Finding Gender Fluidity In The Old West

Joanne Freeman: Today on the show we’ll be exploring the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer folks in the United States.

Nathan Connolly: We’ll hear from a San Francisco police officer who broke barriers through a lifetime of service and activism.

Joanne Freeman: We’ll be learning how the roots of the gay right movement go back long before the Stonewall uprising.

Brian Balogh: And we’ll talk more with Lillian Faderman about Harvey Milk’s road to becoming an LGBTQ icon and the hostility endured leading up to his death.

Joanne Freeman: Imagine for a moment the Old West. It’s a vast and rugged terrain with some tumbleweed rolling by. Maybe some cowboys with a striking resemblance to John Wayne roaming the plains. This is a stereotypical snap shot of the Old West, or at least how it’s presented. Many of the stories we hear usually depict the same kind of character. A frontiersman, that John Wayne type. He’s self sufficient, he’s white and he’s strictly heterosexual.

Brian Balogh: It’s estimated that in 1880 most of the American West had at least 20 percent more men that women. But gender and sexuality in the Old West was much more diverse than we might see in the movies.

Peter Boag: There were numerous people who dressed in ways that according to society didn’t comport with their biological sex.

Brian Balogh: That’s historian Peter Boag. He’s researched sexuality in the Old West, including stories of people cross dressing. He looked at old arrest records, news paper articles and other documents and found there were many reasons why somebody might done clothing of the opposite sex.

Peter Boag: This was specially the case for women because women were more marginalized people in society and they might dress as a male in order to take advantage of better paying jobs or types of work that were only available to men.

Brian Balogh: Boag says it’s very possible these people were what me might regard today as transgender, but back then this wasn’t even a concept, let alone socially acceptable.

Peter Boag: That wasn’t a term used then, I don’t find it anywhere in the documents so I try to understand the people according to how they identify themselves or how their society identified them. So sometimes some people that we today might consider transgender if they were arrested they might actually use any number of excuses that were common for people who might not be transgender and who are caught dressing as the opposite sex. But it was very difficult I think for people who were transgender to be transgender, and I’m not exactly always sure how they really felt as far as comfort in their own skins.

Brian Balogh: One of this people was Mrs Nash, a laundress from Mexico who worked for Lieutenant Colonel George Custer, 7th Cavalry. That’s the regimen infamously remembered for its defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Boag says Mrs Nash spent about a decade with the Cavalry and even married some of the military men.

Peter Boag: She found three husbands so in this sense she was very much integrated into that community. She also worked very important jobs, not only as a laundress but she also worked as a midwife delivering children for many of the officers’ wives. And so Elizabeth Custer, the wife of George Armstrong Custer writes about these types of activities that Nash participated in, making it appear that she very much was part of this community and that seems to be the case. But Elizabeth Custer also racializes Nash in these stories too and writes in a way that is somewhat condescending and smirking of Nash and so there are questions then to what degree Nash actually is accepted in this community.

Joanne Freeman: Poor Miss Annie shuttered when I spoke of her, for the women was a Mexican and like the rest of that hairy tribe she has so corse and stubborn a beard that her chin had a blue look after shaving in marked contrast to her swarthy face. She was tall, angular, awkward and seemingly coarse but I knew her to be tender hearted. In days gone by I had found when she told me of her troubles that they had softened her nature.

Peter Boag: When she was stationed at Fort Lincoln and what was then Dakota territory, she died and when she died it was discovered that she had the body of a male.

Joanne Freeman: Her past life of hardship and exposure told on her in time and she became ailing and rheumatic. Finally after we left Dakota we heard that when death approached she made an appeal to the camp women who surrounded her and had nursed her though her illness. She implored them to put her in her coffin just as she was when she died and burry her at once. They thinking such a coarse would not be paying proper attention to the dead broke their promise. The mystery which the old creature had guarded for so many years through a life always public and conspicuous was revealed. Old Nash years before becoming weary of the laborious life of a man had assumed the disguise of a woman and hoped to carry the secret into the grave.

Peter Boag: She was married when she died. She was married to Corporal Noonan. It was out in the field doing reconnaissance work when his wife died from acute appendicitis, and when he came back, of course the story was out that Mrs Nash actually had the body of a male so seemed to be a man. And so John Noonan came back to this not only word that his wife whom he had been married to and lived with for a number of years was dead, but he also is facing a perplexed public and other soldiers who start making jokes about him and joshing him in very mean spirited ways about this relationship he had carried on for a number of years.

Joanne Freeman: After enduring the jibes and scoffs of comrades for a few days, life became unbearable to the handsome soldier who had played the part of husband in order to gain possession of his wife’s savings and very the plain fare of the soldier with good suppers. He went into one of the company’s stables when no one was there and shot himself.

Brian Balogh: Like Boag said, the story of Mrs. Nash became a big one in the press, and Mrs. Nash wasn’t the only person who was featured in the news columns. Boag says a sensational story about a cross dresser wasn’t rare during this time.

Peter Boag: There were lavish romantic stories created to try to take account of why somebody would do this sort of thing.

Brian Balogh: “Has women male soul? Does dead live in her? Is professor Eugene Deforest, women who mascaraed as a man for 25 years the reincarnation of her dead brother? Or is her queer condition of male mentality in a female body due to parental influence? These are the questions which scientists are to solve and on which lawyers may base their defense of the women’s mascaraed, unless she is permitted to wear men’s clothes as she desires and continues her life as she will. The law may not prevent her for so doing but it will prevent her marrying again either as a man or a woman.” Oakland Tribune, September third, 1915.

Brian Balogh: Peter, I Confess much of my knowledge about the West comes from movies and old television shows, but certainly the image of the West is one that I’ve never heard a discussion of transgender, I’ve never seen it. It doesn’t appear in any of the John Wayne movies that I’ve watched.

Peter Boag: Yeah well, I began to wonder why is it that these people that I found to be so numerous and so many historical records about them, why they have been largely forgotten from our Western past. It’s a little bit easier to try to figure out why things are remembered but how do you ever forget why someone or a culture works to forget something.

Brian Balogh: So what’s the [inaudible 00:19:50], Peter?

Peter Boag: At the end of the 19th Century is a very important transitional moment in American history, and it’s at this time that crystallizes the romantic story about America’s frontier past. And the belief that the frontier pass, the queath to America all sorts of positive characteristics and attributes that make it into the best democracy in the world. You know, at the very time that this frontier romantic idea of America’s frontier past was crystallized and this is also when American sexologists start to study what they think is a new phenomenon, the appearance of sexual inversion. And they identify the appearance of sexual inversion with Eastern urban areas in particular. They made the argument that frontier living conditions prevented sexual perversion from appearing, and it could only appear in a moldering context, people living too close together, overstimulation of nightlife, bad hygiene.

Brian Balogh: So how do this fascinating stories shed light on our contemporary conversation about gender identity?

Peter Boag: When we look at our myths about the frontier foundations of the United States and what this country has been and what this country is as far as a democracy. The myths that we have about this country were created purposely in juxtaposition of transgender people. So I think that’s one of the things that we have to keep in mind today about transgender people specifically. There is this ongoing attempt to sideline them in our history and in our society when in fact our history and society is really constructed in opposition to them.

Brian Balogh: Peter Boag is the Columbia Chair in the History of the American West at Washington State University. He’s also de Author of Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past.