haskell’s 400 was the genesis of other tragedies. When one 1893 love triangle ended in murder, however, even the seasoned madam was shocked. The trouble arose after one of Belle’s girls, 16-year-old Austie Trevyr (born Mary Yusta to a wealthy family in Lincoln, Neb.) took up with gambler Frank DeBelloy, the longtime lover of Gem saloon girl Maggie McDermott. For his part, DeBelloy was content to play both hands.   

That December 17 Austie scrawled out a seemingly innocent invitation to Maggie to join her and Frank for drinks at the local Mascotte saloon. There, in a drunken fit of jealousy, Austie shot and killed Maggie. She was immediately arrested for premeditated murder. At trial the following spring a jury convicted Austie of manslaughter, the judge sentencing her to three years and seven months in the state penitentiary at Sioux Falls, S.D. In 1897 local news reports had the recently sprung Austie first returning to the 400 before leaving that summer for a women’s seminary back East, seemingly a reformed soiled dove.

An Enduring Institution

By 1889 legislators and lawmen across the Dakotas were targeting brothels and gambling dens and the activities that supported them. The South Dakota Legislature struck the first blow that year by outlawing the sale of alcohol, a move anticipating federal Prohibition by three decades. In 1898 Governor Arthur C. Mellette followed up with a provision to the state constitution outlawing gambling and prostitution, but purveyors of such vice simply went underground. By the time Prohibition took effect in 1920, Deadwood’s brothels had gone aboveground, quite literally, in speakeasies up behind painted doorways over respectable businesses on lower Main.

In 1951 law enforcement officials raided Deadwood’s brothels, but demand meant they were soon back in business. In 1952 the state’s attorney for Lawrence County prosecuted the brothel operators in the latest attempt to shut them down. This time the madams hired attorney Roswell Bottum, a former state representative, who managed to get the women acquitted on a technicality. Another raid and round of prosecutions in 1959 also failed to close the brothels.

Not until the spring of 1980 did federal and state authorities working in tandem manage to shut down the last four remaining Deadwood brothels. A group of citizens paraded down Main Street in support of the madams, much like lonesome miners did the day the Utter brothers’ wagon train brought the first sporting girls to town in 1876.

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Linda Wommack, from Littleton, Colo., is the author of several books on Colorado history. For further reading she recommends An Open Secret: The Story of Deadwood’s Most Notorious Bordellos, by Chris Enss and Deadwood History Inc., and Pioneer Days in the Black Hills, by John S. McClintock.

“She was a voluptuous creature.” So said veteran San Francisco police detective Ben Bohen in 1890 when recalling Belle Cora (depicted at right), the most notorious woman of Gold Rush–era California. The beautiful and cultured Cora ran San Francisco’s preeminent bordello. Among her clients and friends were influential politicians, businessmen, lawyers and judges. But when Belle’s lover shot and killed a prominent U.S. marshal, she found herself in direct conflict with not only the city police and prosecutor but also the feared 1856 Committee of Vigilance. Despite such formidable adversaries, in the end her true nemesis proved to be another woman, a California pioneer of an entirely different cloth.

The Coras Head West

San Francisco’s Gold Rush vixen was born Arabella “Belle” Ryan in Baltimore, Md., in 1828. Belle and sister Anastasia, two years her senior, were orphaned in childhood. The Ryan girls attended grammar school, but as teens they went to work in a dressmaking shop. Detective Bohen, a few years Belle’s junior, also grew up in Baltimore and knew the Ryans. As he later explained, the sisters often delivered gowns from the shop to the “hurdy gurdy” girls in a nearby bordello. “The girls were compelled to go to and from this place frequently, and in time developed a desire to lead the free and rollicking life of the women for whom the dresses were intended, and shortly afterward commenced a career of dissipation.”

In 1848 a restless Belle boarded a steamship bound for Charleston, S.C., where she took up with a lover. Her choice of companions was poor, for he was soon killed. Belle then boarded another ship, this one bound for New Orleans. There, as Bohen recalled, “She met Charles Cora. He was a prosperous gambler and was struck by her beauty.” Twenty-year-old Belle was indeed attractive, with a round face, thick brown hair, hazel eyes, a fair complexion and a plump, well-endowed figure. She in turn fell for the dashing gambler.

Cora was a well-known figure in the card rooms of New Orleans. Born in Genoa, Italy, in 1817, he immigrated to America with his family as a boy. One of his gambler friends, J.J. Bryant, later said Charles’ parents had abandoned him in the wide-open town of Natchez, Miss. “He was an ignorant Italian boy,” Bryant said, “and had been picked up and raised by a woman who was the keeper of a house of prostitution in Natchez.” Before turning 30 Cora had plied the Mississippi River as a successful and wealthy gambler. In 1846 he drifted back downriver to settle in New Orleans, where he became noted for his success at the faro tables.

Cora stood 5 feet 7 inches and was heavyset, with hunched shoulders, dark hair and a drooping mustache that covered his mouth. Like most gamblers, he dressed immaculately, accessorizing with an embroidered vest and a top hat. He was also quarrelsome. In May 1847 Cora got into a brawl and assaulted a New Orleans police officer. Five months later he engaged in another fracas in a New Orleans dance hall and landed in jail. A year later Cora met Belle Ryan, and from then on the pair lived together as man and wife, though they never legally married.

At the time Charles and partner Sam Davis were running a faro bank on Carondolet Street, near the French Quarter. In the spring of 1849, in a precursor of later events in San Francisco, Cora assaulted a man who’d insulted Belle. In revenge the man turned in Cora and Davis, who were arrested and charged with running an illegal gambling house. After a much-publicized hearing a judge released the pair after each paid a whopping $5,000 bail bond, roughly equivalent to $200,000 in today’s dollars.

News of the huge gold strike in California was then sweeping the globe. Resolving to join the Gold Rush, Charles and Belle boarded a gulf steamer, crossed the Isthmus of Panama, and took another steamship north to California. Fellow passenger E.L. Williams recalled that Cora and three companions started trouble aboard ship until the captain finally clapped all three in irons. Rumor had it Cora and cohorts carried on them $40,000, with which they planned to start a faro bank in San Francisco. In late December the steamer sailed through the Golden Gate.

Belle and Charles surely found ramshackle San Francisco a far cry from Baltimore or New Orleans. The harbor of the roaring boomtown was crammed with hundreds of abandoned vessels, their crews having jumped ship and left for the goldfields. Its 25,000 inhabitants were overwhelmingly young and 90 percent male. Most lived in canvas tents and rough wood-frame houses. A promising sight to the disembarking couple, however, were the dozens of saloons, gambling halls, fandango houses and bordellos.

An Incident at the Theater

In 1849 women were so scarce in San Francisco that when a member of the fairer sex strolled down the board sidewalks, crowds of lonesome, homesick miners would flock out of the saloons and gambling tents, hats in hand, just to catch a glimpse. Prostitutes accounted for much of the scant female population.

Leaving San Francisco for richer grounds, Belle and Charles took a ship bound up the Sacramento River to Marysville, gateway to the Sierra Nevada goldfields. There, in partnership with one James Y. McDuffie, they opened a gambling hall and bordello called the New World. “I remember seeing a bet of $10,000 made at poker by Charles Cora,” recalled one Forty-Niner who patronized the New World. “He won his bet.”

In 1852, flush with cash, the couple returned to San Francisco, where Belle took to using her paramour’s surname. There, at the corner of Dupont (present-day Grant Avenue) and Washington streets, in what today is Chinatown, she opened a brothel in one of the ubiquitous wood-frame houses.

As women remained scarce, men flocked to Belle Cora’s bagnio, which became the most successful of the more than 100 brothels in town. Though plain on the outside, its interior was replete with fancy furnishings and even fancier courtesans. Among the clientele were prominent merchants and political figures, including the mayor. As Belle prospered, she lavished money on Charles, which he quickly lost in the faro dens. The modish madam also tapped her newfound wealth to buy a fancy carriage, in which she enjoyed riding about town with her girls and to the theater with her husband—that is, when he was in town.

As he had on the Mississippi, Charles roamed widely, following the gambling circuit to Marysville, Sacramento and around again. On Oct. 26, 1852, he got into a quarrel with a dangerous gambler, Thomas Moore, at the El Dorado saloon in Sacramento. Both men jerked out Colt revolvers, one walking out into the street, while the other stood in the brick doorway. Customers scattered as the two opened fire. Fortunately for Cora, none of Moore’s shots found their mark. A police officer soon arrived on the scene and arrested both men. Each was released after forking over a $1,000 bond, and neither faced prosecution.

In the spring of 1855 Belle moved into a new, two-story brick building at 27 Waverly Place. By then San Francisco had greatly modernized. Replacing the tents were multistory brick buildings on streets paved with cobblestones and illuminated by gas lamps. The improvements prompted miners and merchants alike to send for their wives and families, bringing more and more respectable, middle-class women to town. The latter development brought Belle no end of trouble and scorn. At the same time Charles remained fiercely protective of her.

On the night of Nov. 15, 1855, Belle and Charles attended a play at the American Theater, with seats in the exclusive first balcony. In the row directly in front of them was William H. Richardson, 34, the U.S. marshal for northern California, accompanied by his 22-year-old wife, Lavinia, and a female friend. The Richardsons had been married for two years, and Lavinia was six months pregnant. Richardson, like many San Francisco pioneers, was a former soldier, a heavy drinker and quick to take up an insult or a quarrel. Neither he nor his wife had any idea a notorious madam was sitting directly behind them.

At intermission the lights went on, and Lavinia and her friend noticed men in the pit below leering at them and laughing. Lavinia complained to her husband, and Richardson went down to confront the offenders. The men explained they had not been looking at Lavinia, but rather at Belle Cora, just behind her. A furious Richardson stormed back to the balcony and demanded Charles and Belle leave at once. When they refused, the marshal complained to the theater manager. The latter declined to eject such wealthy patrons, so the Richardsons left in a huff.

The next evening William Richardson happened across Charles Cora in the Cosmopolitan saloon. Both had been drinking, and they exchanged angry words. Cora then announced to onlookers, “This man is going to slap my face!”   Richardson replied with a grin, “I promised to slap this man’s face, and I had better do it!”

At that, their respective friends stepped in and separated the pair.

The next evening, November 17, Cora was drinking in the Blue Wing saloon on Montgomery Street. As was his custom, he carried a pair of single-shot derringers in his pockets. When he heard that a man outside was asking for him, Cora stepped through the door and found Richardson waiting on the sidewalk. The marshal was also armed, carrying a concealed derringer and a silver-sheathed bowie knife.

In conversation, the two walked to the corner of Clay and Leidesdorff streets, where Cora suddenly pushed Richardson into a doorway.

“What do you mean to do?” exclaimed Richardson. “Do you mean to shoot me?”

“No, but I want to talk to you,” declared Cora. The gambler instead seized the marshal’s collar with his left hand, then yanked out a derringer and thrust it into Richardson’s breast.

“Don’t shoot!” the marshal pleaded with his assailant. “I am unarmed!”

Cora fired once, and the bullet tore into Richardson’s chest, a mortal wound. Cora held the marshal upright for long moments, then abruptly dropped his corpse and strode up the street.

Arrested almost immediately, Cora was scarcely in jail before outraged citizens had gathered outside, calling for his lynching. Belle was overcome with anxiety, for she well knew that on the California frontier murderers were generally sentenced to death by hanging. She was determined to save her man from the noose.

Witness Tampering

At the coroner’s inquest two days later the first witness called was 35-year-old Maria Travis Knight, who, like her husband, came from a respectable, well-to-do New England family. In testimony confirmed by other eyewitnesses, Maria described the killing and swore Richardson had not been holding a weapon when shot. Her testimony was critical, as she’d been passing down the same sidewalk and was standing only steps away when the fatal shot was fired.

Belle grew frantic when Charles was indicted for murder, his trial set for Jan. 3, 1856. She sent a prominent attorney to the Knight home. Explaining that his client was overcome with grief, the lawyer beseeched Maria to meet with Belle. At first Knight refused, but when a family member appealed to her Christian sense of duty, Maria finally consented.

The next evening, guided by a confidante of Belle’s, Knight climbed a vacant lot to the rear of the notorious bordello. “A long path through a beautiful flower garden led to a door of the house, which was opened from within by two servants,” Maria recalled. “Behind the servants stood the madam, who called herself Mrs. Cora. She was smiling and cordially invited us to enter.” Forty years later Knight recalled her hostess vividly. “She was superbly attired in black silk with costly laces,” Maria wrote. “Although she possessed the grace of a highly cultured woman, I shrank from her and wanted to run, but feared to make an attempt to escape.” After 10 minutes of casual conversation, Belle poured her visibly anxious guest a glass of wine.

“You seem nervous,” Belle said sweetly, “and the wine will help you.”

But middle-class women did not socialize in brothels, and they did not drink alcohol.

“I have never tasted liquor of any kind,” Knight told Cora.

“[Belle] quietly put the glass on the tray and then sat down by me,” recalled Maria. “She talked about the weather, her health and trivial things, and then most particularly inquired after my own health.” Belle then briefly left the parlor and returned with a cup of tea, saying, “I have brewed it expressly for you.”

By then Knight was overcome with fear, suspecting both the wine and the tea were poisoned. Again she refused. After more small talk, Belle finally turned to the topic of Richardson’s death. Maria replied with the same account she’d given at the coroner’s inquest. Then Belle asked, “What did Richardson have in his hand?”

“Nothing whatever,” Maria responded. “I distinctly saw that his fingers were extended and that it would be impossible to hold anything with his hands wide open.”

Belle cross-examined Knight, trying to get her to change her story, but Maria wouldn’t budge. Seething with anger, Belle abruptly stood and loomed over her guest. “Woman, if you expect to get out of this house alive, you must say that you saw Richardson with a pistol in his hand! That is the only ground we have to save my husband’s life.”

Though terrified, Knight managed to reply in an even tone, “Madam, I did not see a pistol in Richardson’s hand, and I cannot say that I did.”

An enraged Belle rushed to the parlor door and swung it open. Two men burst through the doorway. Knight recognized one of them—Dan Aldrich, a well-known gambler. He held a steel dagger in his hand. Maria later testified that Aldrich towered over her with the knife and growled threats. “My life would be spared if I would accept $1,000 and leave the country,” she recalled the trio telling her. “I must also promise never to return.”

Frantic to escape, Maria readily agreed. Belle told her they would later reveal where the bribe money was buried. Knight then rushed from the bordello and down the long hillside to her home. As soon as she’d recovered her wits, she reported the whole affair to the prosecuting attorney. Meanwhile, Belle set out to bribe other witnesses. She also hired three of the most prominent lawyers in California, paying them $5,000 each to defend Charles.

When the trial began a few weeks later, Knight was again a key prosecution witness. Charles Cora’s lawyers produced a parade of witnesses for the defense. Several of his gambler friends from New Orleans swore he had a reputation there as a peaceable man, which was false. Few of the defense witnesses had appeared at the coroner’s inquest, yet two men in turn took the stand and claimed Richardson had had a knife in hand when shot. On cross-examination both admitted they had visited Belle at her brothel before the trial, though each insisted he’d not been bribed.

Though it was clear there had been witnesses tampering and bribery, the trial resulted in a hung jury. San Franciscans were shocked. Knight had testified not only that Richardson hadn’t had a weapon in hand, but also that Belle Cora had threatened her life and tried to bribe her. Her account was plainly true, for no respectable woman would ever admit having set foot inside a brothel. Public shock turned to outrage when evidence surfaced that Belle had also offered a bribe to at least one of the jurors. “Rejoice, ye gamblers and harlots,” wrote crusading newspaper editor James King of William in ridicule of the verdict. “Assemble in your dens of infamy tonight and let the costly wine flow freely, and let the welkin [heavens] ring with your shouts of joy!”

The editorial struck a chord, for the city had been under the thumb of corrupt Tammany Hall politicians from back East. The latter’s enforcers, known as “shoulder strikers,” were ruffians from the street gangs of New York. That May 14, while Cora languished in jail awaiting a new trial, a crooked politician named James P. Casey mortally wounded King, who had exposed Casey as an ex-convict from New York. In short order upward of 8,000 men, many of them veterans of the Mexican War, reorganized the city’s famed Committee of Vigilance. Seizing weapons from state militia armories, they took control of San Francisco’s government. Their headquarters, a two-story building on Sacramento Street fortified by a sandbag breastwork, was known as “Fort Gunnybags.”

On May 18 more than 1,500 vigilantes surrounded the jail and, at the point of a heavy cannon, seized Charles Cora and James Casey. Two days later, within the confines of Fort Gunnybags, the prisoners were tried by the vigilantes and sentenced to death. Belle’s money and influence were irrelevant. On the day of execution, May 22, Charles asked a Catholic priest to give him the last rites. The father refused unless he first married Belle. She promptly came to Fort Gunnybags, where the priest performed the wedding. An hour later Cora and Casey, with nooses draped around their necks, stepped onto gangplanks protruding from two second-story windows. Within moments both plunged to their deaths.

Over the next two months the vigilantes hanged two more murderers and rounded up some 40 shoulder strikers and other hard cases, placing many aboard ships bound for Central America and Hawaii. Meanwhile, Belle Cora returned heartbroken to her bagnio on Waverly Place. Perhaps to deal with her grief, Belle took opium. She soon became addicted to it and later to chloroform. In myth and popular history the madam gave up her wild life and lived quietly in San Francisco. That was hardly true. She continued to run her bordello another six years. In 1857, when a policeman tried to make an arrest in Belle’s place, one of her girls broke a bottle over the officer’s head. Two years later another of her courtesans was arrested after promenading downtown in a revealing “French square neck” dress. Several other disturbances and scandals took place at her brothel. Then, in 1862, Alexander Purple, a thug whom the vigilantes had run out of town in 1856, cut his throat in the basement of Belle’s brothel after she’d rejected his advances. He later died.

Two weeks later, on Feb. 18, 1862, Belle herself died at the bordello from the effects of the habitual abuse of chloroform. California’s most notorious woman was only 35 years old.

What became of Belle’s nemesis, Maria Knight? In 1859 she divorced her husband, months later marrying prominent sea captain Samuel J. DeWolf. Six years later, on July 30, 1865, DeWolf’s steamer, Brother Jonathan, ran aground and sank off northern California, taking with it DeWolf and most of his 244 crewmen and passengers. A year later Maria stopped by the art studio of Gideon Jacques Denny, San Francisco’s foremost marine painter, to buy an oil on canvas of Brother Jonathan, when Denny’s ex-wife walked in and spotted the pair talking. Overcome with jealousy, the woman pulled a pistol and fired as Maria fled for her life. The widow DeWolf outran the bullet and lived to age 86, dying in 1906. In later years she often regaled listeners with the story of her run-in with Charles and Belle Cora. She was the last living eyewitness to the deadly quarrel that helped ignite the nation’s largest vigilante movement.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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San Francisco-based writer John Boessenecker is a special contributor to Wild West and the author of 12 books about the American West. For further reading see his book Against the Vigilantes: The Recollections of Dutch Charley Duane, as well as The Madams of San Francisco, by Curt Gentry, and History of California, by Theodore Henry Hittell.

In the end William “Billy” Dixon cared far less about being a legend or hero than he did about the vibrancy of life he had experienced on the Great Plains. Death had flirted with the famed frontier scout and buffalo hunter on more than one occasion, but it was in those harrowing moments he had felt most alive.  

A reflective Dixon recalled one of those life-defining episodes in his autobiography, dictated shortly before his death and published in 1914. His mind drifted to his days as a young buffalo hunter at Adobe Walls, a remote outpost of hunters, skinners and tradesmen in the Texas Panhandle. There, in the predawn hours of June 27, 1874, Dixon caught a glimpse of a large body of shadowy objects near a timberline beyond the settlement’s grazing horses. They were moving toward the outpost. Dixon strained his eyes but couldn’t define anything in the murky light. Suddenly, the advancing body “spread out like a fan” and unleashed a collective, thunderous war whoop that “seemed to shake the very air of the early morning.”  

Hundreds of mounted Comanche, Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne warriors then burst into view, charging furiously in full regalia. The fearless Comanche Chief Quanah Parker led the pack. Dixon described the scene with vivid, romantic prose—splashes of bright red, vermillion and ochre on the warriors and their horses…scalps dangling from bridles…fluttering plumes of magnificent warbonnets…and the bronzed, half-naked bodies of the riders, glittering with silver and brass ornaments as they emerged from the fires of the rising sun. “There was never a more splendidly barbaric sight,” Dixon confessed. “In after years I was glad that I had seen it.”  

Dixon had witnessed one of the last great thrusts by the Plains tribes in defense of their way of life—an ancient, nomadic existence tethered to the once mighty herds of buffalo. By the time of the 1874 Second Battle of Adobe Walls, however, the herds were vanishing at an alarming rate. Dixon, like the buffalo, miraculously survived. He emerged from battle that day as the “hero of Adobe Walls,” having dropped a warrior from his horse with a legendary rifle shot of more than 1,500 yards. In the ensuing decades Dixon became increasingly cognizant of the unique history he had experienced on the Great Plains. Above all he came to appreciate the magnitude those events had had on the development of the American West.

“I fear that the conquest of savagery in the Southwest was due more often to love of adventure than to any wish that cities should arise in the desert, or that the highways of civilization should take the place of the trails of the Indian and the buffalo,” Dixon said. “In fact, many of us believed and hoped that the wilderness would remain forever. Life there was to our liking. Its freedom, its dangers, its tax upon our strength and courage, gave zest to living.”

Memories of that life flooded Dixon’s mind. Fortunately, Billy’s greatest champion—his wife, Olive—convinced him to preserve his remembrances for future generations in an as-told-to autobiography. Starting in earnest in the fall of 1912, she faithfully recorded Billy’s running narrative on notebooks scattered throughout their homestead in Cimarron County, Okla. She even kept a notebook in the corral in case her taciturn husband became reflective about the past, ever mindful of his reluctance to fuss over his adventures. Sadly, Billy never read the final manuscript. He caught pneumonia during a winter storm and died shortly afterward at home on March 9, 1913, at age 62. Fellow members of his Masonic lodge buried Billy in the nearest cemetery on Texas soil, in the Panhandle town of Texline.

“Little did we suspect that Death—the enemy from whom he had escaped so many times in the old days—was at hand,” Olive wrote in the preface to his autobiography, “and that the arrow was set to the bow.”

Having inherited her husband’s hefty mantle, Olive faithfully labored over the next 43 years—until her own death—to preserve and promote his legacy. Her love and unwavering dedication to Billy, a man 22 years her senior, is consistently evident in her private letters, published articles, lectures and memorial projects. In the immediate aftermath of his death she dedicated her efforts to publishing his life story. First, Olive enlisted the services of Frederick S. Barde, the “dean of Oklahoma journalism,” to compile Billy’s remembrances into an orderly manuscript originally entitled Life and Adventures of “Billy” Dixon. She then borrowed $500 at 12 percent interest to pay for the printing—a mighty sacrifice for a widow of seven children. Twelve years would pass before Olive finally paid off her banknote, but any hardships proved worthwhile where her husband’s legend was concerned.

Historians and old-timers alike declared the book an instant frontier classic. University of Oklahoma history professor Joseph B. Thoburn, who became one of Olive’s closest friends and confidants, viewed the timing of her work on the book as “almost Providential.” In one letter to Olive he declared, “Posterity will always owe you a debt of gratitude for your persistence in persuading your husband to tell his life story for publication. So much valuable historical material of this class had been lost in the West because the story of a man’s life was permitted to die with him.”  

Thoburn spoke truth. If not for Olive’s perseverance, large swaths of Billy’s remarkable life story would never have been recorded. The autobiography alone provided Dixon’s firsthand accounts and context for two of the American West’s most thrilling episodes—the June 27, 1874, Second Battle of Adobe Walls, and the Sept. 12, 1874, Buffalo Wallow Fight.  

Buffalo Wallow

At Buffalo Wallow—a sideshow of the Sept. 9–14, 1874, Battle of the Upper Washita River—Dixon, fellow civilian scout Amos Chapman and four enlisted men of the 6th U.S. Cavalry defended a patch of naked ground against a large band of Comanche and Kiowa warriors. For their actions Dixon and the others received the Medal of Honor. Billy’s blunt but gripping narration of the battle to Olive provided the backstory behind the medals.  

Dixon described how he and his companions were carrying dispatches from McClellan Creek, in the Panhandle, to Camp Supply in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), some 150 miles to the northwest. They’d been sent by Colonel Nelson A. Miles, then commanding the 5th U.S. Infantry and the 6th Cavalry, whose rations were running dangerously low amid the Red River War, the ongoing campaign to subdue the southern Plains tribes. At sunrise on September 12, their second day out, the small party crested a knoll within plain sight of the Comanches and Kiowas. The warriors quickly encircled the men.    

“We were in a trap,” Dixon recalled. “We knew that the best thing to do was to make a stand and fight for our lives.” As the men dismounted, Private George W. Smith gathered the reins of their horses, only to be shot a moment later. He fell face down. At that the horses bolted. A fierce, close-quarters firefight ensued, as Dixon, Chapman, Sergeant Zachariah T. Woodhall and Privates Peter Roth (or Rath) and John Harrington fended off an estimated 125 warriors.  

Scanning the open plains for any shelter, Dixon spotted a depression some yards distant where buffalo had pawed and wallowed. As the men sprinted for it under fire, one shot dropped Chapman, who fell with a moan. Roth, Woodhall, Harrington and Dixon kept running till they reached the wallow, then desperately stabbed and clawed at the earth with their knives and hands to throw up a crude earthwork around its perimeter. “We were keenly aware that the only thing to do was to sell our lives as dearly as possible,” Dixon said. “We fired deliberately, taking good aim, and were picking off an Indian at almost every round.”  

Chapman and Smith—the latter presumed dead—remained where they had fallen. One of the men cried out for Chapman to make a dash for the wallow, but the scout replied that a bullet had shattered his left knee. Dixon refused to leave Chapman stranded. Despite intense volleys by the enemy, he finally reached his fellow scout, hoisted Chapman on his back and bore the larger man to the safety of the wallow. Chapman later told a dramatically different version of who saved whom that day, a claim the reserved Dixon never contested publicly while alive, much to Olive’s dismay.  

Around 3 p.m. merciful fate intervened, as sheets of cold rain provided the defenders with welcome water and pelted their assailants, prompting the Comanches and Kiowas to retreat for warmth and cover out of rifle range. By dawn the next day the warriors had vanished. The break came too late for Smith, who’d been mortally wounded with a punctured lung. In the dark of night Dixon and Roth had manhandled the private back to the wallow, where he died without complaint. Decades later Billy spoke of the cool courage displayed by every man that day and mournfully told his wife that Private Smith still lay buried out on the windswept plains.  

Tireless Work

The knowledge that Smith’s grave, as well as the battle site, remained unmarked overwhelmed Olive with a sense of responsibility to honor the memory of Billy and his contemporaries. With that singular mission in mind she leapt from one project to the next. She wrote to magazines and newspapers, often to correct details in published articles about Billy’s life. In 1922 she became a charter member of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Society and two years later spearheaded the society’s efforts to mark the 50th anniversary of the Second Battle of Adobe Walls.  

On June 27, 1924, more than 3,000 celebrants descended on the remote Adobe Walls battlefield, by then part of the Turkey Track Ranch in Hutchinson County, Texas. They arrived in automobiles, wagons and on horseback, all to pay homage to the memory of a heroic and successful last stand by 28 men and one woman (Hannah Olds, the wife of cook William Olds) against “the flower and perfection” of the Plains tribal warriors.  

Andy Johnson of Dodge City, Kan.—one of two living defenders—attended the celebration with a pistol fastened to his waistband. He later regaled the crowd with a stirring account of the battle as airplanes circled overhead. Naturally, Johnson’s story of Dixon’s legendary long shot received prime treatment, though the claim later drew skepticism in some quarters. Olive also made brief remarks, crediting others for the historic occasion. The crowd cheered lustily when a 10-foot-tall monument of the finest Oklahoma red granite was unveiled. Inscribed on it are the names of each Adobe Walls defender.  

The successful event only fueled Olive’s commitment to her cause. She had already begun lobbying the society to mark the site of the Buffalo Wallow Fight while simultaneously searching for a publisher to reprint Billy’s book. Despite the book’s critical acclaim a decade earlier, Olive’s hunt for a publisher proved slow and unnerving. In a Dec. 27, 1925, letter to Thoburn, she went so far as to declare that if she couldn’t secure a publisher soon, she would be forced to “sell my land in Cimarron County.”  

Two years passed before Olive celebrated those two signature achievements—the release of a revised edition of Billy’s autobiography, by Dallas-based P.L. Turner Co., and the placement of a monument at the Buffalo Wallow battleground, 22 miles south of Canadian, Texas. She even successfully lobbied the U.S. War Department to provide a grave marker for Private George Smith.  

Still, Olive couldn’t rest. Two years later she made the intensely personal decision to have her husband’s remains reinterred to Adobe Walls. On June 27, 1929—55 years to the day after the storied battle with allied warriors led by Quanah Parker—a police escort led a funeral procession three hours from Texline to the battleground. Reverent spectators lined the route, removing their hats as the caravan passed. A headline in the Amarillo Daily News proclaimed, Col. Billy Dixon Gets Last Wish: Buried at Site of Adobe Walls. Never mind that Dixon had no military rank; he didn’t need one to be remembered.  

Immortalized in Print

The model of a devoted widow, Olive ensured her husband’s name would echo through time. She did so tirelessly, lovingly and with humility. Recognizing her immense contributions to the history of the Texas Panhandle, author John McCarty sought her permission to write a biography about her life with Billy, and his vision culminated in the 1955 publication of Adobe Walls Bride: The Story of Billy and Olive Dixon. Initially, Olive had balked at the idea. “Throughout the time when interviews and research were bringing out the story of her life,” McCarty wrote, “Mrs. Dixon steadily maintained that there was nothing distinctive about her or her experiences; she even protested that there would be no interest in a story of her life, as she had done nothing out of the ordinary. All her disclosures were slanted toward one recurring theme: ‘My husband was a great man.’ But she took no credit for Dixon’s achievements.”  

Olive died in Amarillo a year later, on March 17, 1956—43 years and eight days after her beloved Billy left this earth. Death stole her swiftly. That evening she had joined daughter Edna and son-in-law Walter Irwin for dinner at a popular barbecue restaurant. On the drive home Olive quietly slumped over on her daughter’s shoulder. She never regained consciousness.  

As a child growing up in Virginia, Olive had dreamed of a time when she could “mingle with people who were really doing things in an unusual way.” Stories of the expansive cattle ranches on the Great Plains fueled her imagination, until in 1893, at age 20, she boldly joined brother Archie King in Texas for the adventure of a lifetime. He worked as a cowhand for a Hutchinson County spread, living with wife and child in a crude log-and-sod structure dug out of a bank on Johns Creek some 20 miles from the ranch headquarters. She also visited brother Albert, who wrangled for a neighboring spread.  

Olive instantly fell in love with the West, and soon after with one of its icons. Her childhood dream was realized. She’d sought adventure, embraced the pioneer spirit and then married the love of her life. Olive, like her husband, had lived a life worth remembering.   

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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Ron J. Jackson Jr. is an award-winning author from Rocky, Okla., and a regular contributor to Wild West. For further reading he recommends the autobiography Life and Adventures of “Billy” Dixon, as well as Adobe Walls: The History and Archeology of the 1874 Trading Post, by T. Lindsay Baker and Billy R. Harrison; Adobe Walls Bride: The Story of Billy and Olive King Dixon, by John L. McCarty; and Billy and Olive Dixon: The Plainsman and His Lady, by Bill O’Neal.

In 1942, British authorities in Cairo arrested an Egyptian dance superstar for espionage. Her name was Hekmet Fahmi. Allegedly a nationalist with connections to Anwar el-Sadat, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and members of the Egyptian revolutionary Free Officers Movement, Fahmi had gained access to top secret intelligence from a well-informed British lover who worked at GCHQ and had passed this information to a pair of German spies who had managed to infiltrate Cairo.

At least, that was what Fahmi stood accused of. The espionage threat was credible enough for British authorities to put Egypt’s most famous dancer behind bars for more than two years. Her career would never recover. Yet Fahmi’s story remains a captivating part of World War II history, not only because of her alleged espionage but because of the talent that likely worked to her advantage as a spy: Egyptian cabaret belly dancing. 

An Elusive Art

Egyptian belly dance, known as raqs sharqi, has a history stretching back thousands of years. Ancient Egyptian temple reliefs from the days of the pharaohs contain strikingly similar imagery to modern Egyptian belly dancing, such as women dancing wearing hip scarves to the accompaniment of clarinets and drums. While belly dancing expressed itself in different forms over time, including group dancing and male dancing, female belly dancing proved the most enduring and popular incarnation of raqs sharqi. Historically seen as a desirable trait for wives, brides-to-be were taught the art of belly dancing so that they could dance for their husbands. Some women became professional dancers to entertain primarily male audiences. 

Belly dance is a highly disciplined dance style comparative to a sport. It is a full body exercise that requires dancers to move different muscle groups independently. Essential to Egyptian-style belly dance, a scarf worn around the hips accentuates isolated hip and waist movements and adds flair to performances. Aside from complex hip, waist and chest movements, the dance also incorporates fluid arm and finger movements. To gain the amount of flexibility, precision and rhythmic grace to belly dance successfully takes rigorous practice. Once the essential basic movements are mastered, a dancer may weave together endless combinations and improvisations to form complex choreography. The dance can be performed to any type of music and also be highly dramatized if desired. Special types of belly dance performances can include candle dances, sword dances, floor dancing (performed on one’s knees and sometimes bending backwards), and the ever-popular veil dances, all of which require finesse.

Appeal to Foreigners

Foreigners who visited Egypt were captivated by belly dance performances they witnessed. Although Western paintings and illustrations from the 19th century often portrayed “oriental dancers” with colorful garb and bare stomachs, religious convictions saw female belly dancers in Egypt cover up more over time. The essential hip scarves were still worn but bare waists became less common and dance movements became more restricted as time passed. 

Belly dance experienced a Renaissance in the 1920s thanks to the creative genius of Badia Masabni, popularly known as Madame Badia. Originally from Syria, Badia spoke five languages and traveled in many countries throughout the world. Drawing inspiration from French cabaret performances, Badia realized how to create an elegant and exciting new dance style fusing the best of Egyptian belly dance traditions with Western flair.

Cairo’s Favorite Casino

With innovation and entrepreneurial skills, Badia set up a nightclub in Cairo called the Casino Opera, also known as the Casino Badia: an exclusive venue that also functioned as a training school to teach her new style of dance to adventurous young local women. Egyptian cabaret style belly dance was born.

Badia revolutionized belly dance. She introduced sweeping changes to dance costume, modeling her dancers’ costumes on two-piece French cabaret outfits with decorative brassieres, short hip scarves, and plenty of sequins. The dancers performed in high heels and sometimes barefoot. Badia developed new signature moves in the dance; she also allowed the dancers a wider field of movement and mixed signature Egyptian techniques with Latin dance styles and ballet. Badia also upended music, blending Western orchestral instruments like violins, cello and accordion with Egyptian traditional instruments such as clarinets and tabla drums to create powerful and enchanting background music for performances. The results were fantastic. Badia’s new cabaret dance style became all the rage in Cairo and influenced other schools of dance. 

Cabarets offering belly dance performances became magnets for British troops garrisoned in Cairo both before and during World War II. Badia’s Casino Opera was one of the most popular hotspots. Egypt’s King Farouk was a patron as was Randolph Churchill and many other famous personages. Many British soldiers in Cairo were eager to enjoy the company of attractive Egyptian females in nightclubs as well as to drink and socialize. Cabarets like Badia’s Casino Opera in Cairo were great places to mix—and to spy.

During World War II, many Egyptians were sympathetic to the Germans due to a general dislike at living under a de facto British occupation. We will probably never know how many Egyptian women who gained access to influential military and government officials through nightclub entertainment passed information they learned to German intelligence operatives, spurred by a desire to further the cause of Egyptian independence.

Accused spy Hekmet Fahmi herself was trained at the Casino Opera and was one of Madame Badia’s star pupils. Badia herself was rumored to have engaged in espionage, although for whom she may have been spying remains a mystery.

What is clear is that the special dance style that Badia and her proteges wielded to enchant their audiences has had staying power. The Casino Opera debuted many famous Egyptian belly dancers and movie stars, such as Samia Gamal and Taheyya Kariokka,  icons of 1950s Egyptian cinema. These talented and graceful women remain an inspiration for practitioners of Egyptian cabaret belly dance, a style which spread from Cairo all over the world and remains popular today.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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O n the evening of Nov. 3, 1870, Laura Fair, whom one contemporary newspaper dubbed a “saucy wench,” dressed all in black with a black veil and followed her lover, Alexander Crittenden, onto the San Francisco–bound ferry El Capitan. Aboard she found him sitting on a bench with his wife and three of his children. Approaching the group, Fair shouted, “You have ruined me!” and abruptly shot Crittenden with her Sharps pepperbox pistol. Within hours he was dead.  

Five months later, much to her surprise, a jury convicted her of the murder.  

She had expected an acquittal.  

“All her life in the West,” historian Dee Brown wrote of Fair, “she had been idolized merely because she was one of the petticoated few, [and] during the 1850s and 1860s females had shot males down and escaped scot-free.” Rightly so, many thought. There was an unwritten rule of the times that warned seducers to beware. In her 2013 book The Trials of Laura Fair Carole Haber, a professor of history at Tulane University, quotes a period lawyer saying in the purple prose of the day, “He who invades the family circle to blight it with dishonor, he who robs the fireside of its chastity and tears from the home of virtue wife or daughter or sister, justly forfeits his life.”   

Crittenden was obviously a seducer, but so was Fair, and the West was changing.  

Born Laura Ann Hunt in Holly Springs, Miss., in 1837, the future femme fatale married her first husband, a man more than twice her age, at age 16 in 1853. He died a year later—“mysteriously,” Brown notes. Soon remarried, she just as quickly abandoned that husband. Moving to California in 1856, she next took up with and married lawyer William D. Fair, 15 years her senior. They, too, split, and he killed himself. By 1863, with the Civil War raging in the East, Fair was running a boardinghouse in Virginia City, Nev., when a shopkeeper there ran up a Union flag outside his store. A true Southerner, Fair took offense and cut down the flag.   

In the process, she admitted, “I may have cut his hand a little.”   

She was arrested, and Crittenden was conspicuous in the audience during her trail, an indicator the affair had either started or was about to.  

Hailing from a prominent family in Lexington, Ky., Alexander Parker Crittenden was a West Point graduate and a nephew of John J. Crittenden, who had been governor of Kentucky and U.S. attorney general under President Millard Fillmore. In keeping with the pattern, Alex was 21 years older than Laura. Their May-December affair waxed and waned over the next seven years, Fair taking a break in the midst of it to marry and divorce once again. Adding to the tensions, in 1864 Crittenden’s wife, Clara, and family came to Nevada to be with him. (In all the Crittendens had had 14 children, only eight of whom survived to adulthood.)  

Fair later followed the family when it relocated to San Francisco.  

There she got in another scrape when a tradesman, this time a man to whom she owed money, barged into her home demanding payment. Fair slashed at him with a pair of scissors, cutting his coat. Though arrested, she was found not guilty at trial. According to Haber, the court ruled that “the offending party…was the tradesman who tried to force his way into the house of a poor, defenseless woman.”  

Crittenden continued to dally with Fair in San Francisco and abide with her at times tempestuous moods—she was said to have fired at least one shot at him during an argument—always reconciling with her and swearing his intention to divorce Clara and make Fair his legal wife. At one point he sent Fair to Indiana, where he said divorce laws were less rigid, and promised to meet her there. He didn’t, and Fair grew suspicious he would never divorce the loyal Clara and marry her. Finally, in November 1870 Fair learned that Crittenden’s wife and three of her children were returning from a trip to the East and went to observe the family reunion at the Oakland railroad station. She wondered how Crittenden would greet the woman he said he no longer loved and was going to divorce.  

Apparently, he greeted her much too warmly.   

Riled, Fair followed the family onto El Capitan and shot Crittenden point-blank in the chest. She then dropped the gun and walked away, pursued by Crittenden’s 14-year-old son and a local policeman who happened to be aboard. Cornered in the wheelhouse, Fair surrendered. The wounded Crittenden was taken home, where he died two days later.  

Convened in March 1871, Fair’s trial garnered national news coverage, and locals lined up for seats in the courtroom. Fair was confident her gender and the “unwritten laws” of the time, along with the defense argument that she had acted in a moment of insanity, or “female hysteria,” would spring her from the San Francisco County Jail. But public opinion was against her. For one, Brown wrote, “She had been so unladylike as to shoot her man while he was actually in the presence of his of his own legal wife.” Meanwhile, suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony railed against the idea of “female hysteria” as something used for centuries to keep women subservient to men.  

After deliberating a mere 40 minutes, the jury found her guilty, and Fair was sentenced to death by hanging.  

But that wasn’t the end of it.  

Fair appealed, wrangled a retrial in 1872 and was found not guilty on the grounds of “emotional insanity,” which sounds a lot like “female hysteria.” Released, she continued to reside in San Francisco. “She lives in style,” wrote a visitor to that city in 1875. “Few ladies are so often named at dinner tables, and the public journals note her doings as the movements of a duchess might be noted in Mayfair.”  

Fair, 82, died a free—and single—woman in San Francisco on Oct. 19, 1919. 

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Frederika Charlotte Louise, Baroness Riedesel zu Eisenbach—better known as Baroness von Riedesel—was the wife of Baron Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, a German mercenary commander who served with the British during the American Revolutionary War. Frederika insisted on traveling with her husband and his army, and kept a diary.

Frederika fell in love with Friedrich, a seasoned Hessian officer, when he was recovering from his wounds at her family’s estate during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763); she was 16 years old when they married. The couple enjoyed a close relationship, so much that Friedrich consented to allow his wife to follow him when he went to war in North America.

A determined woman, Frederika was not put off from the journey although she had three very young children and angered her mother by going. “I am very sorry to be obliged, for the first time in my life, willingly to disobey you,” she wrote to her mother.

She began her journey on May 14, 1776, taking her three small daughters; one age 4, another age 2 and the youngest 10 weeks old. The baroness braved many dangers, traveling through areas infested by highwaymen, “yet I would have purchased at any price the privilege thus granted to me of seeing daily my husband,” she wrote. 

Frederika accompanied her husband on campaign. “They are naturally soldiers, and excellent marksmen,” she wrote of the Americans, “and the idea of fighting for their country and their liberty increased their innate courage.” Frederika saved her husband’s regimental colors when they were taken prisoner by the Americans by hiding the colors in her mattress. She and her husband survived the war and returned to Germany, having had four additional children in North America.

Her diary remains an important firsthand source describing the events of the war. Frederika is one of many German women who made noteworthy contributions to history while supporting their husbands. It is interesting to compare her as a German officer’s wife to the wives of leaders of Nazi Germany, who had a chauvinistic vision for the role of German women. In this passage, Frederika describes the Battle of Saratoga which ended in Patriot victory on Oct. 17, 1777. 

Marching with The troops

We finally reached Saratoga about dark, which was only a half hour march from the place where we had spent the whole day. I was totally soaking wet due to ceaseless rain and had to stay that way all night because I had no place to change my clothes. So I sat next to a good fire, undressed my children and then we all laid down together on straw.

I asked [Major General William] Phillips who approached me why we did not start our retreat while there was still time, because my husband had undertaken responsibility to cover the retreat and see the army through it. “Poor woman!” he answered me. “You amaze me! Although you’re soaking wet you still have the courage to wish to go on in this weather. If only you were our commanding general! He believes himself to be too exhausted and wants to stay here for the night, and give us some supper.”

In fact General [John] Burgoyne was very keen to do so; he spent half the night singing and drinking, and amused himself with the wife of a commissary, who was his mistress and loved champagne like he did. 

Then I rose at 7 a.m. the next morning with some tea to wake me up, and we hoped now that things would change in an instant for us to finally continue marching away. To cover our retreat, General Burgoyne ordered for the beautiful houses and mills in Saratoga that belonged to [Major] General [Philip] Schuyler to be set on fire…

Aiding the Neglected Troops

Wretchedness of the greatest magnitude and the most extreme disorder reigned in the army. The commissaries forgot to distribute rations among the troops. There were enough cattle but none were slaughtered. More than 30 officers came to me who could not hold out much longer due to hunger. I ordered coffee and tea to be made for them…

Ultimately my provisions were depleted, and in the exasperation of not being able to help anymore, I called the General Adjutant [John] Patterson over because he happened to pass by and I told him, forcefully, the following words because these matters were weighing much on my heart:  “Come here, and see these officers, who have been wounded for the common cause, and who are now deprived of everything because nobody gives them what they are owed. It is your duty to bring this to the attention of the general.” 

He was deeply moved by this and the result was that General Burgoyne himself came to me within a quarter of an hour later, and thanked me very pathetically that I had reminded him of his duties…I replied to him that I asked for his pardon for interfering in things that I knew very well were not a woman’s business, but that I found it impossible to remain silent because I had seen so many brave people in want of everything and had nothing more to give them myself. He thanked me afterwards once again (although I still believe that in his heart he never forgave me for this blow)…

Dodging GunFire

At about 2 o’clock in the afternoon the sounds of cannon fire and small arms fire were heard again, and everything transformed into alarm and movement. My husband sent instructions to me that I should immediately go to a house which was not far from there.

I got into my calash [carriage] with my children, and we had hardly started going towards the house when I saw, on the opposite bank of the Hudson River, five or six men with rifles aiming right at us. Almost unconsciously I threw the children into the rear of the carriage and threw myself over them.

In the same moment the bastards fired, and completely tore up the arm of a poor English soldier behind me, who was already injured and also wanted to retreat to the house. 

Just after our arrival, a frightful cannon barrage began, which was for the most part directed at the house where we were seeking shelter. The enemy probably believed that the generals were there because they saw so many people streaming toward there…We were ultimately forced to flee into the cellar, where I kept in a corner not far from the door. My children lay on the ground with their heads on my lap. We stayed that way the whole night….

Cannonballs in the House

Eleven cannonballs went right through the house and we could clearly hear them rolling right over our heads. One poor soldier, who was supposed to get his leg amputated and had been laid out on the table for this, had his other leg taken off by a cannonball in the meantime…

I was more dead than alive, but not so much over our own danger as that which my husband was facing. However he often sent men to ask how things were going for us and to let me know that he was all right…

Often my husband was of a mind to get me out of danger by sending me over to the Americans, but I protested that it would be more abominable than anything I was now enduring if I had to see and be courteous to people who at the same time were possibly killing my husband. Therefore he promised me that I would continue to follow the army…

I attempted to distract myself by busying myself a lot with our wounded… Once I undertook the care of a Major Plumpfield, adjutant to General Phillips; a rifle bullet had passed through both of his cheeks and smashed his teeth to pieces, and grazed his tongue. He could hold absolutely nothing in his mouth; any food nearly choked him and he was in no condition to take any other nourishment but a bit of beef soup, or some other liquid.

We had Rhine wine. I gave him a flask of it in the hope that the acidity of the wine would clean his mouth. He constantly took some of it in his mouth and that alone had such a salutary effect that he became healed, and thus I again made another friend. And thus I had, amid my hours of sorrow and worry, joyful moments of happiness that made me very glad.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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A gloomy and tragic scene—one with which the inhabitants of the oft-contested city of Winchester, Va., were unfortunately all too familiar—unfolded throughout the night of September 19, 1864, as thousands of casualties from the Third Battle of Winchester were brought to makeshift hospitals throughout the community. “All the wounded,” reported Surgeon James T. Ghiselin, the Army of the Shenandoah’s medical director, were taken to “churches, public buildings, and such private dwellings as were suitable.”  

It did not take long for Ghiselin to realize that the 40 structures transformed into ersatz hospitals would be insufficient to handle the army’s casualties, which exceeded 4,000 troops. Ghiselin also understood these spaces would be further strained with additional casualties as Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah pursued Lt. Gen. Jubal Early’s Confederates south toward Fisher’s Hill. Sheridan’s medical director quickly realized that the time had come to implement a plan, developed several weeks earlier, to transport hundreds of tents to Winchester and construct what would be known as the Sheridan Field Hospital—the largest hospital of its kind constructed during the Civil War.  

The day after the battle Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes ordered Surgeon John Brinton “to proceed without delay to Winchester” and supervise the construction of “a large tent hospital…to be of a capacity of four to five thousand beds.” The following night Brinton arrived in Winchester. While erecting “500 tents…was no slight matter,” as Brinton asserted, the task of erecting the Sheridan Field Hospital was completed on September 29, 1864, with the support of approximately 500 troops from Colonel Oliver Edwards’ brigade. After the hospital’s construction, and in the ensuing weeks, a bevy of civilians, including relief agents from the U.S. Christian Commission and nurses arrived to aid in caring for the wounded. Among them was Jane Boswell Moore.  

Moore, a native of Baltimore, Md., who at the war’s outset aided wounded and sick Union soldiers brought to the city, believed that by the late summer of 1862 her talents could be put to better use in the field. After the conflict’s bloodiest day at Antietam, Moore ventured from Baltimore to Sharpsburg. From that moment until the war’s end, she cared for wounded soldiers in the aftermath of the some of the conflict’s fiercest engagements in the East, including Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Petersburg.  

In the autumn of 1864, Moore came to Winchester. During that time Moore aided wounded soldiers in various hospitals throughout the town, including the Sheridan Field Hospital. As had been the case throughout her service, Moore took a special interest in particular soldiers and decided to share their stories and her experiences by sending letters to “a number of religious and secular periodicals.” Moore hoped that publication of these letters would encourage donations of supplies. While difficult to quantify the amount of donations Moore secured, a Congressional report noted decades after the conflict that her published letters prompted “great quantities of donations.”  

During Moore’s stint in Winchester, two of her letters appeared in the Advocate and Family Guardian—a biweekly newspaper published by the American Female Guardian Society in New York City. These letters, printed in early 1865, reveal much about a nurse’s experiences caring for soldiers wounded during Phil Sheridan’s 1864 Shenandoah Campaign, illuminate the sufferings of the wounded, and serve as a powerful reminder of war’s devastating and tragic consequences.  

Moore’s first letter, published on January 16, 1865, includes an account of her encounter with Sophronia Loder, a mother who ventured to Winchester from Indiana when she learned that her son, Sergeant Adam Loder, 18th Indiana Infantry, had been wounded at the Battle of Fisher’s Hill on September 22. Unfortunately, the wounds Sergeant Loder received to his left lung and left arm proved mortal. He died on October 7, 1864, prior to his mother’s arrival. In addition, Moore recounts the difficulties experienced by Private Walter F. Reed, shot in the jaw at the Battle of Cedar Creek, and Corporal Isaac Price, 15th West Virginia Infantry, who lost both arms in the skirmish near Hupp’s Hill, south of Cedar Creek, on October 13, 1864.  

Advocate and Family Guardian  
January 16, 1865  
I rose from a rude bed on the floor of a house in Braddock Street, in the old town of Winchester, Va., where we have spent seven weeks ministering to the wounded in the last great battle [Cedar Creek]….At eight o’clock daily, an ambulance reports for duty… we, away from the home, and standing in the stead of kindred, dedicate this day, by an act of respect, to the dead, who sleep in Virginia soil….On this bright morning, we pluck a sprig of evergreen to send to the loved ones far away from the grave in which their son and brother is sleeping, and our hearts are saddened to think how these mounds are filling loving hearts with anguish and desolation….Every one of these small shingle-boards, with its miserable and almost illegible penciling, has its history, and that of some is heartrending. Shall I briefly allude to those whose names were carved by same hand?  

In this corner lies Sergt. Loder, from Indiana; seven weeks ago, in the ambulance in which we rode from Martinsburg here, we met his mother, and to know her was to love her. In the pages of memory the record of those pleasant hours and interesting conversation will remain, when years have passed away. It is not often you can know the heart of a stranger, yet sometimes, in our journey through life, we meet a gentle, loving spirit whose sympathies with our own, and whose transparency and simplicity of character are as rare as charming. Sad, indeed, was the result that widowed mother’s journey, for ere she left home her son was laid in this burial spot. She waited long, in hopes of taking him to his wife and child, but this, owing to the manner of his burial, was not accomplished; and she returned, leaving us to mark the spot; and on the very day I performed this duty, I received from her one of those warm, affectionate letters that proved ours to be more than common acquaintanceship….Our sad task over, we load the ambulance with soft crackers, pickles, wine, condensed milk, tobacco (needed in the terribly offensive state of wounds), tomatoes, jelly, butter, and eggs, (when they can be obtained). Bay rum, soap, canned fruits, stationery, clothing, &c., and drive over a rough road, up the hill to Sheridan’s field hospital, where snowy tents loom up against the exquisite hue of the peaks of the distant Blue Ridge—tents alas! so full of misery. Here, Wards, three, four, five, six, seven, ten, twelve, fifteen, sixteen, nineteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-six and seven, and the gangrene tents claim our special attention.  

Let us hurriedly glance at some of the more interesting cases. In ward three Walter F. Weed, of the 114th N.Y.V., has long been a candidate for soft food, his mouth and jaw being terribly broken by a minie ball. At first he could not speak, and we brought him fresh milk; but now he is able to tell his wants, chew a little, and is going home. His can of peaches we find he has been saving to eat on the way, so we add other articles, and smile at his provident forethought….Isaac Price of the 15th loyal Va., looks dispirited, as he sits with both arms gone. Perhaps he is thinking of the wife, mother, and nine children at home on whom as well as himself this heavy trial has fallen…  

Well, reader, no doubt you are weary of so much suffering, and so also are we, so we hurry home at half-past twelve, making a very plain and hasty dinner of crackers, beef and as it is Thanksgiving, some canned tomatoes…and then drive to the “front,” with dried fruits, condensed milk, crackers, stationery, needle-bags, little books and papers. We have paid constant attention to other regiments and to-day we will remember Maryland. It is quite disappointing to find the members of the 6th mostly on picket, but amongst those left in camp our stock is decidedly unpopular…  

We pay a visit to the poor soldiers in Camp Convalescent, and they look so sadly into the ambulance, it makes one’s heart ache. After tea, a sick New Yorker sends for something he can eat; so we put crackers, butter, a lemon, loaf sugar and calves-foot jelly on a tin plate, and send to him. At night there are letters to write for the sick, and a head-board to carve for the dead—sad, yet needless duties; and, as I look to remember that not to me has the day passed without bringing its own sad memories.   

One month after Moore’s first letter appeared in the Advocate and Family Guardian, the paper published a second. In addition to describing the grisly scenes that followed the Battle of Cedar Creek, Moore shared the experiences of Private George Hill, 13th West Virginia, who lost his right leg at Cedar Creek, and his interactions with Carrie Fahnestock, the seven-year-old daughter of Gettysburg, Pa., merchant Edward Fahenstock, who sent a brief note and housewife to the U.S. Christian Commission to hopefully brighten the spirits of a wounded Union soldier. In addition to including the text of Fahnestock’s letter, Moore also sent Hill’s response to it. Hill survived his wound but perished 14 years later at the age of 32. Whether Hill’s war wound contributed to his death is unknown.  

Advocate and Family Guardian  
February 16, 1865  
On the twenty-first of October, after the last great battle in the valley, Dr. [James H.] Manown, the kind-hearted surgeon of the fourteenth West Virginia, told me that towards evening a number of wagons would arrive from the “front,” with wounded, on their way to Martinsburg, twenty-two miles further. My orderly was sent to borrow pails, and we were soon busily employed making milk punch. Just about dark, an immense double train of rough army wagons arrived, blocking up the streets, and belonging to the Sixth, Eighth, and Nineteenth Corps, each freighted with mangled, bleeding, yet precious burdens, among whom our work commenced. It was a strange, warlike scene—dark night settling over Virginia roads, mud, cavalry, and wagons, whilst with flaming candles (lanterns were not be to procured) we supplied the wounded in the different wagons, giving to each half a tin cup full, and to others hot tea. The night was raw and chilly, and both then and on the next, our duties being the same, many suffered from the cold, especially the rebels whose clothes were ragged and thread-bare, many having old quilts and spreads around their shivering forms. They were mostly from North and South Carolina, Louisiana, Virginia, Georgia, &c., ours from West Va., N.Y., Mass., Ohio, Ind., Pa., &c, &c. Many had to be lifted up to drink, and two were beyond the reach of all earthly pain. Two whose legs had been amputated, one from N.Y. the other from Pa. implored me to have them left in Winchester, they being unable to endure the rough ride over stony roads, in lumbering wagons, and Dr. Manown had them taken out, with others, for whom a further ride would have been impracticable. Among them was Georgie Hill, who was fearful of being moved lest the stump of his right leg should be jarred, so Dr. M. lifted him tenderly in his arms, and carried him into his own hospital, in the Southern Methodist Church, on Braddock Street, two doors from our quarters…lying in front of the pulpit, I found him. He did not look more than twelve years old, his skin was fair as a girl’s, his hair dark, and his great black eyes, just about as large and full of mischief as any I ever saw. Though I had a great many serious cases in Sheridan Hospital, who were not nearly so well cared for, I generally managed at noon to get a minute to take a can of peaches or cherries, or some other delicacy to the dear little fellow, whose bright eyes sparkled with pleasure…  

One day I thought of a present for Georgie, sent by a little girl in Gettysburg to the Christian Commission, and entrusted to me. It was a needle-book or housewife, made of pretty red, white, and blue merino, or soft flannel, with pins, black-thread, a nice letter, some little bits of candy wrapped in paper, and a sweet carte-de-visite of a dear little girl. So I told Georgie about it, and his face lighted up as he said, “Bring it right in, so that I can see it.” Some days elapsed before I found time to do so, receiving at length a gentle reminder that, “that though promised three days before, he had not seen it yet.” So at noon I hurried into the church, and stooping on the floor, showed Georgie the wonderful contents of the needle-book, and read to him little Carrie’s letter. “Isn’t she a little one!” he exclaimed, his eyes expanding to their utmost capacity. This is Carrie’s letter:  

Gettysburg, February 25th [1864]  
Dear Soldier,—I can’t do much for you, as I am a very little girl—but I think of you, and pray for you too. I hope you are good, and pray for yourself. When we had the battle here, I saw how you had to suffer, and I pity you. I carried things to sick soldiers, and if you were here would do it for you. I send you my picture that you may see how small I am.   
Good-by. Carrie Fahnestock.  

A few days after, I went in to give eggnog to the wounded, and was sorry to see Georgie about to be taken in an ambulance from the church to Sheridan field-hospital. His few worldly possessions lay on his stretcher, and he looked sorry to leave, for it was one of the coldest days we had had. I tried to comfort him, telling him I daily visited Sheridan hospital, and all he had to do in case we did not find him among so many was to let us know the number of his tent. “How can I let you know?” was his doubtful reply. But late in the afternoon, I sent James with some little article for poor Jones, in whom I took a deep interest, and sure enough in “Ward Seven” lay Georgie…  

The next day was intensely cold. The sky was strangely covered with bright, shifting clouds, looking like grotesquely-shaped precipices, the exquisitely-tinted hills of the Blue Ridge forming a framework or border to the picture of the hillside, with its orchard of ruined fruit-trees, through which numberless teams and wagons wended their way to the closely-gathered tents of Sheridan, covering so many suffering and dying souls… I sought out Georgie, and wrote in answer to Carrie’s letter:  

Sheridan Hospital, Ward 7  
Nov. 5th 1864 Winchester, VA   
Dear Little Carrie,—I am quite a little boy, and my name is Georgie Hill, Co. K, 13th West Va. Regiment. I have been a little soldier boy fourteen months, and was wounded in the leg on the nineteenth of October near Cedar Creek, Va., with a minnie ball. I was carried to Newtown and lay in a tent, and on the twentieth the doctor took my right leg off. My father is dead, but I have a mother, three brothers and one sister, and my home is in Mason County, Va. Three of my brothers are dead, all soldiers, one died in the Mexican war, one at the siege of Vicksburg, and one in the hospital in Gallipolis, Ohio….Miss Moore gave me your dear little picture and present. She told me I must keep it as long as I live to remember the time I lay on the church floor in Winchester, after the battle; and I will. Yesterday they brought me to this field- hospital, where all the sick are in tents, and I find mine very cold this windy day. I don’t like it as well as a house, and if I could have stayed, would not have left the warm church [Southern Methodist Church on Braddock Street]. Miss Moore found me to-day right in her ward—she brought me a little puzzle-box, with seven pieces of wood, and if you know how, you can make squares and funny figures. At first I could not put them all back in the box. I am going to play with it when I go home, before I get my wooden leg and am able to run around. I have not been home for fourteen months, and I don’t know when I shall get there. I have not had a letter for two months either, my mother does not get my letters, or I don’t get hers, I don’t know which. I am going to eat candy after dinner, (this arrangement was not made with difficulty) I have had some pudding, brought in by a Winchester lady, but it has lemon in it, and I don’t like lemon, so I keep looking at the candy. Miss Moore asks if there is anything else I want to say, but I never wrote to you before, so you must excuse me. Good-by, Carrie.   
Your little friend, Georgie Hill   

The Sheridan Field Hospital officially closed on January 4, 1865. Whether Moore departed Winchester before or after that date is unclear. Evidence indicates Moore was with Union forces in Richmond at war’s end. Four years of nursing wounded soldiers in hospital and on the battlefield exacted a physical toll on Moore. In 1888, suffering from “extremely poor health, caused by her army service,” the Federal Government awarded Moore a monthly pension of $50.   

After the conflict Moore, who married Jacob Bristor, a veteran of the 12th West Virginia Infantry in 1867, committed herself to aiding the less fortunate at home and abroad. At the time of her death in 1916 The Baltimore Sun reported she contributed “about $150,000 to the foreign and domestic missionary societies of the Presbyterian Church, most of these gifts having been made in the form of property and ground rents in Baltimore.”  

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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Jonathan A. Noyalas is director of Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute and the author or editor of 15 books.

The lyrics to America’s most famous marching song of the Civil War were written when their author was half-asleep and first sold to a magazine for the whopping sum of five dollars. Julia Ward Howe had been visiting Washington, D.C. in November 1861 with her husband Samuel when she witnessed Union soldiers singing a boisterous tune known as “John Brown’s Body,” then popular among abolitionists. A poet and staunch abolitionist herself, Howe wished she could write new lyrics to this rather strange ditty that the soldiers were so fond of singing. Yet nothing immediately came to mind.    

As in most moments of creative genius, the spark of brilliance happened when she was least expecting it. A groggy Howe had woken up too early one morning and was lying in bed thinking about nothing in particular when suddenly “the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain,” she later wrote. Jumping out of bed, “saying to myself, I shall lose this if I don’t write it down immediately,” Howe scribbled down her lyrics and then went back to sleep. She could hardly have expected when she sold the poem to the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 that it would quite literally spread like wildfire and become the hands-down favorite marching song of all men who took up arms to fight for the Union.

Howe, a committed pacifist, was an unlikely military lyricist. Yet the words she came up with that bleary-eyed morning lit a fire in the hearts of all soldiers who heard it and excelled at getting troops riled up, such as: 

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps; They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps:

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps: His day is marching on. 

It is said that the song moved President Abraham Lincoln to tears, and it became known as the anthem of the Union cause. Howe’s fiery and moralistic lyrics proved enduringly popular, and consequently the song has been invoked by all types of movements and groups. Martin Luther King quoted one of its verses in his notable 1968 “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Following his assassination only one day later, the song became an anthem of King’s church and of the Civil Rights movement.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Award-winning actress and singer Ann-Margret is known for her commitment to entertaining U.S. troops during the Vietnam War. In 1966, she responded to a request signed by over 3,000 troops to perform for them and traveled to Vietnam with three bandmates on a USO tour, traveling to Saigon, the USS Yorktown, and the dangerous “Iron Triangle.”

Despite the danger, she said she was determined to do the best job she could and was not worried for her safety because she felt protected by American servicemen. She focused on bringing them joy from home. She returned to the war zone two years later with Bob Hope’s Christmas USO show.

She continues to support military service members and was honored by the USO in 2003 with the Spirit of Hope award, named after her friend Bob Hope. “I am very proud to be an American. Always will be,” she told Vietnam magazine Editor Zita Ballinger Fletcher in an exclusive interview.

Ann-Margret shared insights into her wartime experiences and new limited-edition perfume, with all profits benefiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, available at www.ann-margretperfume.com.  

You received a petition from troops in Vietnam in 1966 asking you to come perform. The war was unpopular and Vietnam was dangerous. What motivated you to go there despite those obstacles?

Honestly, I didn’t think about my safety at all at the time. I was very flattered by those signatures. Nothing would have stopped me from going.  

What did your family members think about you going to Vietnam?

Well, they knew how much I wanted to go, and they of course were worried but I said to them, “There’s no way anyone can get to me because…my guys are there!”  

What songs did you most enjoy performing there?

I loved doing “Dancing in the Streets.”  

You toured with Bob Hope on the USO Christmas Show in 1968. What was it like to work with him?

I loved working with Bob and did many times over the years. He was a gentlemen and always, always funny on stage and off. He was devoted to the soldiers. He shared many stories with us about traveling during World War II and all the marvelous and touching letters he received from them and their families. He was great at writing back, too.

When Bob and I were rehearsing our dancing for a duet for the tour he came out in a minidress and asked, “Who looks better, me or Ann-Margret?” I won, but he did get a couple of votes from the crew.

We knew that we would be safe. When I did Vietnam with Johnny Rivers there were just four of us, and when we went with Bob Hope there were 80 of us. We weren’t afraid at all, never. We all just wanted to bring a piece of home to those men.

What do you think young people should know about the Vietnam War today?

Our guys went through so much—and when they came back, some people were not very nice to them. They had to go through a lot, and to come back and have people be bad to you…We need to show respect and admiration for all the men and women who served, always. Never forget.  

You are donating 100% of the proceeds from your new limited-edition perfume to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. Can you tell us more about this?

Yes, thank you for asking. My dear friend Justin Chambers of Grey’s Anatomy has wanted to make a fragrance for me for a long while since we worked together. So it’s a project that’s been on the drawing board. When he suggested it benefit the veterans, that was a slam dunk for me. I absolutely adore the fragrance.

We worked on the actual fragrance for a year before we selected this special scent. It has notes of gardenia and jasmine and ylang ylang. You can visit my website for all the details at ann-margretperfume.com and I’ll be wearing it. You can count on that!  

You are a strong supporter of Vietnam veterans. Is there anything in particular you would like to say to Vietnam veterans reading this?

I love you all and I am proud to have been there with you.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of Vietnam magazine.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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Nazi wives and lovers tended to be mediocre women. They were not especially gifted or brilliant. They were content to be used as tools for their partners’ purposes—and to make the most of their proximity to power. That might surprise you. You might have expected Nazi-advertised attributes like “blonde,” “athletic,” “Nordic,” or “motherhood” to have had something to do with why certain women ended up in relationships with Adolf Hitler and his inner circle.

While it’s true that several top Nazis tended to be partial to blondes, they chose female partners for reasons of exploitation rather than personal admiration. Hitler, for example, scorned marriage and children, instead preying on naive teenage girls he could dominate; one such relationship was with his half-niece Geli Raubal. 

In most cases, the exploitation was mutual. While the Third Reich touted the ideal of “noble” and “simple” housewives, reality shows the women who stood at the prow of the Third Reich were anything but. They were willing to court monstrosity for money and privilege. Some became sadistic: like Brigitte Frank, who wore furs stolen from displaced Jewish women, or Unity Mitford, who toured a Jewish family’s apartment she wanted to confiscate while the owners wept in front of her. 

Nazi propaganda made people forget that attributes like blondeness, athleticism and motherhood are ordinary. In a world where mediocrity became an ideal, women who otherwise stood no chance of success were able to transform themselves into goddesses, thriving in an atmosphere of cruelty, materialism and superficial glamor.

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In the first years of the 20th century, despite the humiliating constraints of social segregation, thousands of African Americans made a living in show business. In Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Manhattan’s Harlem, there were top-tier vaudeville houses that headlined Black acts for Black audiences, and the Theaters Owners Booking Association signed up Black acts for almost 100 smaller venues around the country that catered to Black audiences. There were night spots like the Cotton Club in Harlem that for White audiences mounted lavish all-Black musical revues and Harlem theaters for full-scale Black musicals.

But the pinnacle was Broadway. As early as 1900, there were all-Black musicals there, but the concept really took off after the Eubie Blake–Nobel Sissle musical Shuffle Along opened in 1921 and ran an astonishing 504 performances. Producers sensed that the high stepping and raucous humor associated with Black performers were a money maker, and over the next decade 22 more all-Black shows opened on Broadway. These shows slotted the Black performers into stereotypical roles of shuffling gait and slurred speech, but they also opened the door for dozens of performers to have lifelong careers that eventually allowed them more dignity.

The money woes of the Great Depression of the 1930s made it tough to find backers for any Broadway shows, and the Shuffle Along type minstrelsy all-Black show virtually disappeared. But by then, two important corners had been turned: top-billed performers such as Paul Robson and Ethel Waters had moved out of the racial show business ghetto to earn star billing in otherwise White shows, and the classic American operas Porgy and Bess and Four Saints in Three Acts had opened on Broadway, giving African Americans roles as complex three-dimensional human beings.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Factory bells governed the day in early 19th-century Lowell, Mass. They summoned the mostly young women workers to the cotton mills at 4:30 a.m., signaled meal breaks, sent them home to company boardinghouses after their 12- to-14-hour shifts, and sounded curfew at 10 p.m.

The keepers of the boardinghouses were both caretakers and disciplinarians. They cooked meals and enforced moral codes. They made sure the “mill girls,” America’s first factory laborers, went to sleep on time and to church on Sunday.

This was life in a company town—the first planned company town in the United States. It wasn’t devised that way from the start, however. When the company founders traveled northwest of Boston in late 1821, it was simply to assess a potential factory site on the Merrimack River. Mainly, could the falls there reliably power textile machinery?

The answer was yes, and they bought the land. In 1823, the first machinery started processing raw cotton into cloth. Three years later, the land was incorporated as Lowell, named after the company’s late co-founder Francis Cabot Lowell.

The workers were mostly single women ages 15 to 30 from financially strapped families in the outlying areas. They needed places to live, so the company built the boardinghouses. A town with shops, churches, and other destinations eventually rose up.

With production growing fast, recruiters visited farms and villages to find help. The families there needed the money but were skeptical about sending their single daughters to live away from home. The promise of cash pay caught their attention. The living situation in Lowell sealed the deal, as many families concluded their girls would be protected, nurtured, and provided for.

By 1850, red brick boardinghouses and five- and six-story factory buildings lined the river for nearly a mile, the work force surpassed 10,000, and Lowell was the top textiles manufacturing location in the country. The mills continued operating another 70 years after that. They slipped into full decline only after World War I and the disappearance of military contracts.

Red Brick and Mortar

The Lowell National Historical Park spotlights preserved 19th-century mills and boardinghouses, as well as the network of canals that allowed boats to pass around the Pawtucket Falls for incoming deliveries of supplies and outgoing shipments of finished textiles.

The 88 water-powered looms at the park’s Boott Cotton Mill still run as they did back in the day, giving visitors an up-close look at the operation that gave the town its reason to be.

The 1840s boardinghouse exhibit in the Morgan Cultural Center, with kitchen and communal dining room downstairs and bedrooms upstairs, tells the story of the day-to-day life of the workers in company housing.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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In her day, Elizabeth Oakes Smith was a national figure. Born in Maine in 1806, she and her family moved to New York City in the late 1830s, where she joined literary circles and emerged as a prominent feminist essayist, lecturer, and poet. By the 1850s, she was living with her family on Long Island. The forces of the Civil War, however, led to her downfall. In 1861, her favorite son, Appleton Oaksmith, was arrested for outfitting old whaling ships for the slave trade. After spending several weeks imprisoned at Fort Lafayette in New York and Fort Warren in Boston, Oaksmith was transferred over to civil authorities and convicted in the federal court in Boston in the summer of 1862. Before he could be sentenced, though, he escaped from jail and exiled himself in Havana, Cuba, where he became a Confederate blockade-runner.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith spent the war years seeking a presidential pardon for her son. She wrote to Abraham Lincoln and met with Secretary of State William H. Seward, but nothing ever came of her efforts. As the war continued, she became increasingly embittered toward the Union and believed that Appleton was the victim of a malevolent administration in Washington, D.C. Although she had shown sympathy for African Americans and abolitionism before the war, her Democratic politics became increasingly evident in her diary by the midpoint of the war. She grew to especially hate Seward.

In the summer of 1863, Oakes Smith experienced one of the greatest terrors of her life—the New York City Draft Riots. For several days in mid-July, working-class men, women, and children—mostly Irish Democrats—lashed out against Lincoln’s conscription and emancipation policies. At least 105 people died during the five days of rioting, many of whom were African Americans who were viciously targeted by the mob. During this ordeal, Oakes Smith saw a dense crowd standing around a lamppost, upon which hung the body of Colonel Henry O’Brien, the Irish commander of the 11th New York Volunteers, who had ordered his troops to fire above the crowd the previous day in order to disperse them.

Sadly, O’Brien’s men had killed a mother and her 2-year-old child in the process. Now the rioters would exact their revenge. She also encountered Jeremiah G. Hamilton, a 56-year-old African American millionaire on Wall Street. Her diary, which is held with her papers at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, is one of the most remarkable accounts of this period. The following excerpts trace her reaction to the Gettysburg Campaign and then the horrific events that transpired in New York City shortly afterward.

June 17
The whole country is in a ferment because of the movement of General Lee north—Harrisburg is threatened—the Govenor [sic] of New York has been called upon for troops by the Govenor of Pennsylvania. The people have responded generously to the State call, but desired guarantees of the Govenor that they shall go only on short service—to defend the north—not fight the South—they will not trust the authorities at Washington.

June 18th
The excitement still continues. The people call for Gen. McLellon [McClellan] to head the army of the Potomac. We are now reaping the bitter fruits of the imbecility, and treachery of this Administration. I sometimes wonder how the historian will deal with this period. The Abolitionists have anticipated time by publishing their own version of events, called a History of the Rebellion by [John S.C.] Abbott, which suppresses facts and misrepresents them.

I am startled and distressed at events, and find how little I have understood the world—how far off the ideal seems now—that once was so near: but to one thing I still cling, the intrinsic worthiness of our humanity—the wholesomeness, and upwardness of its attributes—and then comes the question whence comes all this distortion?….

June 19
….Noon. The papers have come—and the panic is subsiding—it seems that Lee is on the retreat. I do not think all this demonstration is for nothing—I believe he designs to attack Washington, and dictate a peace from the Capital….

June 24th
A day of heavy work—found myself worn in body and spirit—cross and miserable.

The country is in a state of ferment, and yet it is suppressed—no faith in our rulers—I see the Govenor of New Jersey has directed the Malitia which was collected for the defense of Pennsylvania, to be disbanded, judging that there will be no occasion for their service. They refused to serve under the Administration….

Lee’s army within 18 miles of Pittsburg. 10 o’clock P.M. Going to bed—dissatisfied with myself—oppressed with a terrible sense of weariness and despondency. I am indeed cast from my moorings, drifting—drifting—whither?

June 25
The Confederates in large force in Pennsylvania—the papers contain some terrible records of savage cruelty and atrocious crime perpetrated by the Black soldiers. The negro in our cities and villages also has started upon a career of crime unparrallelled in our history. We are threatened with a war of races, in which the poor Negro must and will be the great sufferer….

June 27 
[Discussion of Lee’s invasion and Confederate privateers omitted.]

I believe this treacherous Administration designs to allow the Confederates to take Washington—having no capacity to manage our national affairs—finding themselves hopelessly involved, they design to let matters take very much their own way, and then under plea of necessity, acknowledge the Southern Confederacy:—then will come the contest for northern supremacy, when the wily Seward hopes to ride into the Presidency of the North….

June 30th 
….The Confederates are within four miles of Harrisburg. Gen. Meade has been called to the command of the army of the Potomac—Gen. Hooker relieved probably because of his interference. This is bad, people say, in the face of the enemy—but the Administration will not care to give battle—they wish for a general disruption in public affairs. They have inaugurated the reign of falsehood.

July 1st 
….The Confederates are within ten miles of Washington—they do not seem inclined to battle—with a grim wit they say they have come North to hold Peace meetings. So disgusted have the people become with the present Administration that they seem rather disposed to receive, than repel the invaders. Many say openly that the prospect of restoring the Constitution would be better under Jefferson Davis, than under Abraham Lincoln. Immense Peace Meetings prevail through the country, and resistance to the enrollment is the common sentiment….

July 3d
Great anxiety about the expected battle—I am by no means sure that our arms are successful against Vicksburg. The repulse of our troops at Port Hudson was a shocking, and bloody disaster….

July 6th
A terrible battle has been fought at Gettysburg. The Union army is said to be triumphant, with a loss of twenty thousand men—Good God! what horrible carnage—I am sick at the record—my whole soul revolts at this sanguinary conflict. Such a victory is as ruinous as defeat. There must be a compromise—for neither party will yield, and each seems an equal to the other in point of courage and persistency….

July 20th
The past week has been one replete with anxiety and not without incident. On Monday 13th inst. I took the early train for the City, where the most appalling scenes awaited me. Our fool-hardy, despotic rulers in spite of the warning of observant men, and the indication of the masses, that revolt would come, have persisted in enforcing the Conscription Act. On Saturday the action of Draft created no disturbance, although much jeering and derision followed. The City was greatly excited through Sunday—On Monday I went to the City, and what I now describe, I saw myself. I had occasion to visit the offices of several lawyers upon business—as I passed along the streets large bodies of people thronged the corners—a great crowd was about the Tribune Office, and the white faces of the workmen within, with their little paper caps upon their heads now and then appeared at the windows—but retreated at a sort of growl from the crowd which beset them.

I was obliged to call upon places in this vicinity, and was not unwilling to learn by my own observation the exact spirit of the crowd. I saw a respectable working-woman threading her way through the living mass, as I was doing myself, and found it convenient to use her and her basket as an entering wedge. Sometimes it would cross my mind, that if paving stones should take wing my position would be a dangerous one—but I had little anxiety for myself—indeed! let me confess it: own to the truth.

I was intoxicated—drunk with excitement. I said of myself—“Oh thou drunk, but not with wine.” I had seen the people submit to so many arbitrary measures—seen them go like sheep to the slaughter in this stupidly managed war—seen them die without a word for measures repugnant to them—seen the encroachments upon our liberties made daily by this corrupt Administration, and yet the people were silent—bitter—cursing deep, not loud, and I began to lose all hope—I wished I could do…something to rouse them—but nothing seemed able to do this—the people tamely cowered under oppression—the radical Editors lied and deceived them as did the rulers at Washington, and I despaired for American freedom. I knew the draft was repugnant to the genius of the country—I knew that the…burden of the war fell upon our working men, and the clause of exempting those who were able to pay the $300 threw all the burden upon the poor men, still it seemed as if the people would submit—

But now there was a recoil—five thousand men were up in arms—there was a perfect howl of rage and indignation from the masses. I said to my pioneer of the basket—“what is the matter? what are the people about?”

She gave me a fierce look—“They wont be carried off to the war—that’s what is the matter.”

“Well, would you have your husband carried off in this way?”

“If they do, they ve got to fight me first,” was the prompt reply. She went on with a hard sneering laugh—“Eh! you ladies can pay the $300 and keep your men to home.”

I said no more—passing into Broadway the shops were nearly all closed—the stages had been stopped or converted into conveyances for the insurgents—I walked up to the University building where I found Dr. Elliott, and Edward, on my way I passed several police men, haggard, dusty—exhausted—I said to myself—the mischief works—these insolent ruffians, who have lately fairly trod upon the people—knocking them down, firing upon them in mere wantonness, will now find a check—I grew ruthless in my indignation—for their insolence and cruelty had become a public cry.

About three o clock P.M. Capt Ellott invited us to a dinner at Delmonico in 5th Avenue: scarcely were we seated when the waiters rushed in barring the doors and closing the windows, and there came that great sound as of the sea—the tumult of the people. The rioters had burned down the colored orphan asylum and several other buildings—they paused and for a brief space it was doubtful whether they would not force the building. Soon there was a cry—“there goes a n—–,” and the cruel, remorseless multitude, three thousand strong were in pursuit of the unhappy fugitive. He was without doubt torn in pieces. As we made our way up to 36th street, all was dire confusion—mad uproar—police men, Military, citizens and rioters, in one vast conclave. I was shocked and ashamed to hear these well to do and luxurious people—the denizens of that vicinity urge the fire of the military—there was no expression of pity—no sympathy for the poor laborer, who in his mad vengeance sought a sort of justice—a wild revenge one most true.

Early on tuesday morning I was obliged to go to Wall Street. Before noon the outbreak had assumed such proportions that all business was suspended—stages and cars could not run, and the frequent discharges of the military told that hot work was in progress. I tried to make my way up town—I could not get across the City to take the train for home—nearly exhausted I was struggling onward when a carriage stopped in front of me, and J.G. Hamilton Esqr asked me to ride home with him—I did so and remained long enough to rest, and obtained information that struck me to the heart, and which I inwardly resolved to impart to the people.

While resting in the Hamilton parlors, which opened upon 29th st. down which masses of people were constantly passing with the debris of the insurgents, I observed a demonstration which was quite touching. I ought to say that Mr Hamilton is I think an eastern Indian—his complexion is darker than that of a mulatto, but his features are Caucassian [sic]—and he is a highly cultivated man—his children also are dark, but with fine black eyes, and long hair in ringlets—not at all [illegible word]. Two of these stepped out upon the balcony as they probably have always been in a habit of doing to watch the passers by in the street. Mr H. sprang from his chair—took them in and closed the window—He understood the hazard growing out of their dark complexions. I shall never forget the expression of anguish upon his face.

Soon after I took my leave, and my Host advised me to get at once into Lexington Avenue as a safer retreat from the crowd. I followed his advice—but made a circuit which brought me into the midst of the insurgents. Oh! my soul—what a sight presented itself! Masses of infuriated women, tossing their arms wildly—weeping women and children, and pale desperate men—pools of blood—broken furniture burning ruins. In a low calm voice I began to talk with the people—I told them what I had just heard that five thousand men would reach the City in the five o’clock train, and they had orders to march at once to this Avenue [2nd] and rake the whole length of it with grape shot—no warning given—the first round would be this iron hail. I went from group to group and told this and urged them to go to their houses. A poor, lank boy of thirteen kept close to me—at length I said to him, “My poor boy—go home—keep out of these dreadful scenes.”

The child burst into a perfect paroxysm of tears and sobbed out—“I have’nt got any home”—a woman explained that his Mother had been for some time dead—the father had been killed in the army—and the child lived upon the kindness of others. Observing a pale desperate looking man leaning against a wall I assayed a word with him—“Madam, (he said in good accent) it may be easy to tell us what to do—but I will not obey this draft. I may as well be shot here as anywhere. Look here—(pointing to blood upon the walk)—the soldiers fired upon us—not a word—no warning—and I took a child up—shot through the head—covered with blood—I looked at him—it was my own child—I will have revenge.”

At length a great burly fellow eyed me with a savage frown—and muttered between his teeth—“I know what you are—you are one of them aristocrats from the fifth Avenue—you’re a Spy”—looking round upon his followers—“she’s a Spy—sent here from the Black Republicans!” I saw I was in some danger—but I did not flinch—I do not think I turned pale—I repelled the charge in a calm, firm voice, and went on—he following and muttering—but I did not fear—a superhuman strength seemed mine. I knew better than to leave them—so I kept on talking in [a] low calm manner, advising them as seemed best. I had now reached 33d street, the disorder rather increasing. A short distance from me was a dense mass surrounding a lamp post, upon which the infuriated multitude had suspended the body of Col O Brine, an Irish officer, who had commanded his troops to fire into the crowd. It was a sickening sight—for four hours they tortured the unhappy man—prolonging his sufferings with a fiendish fury. I expressed compassion for him—but they justified their conduct on the ground that he was a traitor to his countrymen—

The deep shadows began to overspre[a]d the neighborhood—and waving my hand I turned up fourth street, quite a group following me and thanking me for what I had done.

The people everywhere repelled the imputation that their object was plunder. It was only opposition to the Draft, they said, and disgust at that clause in the act by which the rich man could exempt himself by paying $300 while the poor man was compelled to go.

It is not generally known what gave the first impetus to the Riot against the draft. I was told several times by the people with whom I talked, the Rioters—and they all told the same story.

It seems that somewhere in the vicinity was a widow woman—Irish, who had six sons. Of course the six were enrolled for the Draft, and by a singular fatality—the whole six were drafted—the young men were aghast—a crowd followed them to the Mother’s door; when the announcement was made to the Mother—she uttered a wild cry—“a yell,” the people called it, and rushed shrieking into the street, tearing her hair and tossing her arms above her head. The effect was electrical—and the fierce passions of the people broke out at once, sweeping all before them.

I returned home on wednesday morning. In the cars I found Mr Hamilton—looking haggard and internally excited, but outwardly calm, and determined. I said at once go home with me. He remained nearly a week….Oh how anxiously we waited returns from the great City.

The Radicals have done their utmost to exasperate all classes—in order to have martial law proclaimed in the City. God save us from such calamity—the streets of New York would run blood—and the prisons be filled with men and women suffered to be obnoxious to the powers that be.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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Jonathan W. White is professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. In August 2023 he published a biography of Appleton Oaksmith titled Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade with Rowman and Littlefield.

With her book The Hello Girls and a follow-up documentary film, historian, commentator and author Elizabeth Cobbs set out to recognize the women who served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps’ Female Telephone Operators Unit during World War I. Members of the unit, many of whom worked Stateside as switchboard operators, maintained communications on the Western Front under spartan and sometimes hazardous conditions. Despite having served in uniform, however, the Hello Girls were denied veteran status. Though Congress remedied that in 1977, many of them had died by then. Recently lawmakers introduced legislation to formally honor the unit with the Congressional Gold Medal, presented for distinguished achievements that have had a major impact on American his-tory and culture. Past recipients include notable American warriors and military units. Cobbs recently spoke with Military History about her book and why the Hello Girls are deserving of recognition.

Who were the ‘Hello Girls’?

They were a group of 223 young women—some in their teens, most in their 20s and a few “old women” in their 30s—who volunteered at the request of the U.S. Army to go to France and run the telephone system. This was a daring thing. Most soldiers hadn’t even gone yet. These women were in logistics. The Army needed telephone operators over there before the majority of doughboys. They had to facilitate what was happening at the front, to get supplies, to get troops shipped here and there. Some served as long as two years. These women fielded 26 million calls for the Army in France. A handful traveled with General [John J.] Pershing during the big battles of Meuse-Argonne and Saint-Mihiel. Others served at the headquarters of the American First Army, which was close to the front but not in the war zone. They came from all over—from Washington state, down to Louisiana, up to Maine, even Canada. There were some French-Canadian women who volunteered and served with the U.S. Army.

Many served close to or on the front lines. Were any killed or wounded?

None were killed in action, but some did suffer permanent injuries, mostly from tuberculosis, which was common in northern France. Two died from the influenza pandemic, one on Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1918.

The conditions of World War I were pretty difficult, especially related to the weather these women had to endure in fairly exposed accommodations. Some were under bombardment. Some were in buildings where artillery concussions blew out windows. Once, they were told to evacuate but wouldn’t leave until the soldiers had. These women worked around the clock, especially the supervisors. Chief Operator Grace Banker, who led the first unit, recorded in her diary at the start of an offensive, “I slept two hours today.” They were handling incredibly complex logistical problems near the front lines. They got no breaks; they worked seven days a week, 12-hour shifts for several months during the worst part of the American war effort. It was extremely stressful. Some were close enough to the front lines that their switchboards shook during bombardments.

Of course, these women crossed the ocean to get to Europe in the first place. This was a time when troopships were being sunk. All of these women knew about this, and they were constantly told to use their lifejackets as pillows and wear all of their clothes to bed in case they were torpedoed. It was scary.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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What kind of training did they receive?

They went through a very strict recruitment and training. They had to be bilingual in French and English, and many washed out because of that. In fact, 7,600 women applied for the first 100 positions. Many were cut for language reasons, others because they weren’t fast enough on the phone. Once selected, they were vetted extremely carefully, sometimes three and four times, by Army intelligence. These women were literally handling national secrets in the wires they connected. One woman was even pulled off a ship at the last minute, though she turned out to not be the German spy they feared she was.

Once selected, they were trained by AT&T [American Telephone and Telegraph] on the phone system. After that they were sent to New York City, where they were drilled and learned to salute on the rooftop of AT&T headquarters. Once they went to France, the women who were sent toward the front were trained in the use of gas masks and pistols. They wore uniforms and had dog tags; otherwise, they risked being executed as spies if captured. They were told again and again that their uniforms and dog tags were their protection as soldiers of the U.S. Army.

Many were bilingual. How important was that skill?

The first group of 100 female volunteers were all required to be absolutely fluent in French and English. They had these super strict tests, where they had to simultaneously translate and operate a telephone exchange, record everything correctly and communicate accurately under pressure. It’s hard for us to appreciate today how nerve-racking that could be. They were getting hundreds of calls an hour, all of them critically important, truly a matter of life and death. These women felt a great deal of responsibility. They were connecting all kinds of calls, such as between commanders and combat units in the field. There were times when they were even talking with French combat troops. The Army set up its own PBX [private branch exchange] telephone system for communications to and from the front. However, the women often had to connect with French lines and French toll operators. Back then, a toll call would be passed from operator to operator to operator. This was a problem for the American doughboys, who generally did not parlez-vous. Pershing realized he couldn’t get a call to go anywhere, so that’s when they realized they needed people who could do the job and communicate with the Allies at the same time.

Why were women selected as operators?

The Army found it took men 60 seconds on average to connect calls that women connected in 10 seconds. In wartime that was the difference between life and death—for an individual and sometimes for whole battalions. Women were adept at using this technology and had the ability to do it much faster and more reliably than men. They were tested on being able to place calls in two languages, write and convey messages, make life-and-death connections in an instant, all while maintaining their composure and decorum.

Banker received the Distinguished Service Medal. What did she do to earn such recognition?

Chief operator for the Signal Corps, Banker was a remarkable person who was devoted to the American cause during World War I. She led the first female contingent under very challenging and difficult circumstances. At one point she developed a severe allergic rash. A doctor told her she needed to have it taken care of, but she said she didn’t have time. There’s a photo of her in which she looked absolutely terrible. Grace served under the extraordinarily demanding conditions of the Battles of Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne and was recognized for courageous service. In World War I the U.S. Army awarded only 18 Distinguished Service Medals to Signal Corps officers, of whom 16,000 were eligible. All the honorees were listed by rank. She was listed as “Miss,” because she was a [single] woman.

Why did the War Department deny the ‘Hello Girls’ veteran status?

Their commanding officers begged and pleaded with the War Department to recognize these women who had served alongside them, some in very dire circumstances. Around 11,000 women served with the Navy and Marines during World War I, and every one of them got military benefits, including hospitalization for disabilities. They all served at home in the United States. Only the Army sent women across the ocean into harm’s way, and then denied them veteran status. It was so upsetting and maddening for these women. They were told it would lessen the importance of the meaning of “veteran” if they were to grant women this honor. The Army decided early in the war these women would be contract employees. However, they neither told the vast majority of women, nor gave them any to sign. In fact, women took the same soldier’s oath everybody else did. They wore uniforms but were unaware there was a distinction. Many of the women were flabbergasted when they arrived home and found out they weren’t veterans.

Congress finally recognized them as veterans in 1977. How did that come about?

Their recognition came on the same legislation as the WASPs [Women Airforce Service Pilots], introduced by Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater had also been a service pilot in World War II and couldn’t believe that women he’d served with, many who wore the same uniform as him, were not being given veteran benefits. At that time the women of World War I came forward and said, “What about us?” The legislation then covered both groups.

Why award the Hello Girls the Congressional Gold Medal after so many decades?

Because it’s a story that was lost. I’ve met so many women in the Army who’ve said they had no idea this is where their story began. Women today represent 15 percent of the armed forces. It’s a very brave act for any woman to join an organization in which she is going to be in the distinct minority and going against gender expectations. It’s important to say we value female veterans as much as we value male veterans. The Congressional Gold Medal would help all Americans better appreciate the women in our armed services. It would help us recognize that what the Hello Girls did was not only physically courageous, but morally courageous—challenging every social convention at the time in order to help our country. It took a very special person to do that. They performed a heroic service.

This interview appeared in the Autumn 2023 issue of Military History magazine.

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New England novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is perhaps best known as the author of young adult fiction, including Little Women (1868), and Little Men (1871). However, Alcott put her writing talents to use in describing her Civil War experiences as a volunteer nurse in an autobiographical account called Hospital Sketches (1863). 

The result was not what one might expect from a nurse’s narrative. Alcott’s account is unique because of its irreverence and her extremely dry sense of humor. Giving herself the literary nom de plume of “Tribulation Periwinkle,” she describes the ironies of being an Abolitionist wanting to get in on the “excitement” of the war but finding herself in over her head. Alcott contracted typhoid fever during her Civil War service, for which she was treated with mercury; scholars have speculated that the health problems she suffered later on throughout her life were related to her exposure to mercury. 

Here Alcott describes her interactions with wounded soldiers from the December 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia, Robert E. Lee’s one-sided Confederate victory over Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s Army of the Potomac in which the 12,000 Union casualties were over twice those of Lee’s rebels.It gives us a perspective of what was on Union soldiers’ minds after the battle; rather than being preoccupied with the overall military situation or their cause, they were focused on matters at hand and their lives at home. 

Alcott manages to give a general sense of each soldier’s personality in describing her brief interactions with them. It is interesting to think that each of these soldiers, otherwise lost to history, achieved some form of immortality in the following narrative. 

Eager To Help

…Having a taste for “ghastliness,” I had rather longed for the wounded to arrive, for rheumatism wasn’t heroic, neither was liver complaint, or measles; even fever had lost its charms since “bathing burning brows” had been used up in romances, real and ideal; but when I peeped into the dusky street lined with what I at first had innocently called market carts, now unloading their sad freight at our door, I recalled sundry reminiscences I had heard from nurses of longer standing, my ardor experienced a sudden chill, and I indulged in a most unpatriotic wish that I was safe at home again… 

Having been run over by three excited surgeons, bumped against by migratory coal-hods, water-pails, and small boys, nearly scalded by an avalanche of newly-filled teapots, and hopelessly entangled in a knot of colored sisters coming to wash, I progressed by slow stages upstairs and down, till the main hall was reached, and I paused to take breath and a survey. There they were! “our brave boys,” as the papers justly call them, for cowards could hardly have been so riddled with shot and shell, so torn and shattered, nor have borne suffering for which we have no name, with an uncomplaining fortitude, which made one glad to cherish each as a brother. In they came, some on stretchers, some in men’s arms, some feebly staggering along propped on rude crutches, and one lay stark and still with covered face, as a comrade gave his name to be recorded before they carried him away to the dead house…

ORders To Bathe Men

The sight of several stretchers, each with its legless, armless, or desperately wounded occupant, entering my ward, admonished me that I was there to work, not to wonder or weep; so I corked up my feelings, and returned to the path of duty, which was rather “a hard road to travel” just then…Round the great stove was gathered the dreariest group I ever saw—ragged, gaunt and pale, mud to the knees, with bloody bandages untouched since put on days before; many bundled up in blankets, coats being lost or useless; and all wearing that disheartened look which proclaimed defeat, more plainly than any telegram of the Burnside blunder. I pitied them so much, I dared not speak to them, though, remembering all they had been through since the rout at Fredericksburg, I yearned to serve the dreariest of them all. 

Presently, Miss Blank tore me from my refuge behind piles of one-sleeved shirts, odd socks, bandages and lint; put basin, sponge, towels, and a block of brown soap into my hands, with these appalling directions: “Come, my dear, begin to wash as fast as you can. Tell them to take off socks, coats and shirts, scrub them well, put on clean shirts, and the attendants will finish them off, and lay them in bed.”

If she had requested me to shave them all, or dance a hornpipe on the stove funnel, I should have been less staggered; but to scrub some dozen lords of creation at a moment’s notice, was really—really—However, there was no time for nonsense, and, having resolved when I came to do everything I was bid, I drowned my scruples in my wash-bowl, clutched my soap manfully, and, assuming a businesslike air, made a dab at the first dirty specimen I saw, bent on performing my task vi et armis [by force] if necessary. 

The “Scrubees”

I chanced to light on a withered old Irishman, wounded in the head, which caused that portion of his frame to be tastefully laid out like a garden, the bandages being the walks, his hair the shrubbery. He was so overpowered by the honor of having a lady wash him, as he expressed it, that he did nothing but roll up his eyes, and bless me…so we laughed together, and when I knelt down to take off his shoes, he “flopped” also and wouldn’t hear of my touching “them dirty craters. May your bed above be aisy [may you be blessed in heaven] darlin,’ for the day’s work ye ar doon!—Whoosh! there ye are, and bedad, it’s hard tellin’ which is the dirtiest, the fut [foot] or the shoe.” It was; and if he hadn’t been to the fore, I should have gone on pulling, under the impression that the “fut” was a boot, for trousers, socks, shoes and legs were a mass of mud… 

Some of them took the performance like sleepy children, leaning their tired heads against me as I worked, others looked grimly scandalized, and several of the roughest colored [blushed] like bashful girls…Another, with a gunshot wound through the cheek, asked for a looking-glass [mirror], and when I brought one, regarded his swollen face with a dolorous expression, as he muttered, “I vow to gosh, that’s too bad! I warn’t a bad looking chap before, and now I’m done for; won’t there be a thunderin’ scar? And what on earth will Josephine Skinner say?” 

He looked up at me with his one eye so appealingly, that I controlled my risibles and assured him that if Josephine was a girl of sense, she would admire the honorable scar, as a lasting proof that he had faced the enemy, for all women thought a wound the best decoration a brave soldier could wear. I hope Miss Skinner verified the good opinion I so rashly expressed of her, but I shall never know. 

The next scrubbee was a nice-looking lad, with a curly brown mane, and a budding trace of gingerbread over the lip, which he called his beard, and defended stoutly, when the barber jocosely suggested its immolation…

“I say, Mrs.!” called a voice behind me; and, turning, I saw a rough Michigander, with an arm blown off at the shoulder, and two or three bullets still in him—as he afterwards mentioned, as carelessly as if gentlemen were in the habit of carrying such trifles about with them.

“Don’t You Wash Him!”

I went to him, and, while administering a dose of soap and water, he whispered, irefully: “That red-headed devil, over yonder, is a reb [Confederate], damn him! … Don’t you wash him, nor feed him, but jest let him holler till he’s tired. It’s a blasted shame to fetch them fellers in here, alongside of us; and so I’ll tell the chap that bosses this concern; cuss me if I don’t.”

I regret to say that I did not deliver a moral sermon upon the duty of forgiving our enemies, and the sin of profanity, then and there; but, being a red-hot Abolitionist, stared fixedly at the tall rebel, who was a copperhead, in every sense of the word, and privately resolved to put soap in his eyes, rub his nose the wrong way, and excoriate his cuticle generally, if I had the washing of him. 

My amiable intentions, however, were frustrated; for, when I approached, with as Christian an expression as my principles would allow, and asked the question, “Shall I try to make you more comfortable, sir?” all I got for my pains was a gruff, “No; I’ll do it myself.” 

“Here’s your Southern chivalry, with a witness,” thought I, dumping the basin down before him, thereby quenching a strong desire to give him a summary baptism, in return for his ungraciousness; for my angry passions rose, at this rebuff, in a way that would have scandalized good Dr. Watts. He was a disappointment in all respects, (the rebel, not the blessed Doctor), for he was neither fiendish, romantic, pathetic, or anything interesting; but a long, fat man, with a head like a burning bush, and a perfectly expressionless face: so I could hate him without the slightest drawback, and ignored his existence from that day forth. One redeeming trait he certainly did possess, as the floor speedily testified; for his ablutions were so vigorously performed, that his bed soon stood like an isolated island, in a sea of soap-suds, and he resembled a dripping merman, suffering from the loss of a fin. If cleanliness is a near neighbor to godliness, then was the big rebel the godliest man in my ward that day. 

Having done up our human wash, and laid it out to dry, the second syllable of our version of the word warfare was enacted with much success. Great trays of bread, meat, soup and coffee appeared…Very welcome seemed the generous meal, after a week of suffering, exposure, and short commons; soon the brown faces began to smile, as food, warmth, and rest, did their pleasant work; and the grateful “Thankee’s” were followed by more graphic accounts of the battle and retreat, than any paid reporter could have given us. Curious contrasts of the tragic and comic met one everywhere; and some touching as well as ludicrous episodes, might have been recorded that day.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Elizabeth Caroline Butler

(1837–1911)

Born in Autaugaville, Ala., on October 7, 1837, Elizabeth Butler had, as a young girl, traveled west with her parents, extended family, and neighbors. At 18, she married Allan T. Daniel in Lauderdale County, Miss., and the following year gave birth to a daughter, Nancy. While pregnant with her second child—a son they would name Henry—Elizabeth traveled with her husband to the community of Eutaw in Limestone County, Texas, where he began working as a farmer and rancher. In early 1860, she would be blessed with twin boys, George and William.

Having to take care of four small children and managing the day-to-day struggles on the frontier was demanding enough, but Elizabeth was about to experience even more discord with the untimely death of her husband that April. The death of a spouse on the frontier was a common occurrence, of course, and Elizabeth did what many such widows did and remarried, this time to dry goods merchant and postal worker Isaac Ellison, nine years her senior.

To defend the Lone Star State’s interests during the war, Texans enlisted in droves at their county seats. Younger, unmarried men were usually the first to go, but Isaac was eventually among those called to duty. In his absence, Elizabeth strove to keep the dry goods store and post office running, while continuing to juggle being a full-time parent.

She had no respite in managing these commitments, and it didn’t help that money was difficult to come by. At this time, each Texas county issued its own paper currency. As the war progressed, Eutaw alternated within the jurisdiction of three counties: Limestone, Falls, and Robertson. County money soon became more worthless than regular Texas and Confederate script, leading to economic collapse.

As it did for communities and states across the country, four years of war decimated Texas’ male population. Having fought predominantly in Colonel James B. Likens’ Bloody 35th Texas Cavalry, Isaac would be one Lone Star boy fortunate enough to return home. —William Joseph Bozic

Charles Carleton Coffin

(1823–1896)

While writing for The Boston Journal during the Civil War, Charles Carleton Coffin was told by his editor to always “keep the Journal at the front.” In that, Coffin succeeded. Based in Washington, D.C., he first made a name for himself traveling into the field with what became the Army of the Potomac. His coverage of the Union army’s retreat at the First Battle of Bull Run, in fact, remains his most extensively quoted piece.

At Fredericksburg in December 1862, a Union soldier expressed amazement at seeing “Carleton” beneath a tree under fire, still writing away. The following spring and summer, Coffin followed the Union army to Gettysburg and ended up traveling 100 miles on horseback and 800 more by train to get accounts to the Journal’s readers.

During the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, Coffin had his nephew hurry his account to the presses in Washington. Ride as fast as you can, he urged; just don’t kill the horse. “If he is behind, his occupation is gone,” Coffin told his fellow war reporters (“specials,” as they were called). The “account must be the first, or among the first, or it is nothing.” If a reporter were to miss the mail or the train, he observed, “he might as well put his pencil in his pocket and go home.”

Coffin was one of more than 300 Northern correspondents to cover the war, earning about $25 a week. He shared with his colleagues a common set of vexations, such as the horse-stealing that frequently bedeviled field correspondents. On several occasions, Coffin’s servant greeted him in the morning, “Breakfast is ready, Mr. Coffin. Your horse is gone again.”

It is no surprise that Coffin’s name has a prominent place among Northern reporters inscribed on the War Correspondents Memorial Arch at Maryland’s Gathland State Park near Burkittsville. —Stephen Davis

Peter Bauduy Garesché

(1822–1868)

The authors of the 2007 book Never for Want of Powder make a compelling case that the Augusta (Ga.) Powder Works and its creator, Colonel George W. Rains, were instrumental to the Confederate Army’s survival as the war endured. Rains, however, had a counterpart in the Confederate Navy who shouldn’t be overlooked: Peter Bauduy Garesché.

Garesché’s father and uncle were French emigres who owned and operated a gunpowder mill in Wilmington, Del. The family were business partners of and relatives by marriage to the DuPonts of Wilmington’s famed DuPont Powder Mill family. Peter worked with his father in the mills as a youngster but eventually embarked on a career as a lawyer in St. Louis.

The Civil War divided the Garesché family. Peter’s cousin and close friend Julius Garesché, a fellow classmate at Georgetown University and a West Point graduate, remained loyal to the Union. Although Peter was a Southern sympathizer, he was not a secessionist, according to family sources. But when ordered to take a loyalty oath, he went south.

It helped also that he had strong Confederate contacts—General Joseph E. Johnston was his brother-in-law—and when the Confederate Navy was looking for someone to run its newly created powder works in Columbia, S.C., Garesché was chosen. It was a prescient decision.

Garesché was applauded for conducting the Columbia Naval Powder Works with “singular skill and commensurate results,” and for supplying the Southern Navy with gunpowder “of excellent quality.” Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who had known Peter while both were in St. Louis, purportedly told a friend: “I would, if I caught him, keep him close and not exchange him for 10,000 men. The powder he manufactures for the South is so superior to ours.”

After the war, Garesché resumed his law practice in St. Louis. He died in 1868. —Bruce Allardice

Mother Mary Hyacinth

(1816–1897)

In 1855, 39-year-old Madeline LeConniat, better known as Mother Mary Hyacinth, traveled to central Louisiana from her native France to open a convent and school along with nine other Daughters of the Cross. Louisiana would prove a harsh climate for her, often leaving her under the weather. The mosquitoes, she wrote, “[besiege] me continually because my blood which still smells European attracts them.” A lack of conversational English also hindered her local relations.

The Civil War increased already hard times with inflated pricing. Food and other supplies were in short supply, causing tense conditions for the nuns, students, and refugees alike. Troops from both sides constantly passed through the area, putting demands on their meager supplies.

The worst came during the Battle of Mansura on May 16, 1864, a contest featuring an artillery duel in which stray shots damaged the convent’s structures. In addition, soldiers looted the rations of the nuns and their wards. Relentlessly, Mother Hyacinth secured donations from the area’s residents to keep matters operating smoothly. She fervently kept the school running and still offered shelter to displaced individuals and families.

After the war, Mother Hyacinth continued to serve the convent and the neighborhood until 1867 when the motherhood discontinued its support of the Louisiana mission. Two years later, Mother Hyacinth was reelected mother superior and called back to Louisiana. She continued her community work without the support of the French motherhouse.

In 1882, at age 65, Mother Hyacinth returned to France to run the American novitiate until her death in 1897 at age 81. The Daughters of the Cross continued to operate schools throughout Louisiana into the next century, capitalizing on the sterling examples set by Mother Mary Hyacinth. —Edward Windsor

Martin Jackson

(Unknown)

As the Battle of Pleasant Hill, La., raged on April 9, 1864, Colonel Augustus Buchel of the 1st Texas Cavalry dismounted his troops and ordered them to attack the Federal infantry. Remaining on horseback, however, Buchel was an easy target and soon fell mortally wounded with seven injuries.

Two days later, Buchel died in the arms of a 17-year-old slave named Martin Jackson, a self-described “black Texan,” who lamented: “I had pitched up a kind of first-aid station. I remember standing there and thinking the South didn’t have a chance. All of a sudden I heard someone call. It was a soldier, who was half carrying Col. Buchel in. I [couldn’t] do nothing for the Colonel. He was too far gone. I just held him comfortable and that was the position he was in when he stopped breathing. He was a friend of mine.”

Martin and his father had followed their owner, Alva Fitzpatrick, to war to serve as cooks. Martin was also a stretcher-bearer, which he referred to as “an official lugger-in of men that got wounded.” Although Martin conceded, “I knew the Yanks were going to win from the beginning. I wanted them to win and lick us Southerners,” he also “hoped they was going to do it without wiping out my company.”

He remained fiercely loyal to the men of the 1st Texas throughout the war, continuing to cook for the men and tend the wounded. After the war, he was freed, became a cowboy, married, and eventually had 15 children. He even served as a cook in World War I, proudly claiming he never donned a uniform in either conflict. Martin’s one regret during the war—he started the deadly 75-year habit of smoking tobacco. —Fran Cohen

Cyrus Hall McCormick 

(1809–1884)

Cyrus Hall McCormick, one of the United States’ great early industrialists, founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago in 1847. Although he was merely one of several entrepreneurs to invent a mechanical reaper, his company’s Chicago home, as well as his family’s business acumen, quickly made his version the nation’s most successful and widely used harvester, critically helping open the Midwest and Great Plains to family farmers in the decade leading up to the Civil War.

Born February 15, 1809, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, McCormick was the eldest of eight children raised by Robert McCormick Jr. and Mary Ann Hall. Robert McCormick had attempted to design and build a mechanical reaper of his own during Cyrus’ youth, but it proved not to be a sturdy, reliable model. Building upon his father’s failures, as well as an unpatented successful version by Scottish inventor Patrick Bell, Cyrus succeeded in constructing a reliable reaper in 1831. He continued working on improving this model and finally received his first patent in 1834.

Two years after Cyrus established the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company with one of his brothers, Leander, another brother—William—joined them in Chicago. William’s business insight and Cyrus’ skilled salesmanship helped the company flourish.

Cyrus, however, suffered a stroke in 1880 and spent the last four years of his life as an invalid before passing away in Chicago on May 13, 1884. In 1902, the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company was absorbed into the International Harvester Company. —Terry Beckenbaugh

John Other Day

(1819-1869)

“When I gave up the war path and commenced working the earth for a living, I discarded all my former habits,” John Other Day once wrote. “It was very hard for me to learn the white man’s ways, but I was determined to get my living by cultivating the land and raising stock.”

Born Ampatutokacha (i.e., Good Sounding Voice) in 1819, Other Day had been a fierce warrior in his youth, but his conversion to Christianity led him to join an association of “farmer Indians” in 1856. The following year, Other Day assisted in the rescue of a young female captive, and in 1859 he was nominated to a treaty delegation sent to Washington, D.C. While on that trip, he met an English woman working at his hotel whom he later wed.

On August 18, 1862, Dakota Indians, upset with living conditions on their federal reservation in Minnesota, killed several settlers and traders during an armed attack on the Lower Sioux Agency, igniting the 39-day Dakota War of 1862. Other Day hurriedly gathered up 62 settlers (men, women, and children alike) and secured them in an Agency building overnight, personally standing guard at the door. Early the next morning, he guided the group on an arduous, three-day trek across the Minnesota River and through a prairie to safety in St. Paul, where he was welcomed as a hero. Wanting to further assist his new community, Other Day volunteered as a civilian scout for the U.S. troops assembled to combat the hostile Indians, often fighting side by side with his newfound comrades.

The U.S. government awarded Other Day $2,500 for his heroism. He bought a farm in Henderson, Minn., but later sold it and moved to the Dakota Territory. He would die of tuberculosis on October 19, 1869, at the Fort Wadsworth hospital in what became the state of South Dakota 20 years later. —Richard H. Holloway

Phoebe Levy Pember

(1823–1913)

In April 1861, there was no reason to expect Phoebe Levy Pember would leave the mark on the Civil War that she did. Born into a prominent Jewish family in Charleston, S.C., she had spent the antebellum years in relative comfort, the well-off wife of a gentile, Thomas Noyes Pember, whom she married in 1856. As the nation formally began its split, however, her husband contracted tuberculosis, and she was widowed three months into the war. With no children and few career options, she relented to residing with her parents in Marietta, Ga. There she struggled, directionless and frequently at odds with her father.

That changed in November 1862 when Pember received an offer from the wife of Confederate Secretary of War George Randolph to move to Richmond to become “matron” of the capital city’s Chimborazo Hospital. Despite no previous nursing experience, Pember proved a providential choice for the position. According to the “Jewish Women’s Archive,” she “oversaw nursing operations as well as housekeeping and food and maintained a friendly but firm authority, loved for her feminine charms and her dedication to her patients.” That did not prevent her from pulling a gun on a hospital worker trying to pilfer whiskey from the hospital’s supplies.

Pember remained as Chimborazo’s first appointed female administrator until Richmond fell in April 1865. In 1879, she penned the book A Southern Woman’s Story: Life in Confederate Richmond, and in 1995 the U.S. Postal Service honored her with a stamp, featuring a painting of Pember feeding one of her patients chicken soup.

As historian James Robertson Jr. remembered: “Mrs. Pember was an aristocrat who developed a deep affection for the common soldiers and the class from which they came. She lived to be 89, but nothing in her life matched the three years of devoted service she gave to the human debris of war. Her only memorial were the looks of thankfulness that came from suffering soldiers who stretched out a hand for help—and found Phoebe Pember.” —Gregg Phillipson

Emma Sansom Johnson

(1847–1900)

The Yankees were several miles ahead, with Nathan Bedford Forrest in earnest pursuit. A deep stream blocked the way, however. Where could he cross—and who would show the way?

It was late April 1863, and a 2,000-man mounted column under Colonel Abel Streight had ridden to northwest Alabama to wreck as many Confederate railroads as possible. On the morning of May 2, the Federals burned the bridge across Black Creek, north of Gadsden, Ala., believing it would stall Forrest long enough for them to get away.

The “Wizard of the Saddle” wasn’t stymied, though. A local girl, 16-year-old Emma Sansom, knew of a nearby ford. Forrest eagerly hoisted her onto his saddle as she pointed the way. After crossing the creek, the Confederates chased Streight and his troopers so determinedly that he surrendered his command the next day.

Forrest was quick to credit the lass with his success, writing her a note of thanks from his “Hed Quarters in Sadle.” Emma quickly became a local heroine. She married the next year, and after the war moved to Texas, where she died in 1900.

Seven years later, Gadsden residents unveiled a statue to her that, despite recent discussions of taking it down, remains standing—with Emma’s right arm held aloft, her index finger pointing of course to that famed Black Creek ford. —John Gordon

Fritz Tegener

(1813–unknown)

A Prussian immigrant, Fritz Tegener lived in the Texas Hill Country town of Comfort, a community started by recent German immigrants embroiled in the political unrest of the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe. Few German Texans owned slaves, and the people of Comfort were openly opposed to secession when the Civil War began, unwilling to participate in another such conflict.

Before the war, Tegener had been politically active in Comfort, serving as a jurist and county treasurer. That would continue during the Civil War. To protect the community from both Indian raids and the Confederacy, Tegener and other residents formed what was called the Union Loyal League.

After the Conscription Act of 1862 passed, Confederate soldiers began harassing the German Texans to join the Army, spurring more than 60 to organize a group that would travel south to Mexico to avoid conscription and appointing Tegener their leader. The ensemble departed in the summer of 1862, pursued by 94 Confederates as it traversed the rugged terrain of southwest Texas.

On August 10, 1862, the Confederates caught the Germans on the banks of the Nueces River and a battle ensued, known as the Massacre on the Nueces, in which 19 Unionists were killed and nine, too injured to escape, left behind and captured. Confederates executed their prisoners and left all 28 bodies unburied.

Though wounded, Tegener escaped and led the remaining Germans to Mexico, only to be ambushed by another Confederate group while crossing the Rio Grande. Eight more died.

Tegener spent the rest of the war in Mexico, but returned home afterward. Later, women of Comfort collected the sun-bleached bones from the battlefield and buried them under the only German language monument dedicated to the Union in the South named Treǔe der Union (Loyalty to the Union). Tegener risked his life to defend his political beliefs and find refuge for young German men of the Texas Hill Country. —Charles Grear

Alice Thompson

(1846–1869)

The ferocity of conflict often leads one to accomplish the unexpected. During the Battle of Thompson’s Station, Tenn., on March 5, 1863, teenager Alice Thompson—a progeny of the settlement’s namesake—made a split-second decision that helped change the course of an eventual Confederate victory.

Life had begun as usual that late-winter day, but Alice soon found herself caught in the midst of a desperate fray. Serving as Confederate physicians, Alice’s father as well as her beau remained near the front. She meanwhile fled her home, seeking protection for the rest of her family and finding refuge in the cellar of a neighbor, Confederate Lieutenant Thomas Banks. From the basement windows, she was able to catch glimpses of the conflict.

As the fighting intensified, Alice confronted a decisive moment. Having watched repeated Union advances and Confederate counterattacks, she became distressed watching a Southern flag-bearer fall to the ground. Forsaking her safety, Alice scrambled from the hiding place and made her way to the fallen soldier, grabbing the regimental colors—those of the 3rd Arkansas Cavalry—he had been carrying. Proudly holding the colors high, she drew the attention of Confederate troops, who were inspired by the recklessly courageous undertaking and rallied to push the Yankees back. Even with shells exploding around her, Alice reportedly never flinched as the Confederates advanced. Retreating Union troops were among those who admired her incredible bravery.

Finally, others concerned for Alice’s well-being pulled her back to the cellar. Her heroics did not end there, however. With Banks’ house serving as a hospital, she helped tend the wounded.

Alice Thompson died in 1869, only 23, but her gallantry at Thompson’s Station secured her place in Civil War history and memory. —Heidi Weber

Julia Wilbur

(1815–1895)

Julia Wilbur’s life easily could have slipped into historical anonymity. After years of a rather conventional rural life of teaching school and tending to the needs and wants of various members of a large and extended family, the spirited and socially aware Wilbur found herself caught up in the evangelical spirit burning through western New York. Residing in the environs of Rochester brought her into contact with prominent abolitionists and social reformers who, in the decades prior to the Civil War, advocated various forms of social and political change. Becoming a member of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society (RLASS) in 1852 probably rescued Wilbur from the life of an unassuming spinster and transformed her, at age 47, into an energetic social activist just as the nation was slipping into secession and war.

Determined to do more than darn socks and send food packages to the local boys in the Union Army, Wilbur traveled to Washington, D.C., as a representative of the RLASS. At first, she was armed with nothing more than a few general letters of introduction and a heart full of grit and compassion. After arriving on October 28, 1862, she was sent to Alexandria, Va., to do what she could to provide aid and comfort to the thousands of contrabands streaming into the Union-held city.

Nothing had prepared her for the sights, sounds, and, yes, smells she encountered. An entry in her diary described conditions she found upon her arrival: “Went to old School House. 150 C’s [contrabands] there. A large house for sick nearby. We went there, people in filth & rags—a dead child lay wrapped in piece of ticking—in another room, a dead child behind the door. Oh what sights! What Misery! No doctor—no medicines—only rations & Shelter.”

Along with her better-known friend—former slave and abolitionist Harriet Jacobs—Wilbur often encountered stubborn military bureaucracies, unfriendly local citizens, and various disorganized benevolent associations during her unrelenting fight against hunger, disease, and death. For the remainder of the war, Wilbur set about to change the dreadful conditions she found there.

Wilbur lived in Washington after the war and worked as a clerk in the Patent Office from 1869 to 1895, a harbinger of the thousands of women who would follow her into government employment. She remained active in social causes such as voting rights for women. She died on June 6, 1895, and is buried in the family plot in Avon, N.Y. —Gordon Berg

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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Contributors:

Dr. Bruce Allardice, author of the “Loose Lips” feature article in ACW’s Spring 2023 issue, teaches history at Illinois’ South Suburban College. He has co-authored several books and articles on the Civil War and on the history of baseball.

Dr. Terry Beckenbaugh is an associate professor of history in the Department of Joint Warfare at U.S. Air Force Command and Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Ala. He is working on a book on the
1862 White River Campaign in Arkansas.

Gordon Berg, who writes from Gaithersburg, Md., is a longtime contributor to America’s Civil War, Civil War Times, and other HistoryNet publications.

William Joseph Bozic Jr., a retired Texas high school social studies teacher, works for the National Park Service in San Antonio. He is married with four children.

Fran Cohen, a freelance author specializing in history , writes from Little Rock, Ark.

Stephen Davis, who specializes in Southern Civil War history, writes from Cumming, Ga.

John Gordon is a freelance author based in Wetumpka, Ala.

Dr. Charles Grear, professor of history at Central Texas College, writes extensively on Texas and the Civil War. He is the author of Why Texans Fought in the Civil War.

Richard H. Holloway, a member of ACW’s editorial advisory board, is a historian who hails from Louisiana.

Gregg Phillipson is a former member of the Texas Holocaust Commission, well known for loaning his large collection of Jewish war memorabilia to museums across Texas. A resident of Austin, he also frequently delivers presentations about Jewish military history.

Dr. Heidi Weber is an associate professor in the SUNY–Orange Department of Global Studies, with specialties in U.S. history, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Edward Windsor, a retired historian and newspaperman, writes from Corinth, Miss.

By life’s end Sarah Creath McSherry Hibbins Stinnett Howard could claim five surnames, one from her birth and one each from her four husbands. Along the way she had suffered more hardship on the Texas frontier than most pioneers, man or woman. Described in her youth as “a beautiful blonde…graceful in manner and pure of heart,” she had watched as two of her husbands, her only brother and one of her children were killed in front of her and had lost a third husband in mysterious circumstances. She herself had been captured by Comanches and escaped, making a perilous and painful journey before stumbling bruised and bleeding into a camp of Texas Rangers.

But she had survived.

Originally from the vicinity of Brownsville, Ill., where she was born Sarah Creath around 1810, Sarah married John McSherry while still a teenager. In 1828 the newlyweds moved south, settling in DeWitt’s Colony, along the Guadalupe River in south Texas, then a Mexican province. In 1829 a son was born to them. Then tragedy struck.

On an otherwise pleasant day that year, around noon, John left the cabin to fetch water from a nearby spring. Moments later Sarah heard yelling and opened the cabin door to the sight of Indians killing and scalping her husband. She quickly slammed and barred the door, locking herself and the baby inside, then grabbed John’s rifle, determined to defend herself and the baby as best she could. While she waited in the still cabin, the Indians slipped away as quietly as they had come.

Around twilight a man named John McCrabb happened by. Seeing what had happened and hearing Sarah’s story, he placed her and the baby on his horse and led them through the darkness to the home of the McSherrys’ nearest neighbors, Andrew Lockhart and family, some 10 miles upriver. Mother and child remained with the Lockharts several months until Sarah remarried, to a well-off Guadalupe Valley man named John Hibbins (also given as Hibbons or Hibben). In 1835, after having given birth to a second child, Sarah returned to Illinois with her two children to visit relatives. In early 1836 they returned to Texas by way of New Orleans, accompanied by Sarah’s only brother, George Creath. In February the four met up with John Hibbins at Columbia, Texas (present-day West Columbia) on the Brazos River, setting out from there by ox cart bound west for the Guadalupe Valley. They never made it. Fifteen miles from home, they were attacked by a band of 13 Comanches who killed Sarah’s husband and brother, took her and the children prisoner, and rode north. 

“They traveled slowly up through the timbered country,” John Henry Brown wrote in his 1880 book Indian Wars and Pioneers of Texas, “securely tying Mrs. Hibbins at night and lying encircled around her.”The next day one warrior, weary of listening to the cries of Sarah’s infant, killed it by smashing its head against a tree as Sarah helplessly watched. Days later the party crossed the Colorado River deep in Comancheria and relaxed the security in which they held their captives.

Sarah faced a crossroads. Though she realized there was a chance to escape, she knew she could not make it away safely with her young son, so she made the heartrending decision to leave him. Wrapping him in a buffalo robe, she quietly slipped out of the Indian camp and into the darkness. 

“Daylight found her but a short distance from camp, not over a mile or two,” Brown wrote, “and she secreted herself in a thicket from which she soon saw and heard the Indians in pursuit. The savages compelled the little boy to call aloud, ‘Mama! Mama!’ But she knew that her only hope for herself and child was in escape and remained silent.”

When Sarah was certain the Comanches had given up their search, she pressed on through the heavy brush and down the Colorado, eventually stumbling across a riverside cabin in which 18 Texas Rangers had just settled down to their evening meal. Though she’d walked only 10 miles, it had taken her 24 hours. “She was so torn with thorns and briars, so nearly without raiment and so bruised about the face that her condition was pitiable,” Brown wrote. 

The Rangers, under the command of Captain John J. Tumlinson Jr., quickly saddled up and went after the Comanches. The next morning, after a brief but hard fight, they rescued Sarah’s child.

Sarah and son next went to live among the families Harrell and Hornsby, near the site of present-day Austin, and fled with them as the Mexican army that had taken the Alamo in March moved north. They eventually found refuge with former Dewitt’s Colony neighbor Claiborne Stinnett, and in the spring of 1837 Sarah and Claiborne married. In 1838 Stinnett was elected sheriff of Gonzales County. That fall the sheriff disappeared while returning north to Gonzales from Linnville, on Lavaca Bay. He was thought to have been killed, either by Indians or, as Brown believed, by two runaway slaves. Regardless, Sarah was again a widow. 

By then, though still shy of 30 years old, she had been widowed three times and seen her brother, one child and two husbands killed before her eyes. On May 29, 1839, she married her fourth and final husband, Phillip Howard. In June 1840 the couple left the Guadalupe Valley and moved west to the San Juan Capistrano Mission south of San Antonio. On arrival they were subjected to an Indian raid, Sarah’s son barely escaping capture a second time. The Howards later moved farther down the San Antonio River to southern Goliad County. There they experienced more Indian raids and again fled, this time to the vicinity of present-day Hallettsville, in Lavaca County. Finally finding peace there, Sarah gave birth to three daughters, and her husband was named a county judge. In their later years the Howards moved once more, settling in Bosque County, where Sarah died on March 28, 1870, of natural causes. She had been with Phillip for more than half of her 60 years—her reward after long years of hardship.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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More than a decade before sharpshooter Annie Oakley joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, dancer Giuseppina Morlacchi garnered headlines performing with Cody in the traveling Western stage drama Scouts of the Prairie. Dime novelist and entrepreneur Ned Buntline, who hastily wrote the three-act Western script in December 1872, had the Italian-born prima ballerina play an Indian princess named Dove Eye. The male stars of Buntline’s theatrical company were Cody and John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro, notable Army scouts who played themselves onstage. Landing Morlacchi was quite a coup for Buntline. Since making her U.S. debut in New York City in 1867, she had become the most sought-after dancer in the country, introduced the can-can to American audiences and earned the nickname “The Peerless.”

Photo collector Tony Sapienza said that when graceful Giuseppina performed the “grand gallop can-can” on Jan. 6, 1868, in Boston, where this photograph was taken, her interpretation of the high-stepping dance left the audience breathless. In Scouts of the Prairie she not only remembered her lines better than her co-stars, but also found romance with one of them. On Aug. 31, 1873, she married Omohundro at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Rochester, N.Y. Morlacchi continued to perform with her dance troupe and star with her husband in Western dramas. But tragedy was to strike the young couple when 33-year-old Texas Jack died of pneumonia in Leadville, Colo., on June 28, 1880. With that Morlacchi stopped touring. A scant six years later, on July 23, 1886, she died of cancer at age 49 in Billerica, Mass.

(For more on both Omohundro and Morlacchi, see Matthew Kerns’ Wild West feature article.)

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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