Divas in Pink Tights

by Lyn Horner

I’ve been reading The Gentle Tamers, Women of the Old Wild West by Dee Brown. It’s a marvelous testament to how women endured and flourished on the western frontier. Some of the accounts are grim, others inspiring, but one chapter is a bit lighter in tone. Titled “Pink Tights and Red Velvet Skirts,” it shines a spotlight on female entertainers who trod the boards in San Francisco, Virginia City, Denver and far flung mining camps.

The chapter opens with this quote from historian Hubert Howe Bancroft: “The mere appearance of a woman sufficed in early days to insure success.” Even if the performer was untrained, had a cracked voice and was far from beautiful, she could strut off the stage amid a shower of silver and gold.

During the decade between the first California gold strike and the Civil War, theaters flourished in San Francisco, but also in just about every mining town. They might be fancy playhouses or canvas tents. In a land where men far outnumbered women, it didn’t matter as long as a woman arrived to put on a show.

When an actress with real talent came along, she was idolized by her male audience. One such woman was Caroline Chapman. Born illegitimately into a famous theatrical family, Caroline performed with her father, William Chapman. After their first performance in San Francisco, the pair were showered with buckskin bags of gold dust. Dubbed “our Caroline” by her adoring audience, she drew mobs of followers. When she and her father arrived in Sonora to christen a new theater with She Stoops to Conquer, they were met and escorted by a thousand miners. The Chapmans would perform anywhere, even on the sawed off trunk of a huge tree in one case.

The most glamorous, seductive and scandalous western diva was Lola Montez. More akin to a burlesque queen than an actress, according to Dee Brown, she “. . . burst upon San Francisco like a bombshell, making excellent copy for the newspapers with stories of her many marriages and her claim that she was the illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron.” She dressed like Byron in black jackets with big rolling collars, and strolled the streets with two leashed greyhounds and a parrot on her shoulder. Lola’s sensational and shocking spider dance made her famous. She purposely spread stories of her sinfulness, tales that have perpetuated her legend in western lore down the years.

 

Petite, talented Lotta Crabtree took the stage as a shy little girl. A protégé of sorts of Lola Montez’s, she danced and sang her way through the mining camps with her mother and eventually landed on the San Francisco scene. She took the “West’s theatrical center” by storm. Headlines read: “Miss Lotta, the San Francisco Favorite,” “La Petite Lotta, the Celebrated Danseuse and Vocalist,” and “Miss Lotta the Unapproachable.” Brown attributes her lasting success to her innocence. She remained above scandal and suspicion, the perennial princess for thirty-five years, amassing a fortune, which her mother carefully hoarded. When Lotta died in 1924, she was worth over four million dollars. All of it went to charity since she never married and had no children. 

Dee Brown goes into much greater detail about performers and the history of theater in the West. And this is only one chapter in his amazing book.

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Cooking on the Trail

Wow.  You’d think that the diaries of those who traveled West would be full of cooking trials and tribulations.  But no. After choosing this subject, I searched through my many ‘wagon trail diary books’ and found very few references on cooking. In fact, several of the books didn’t even have ‘cooking’ in the index. However, I think I found enough references to make this blog worthwhile.

One of the many tasks women performed on the trail was cooking. Though cooking and baking was second nature to most women (the highly born women didn’t always know how to cook, as they had hired help to do that job back East), cooking on an open flame was not something the women were familiar with. Even Keturah Belknap, who had never cooked on a stove, but rather a hearth, had to learn the ins and outs of cooking on a camp fire.

Helen Carpenter, a new bride making her way west on her honeymoon, wrote: “Although there is not much to cook, the difficulty and inconvenience in doing it amounts to a great deal—so by the time one has squatted around the fire and cooked bread and bacon, and made several dozen trips to and from the wagon—washed the dishes….and gotten things ready for an early breakfast, some of the others already have their night caps on—at any rate it is time to go to bed.” (1)  She also comments, “It is hurry scurry to get breakfast and put away things that necessarily had to be pulled out the last night…nooning is barely long enough to eat a cold bite—and at night all the cooking utensils and provisions are to be gotten about the camp fire, and cooking enough to last until the next night.” (2)

When the wagon train took a break from traveling, either to observe the Sabbath or to give the animals a rest, women “boiled a big mess of beans, to be warmed over for several meals,” relates Catherine Haun in her diary. (1)

Even in wind and rain, the cooking must go on.  According to Amelia Stewart Knight, “(Dreary times, wet and muddy, and crowded in the tent, cold and wet, uncomfortable in the wagon. No place for the poor children [she has seven].) I have been busy cooking, roasting coffee, etc. today….” A month into the journey she writes, “Fine weather; spent this day in washing, baking, and overhauling the wagons” and the next day, “I have been cooking, and packing things away for an early start in the morning.” (2)
When food was found on the trail, it was not wasted.  Eliza Ann McAuley writes “In cutting a way for the road, the boys find thickets of wild currants. There are several varieties, the black, the red and the white. The boys cut the bushes, some of them ten feet long and loaded with ripe currants, which we strip off and make into jelly, currant wine and vinegar, dried currants and currant pie.” (3)

I’ve camped out with my Girl Scout troops and we did a few campfire meals, so I know from experience how much work it is.  I have to admire the women who did it day in and day out, rain or shine for five to six months at a time!

References:
(1)    WOMEN’S DIARES OF THE WESTWARD JOURNEY by Lillian Schlissel

(2)    PLAINS WOMEN: Women in the American West by Paula Bartley and Cathy Loxton

(3) COVERED WAGON WOMEN:     Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, 1852 by Kenneth L. Holmes

This post first appeared on Sweethearts of the West blog on July 14, 2010.
copyright© 2010 Anna Kathryn Lanier

Note from Ginger:  Anna K. has a wonderful blog of her own.  I invite you to visit her...and I'm not really crying because no one ever invited me to be a Sweetheart of the West.  *lol*  There are some awesome authors there.  Check it out.