by Molly Owen | Mar 7, 2013 | Anne Carrole, Blog
Popular legend casts Calamity Jane as a tough character who chose to live her life more as a man than a woman. The question is why and the truth is much more nuanced.
Martha Jane Cannary was born in 1852 to Missouri farming parents. She would become the eldest of six siblings. When Martha Jane was thirteen, her parents moved the family to Virginia City, Montana via wagon train. Unfortunately, Martha Jane’s mother died shortly after their arrival and, tragically, her father died a year later in 1866. Left as the sole support for her brothers and sisters, unschooled, illiterate, and still in her adolescence, Jane moved her siblings to Piedmont, Wyoming. Piedmont was a “new” town in 1867, a tent town, which sprang up to provide the Union Pacific Railroad with railroad ties and services for those laying the tracks. Jane obviously realized that a new town would have many more employment opportunities without requiring much experience. (more…)
by Molly Owen | Feb 7, 2013 | Anne Carrole, Blog
Ladies Magazines played a pivotal role in the lives of women in Victorian times just as Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, Real Simple, Vogue, and Vanity Fair do in our time. However, while modern magazines for women tend to specialize, e.g. Vanity Fair and Vogue for fashion, Ladies Home Journal and Better Homes and Gardens for the home, and Cosmopolitan for those subjects you can’t discuss with your mother, Victorian era magazines for women tended to be more “all encompassing”, giving women bits on fashion, home, and culture.
Often the subject matter was aspirational for the readership. For instance, The Women’s World, a British publication edited by Oscar Wilde, boasted queens and princesses as some of its contributors and these Royals wrote on fashion and trends for the up and coming educated middle class woman. (more…)
by Molly Owen | Jan 7, 2013 | Anne Carrole, Blog
Independent, resilient, determined, and savvy are all words that can describe this late 19th century woman who made her own way in the American West against tremendous odds.
Nellie (Ellen) Cashman (O’Kissane before being anglicized) was born in 1845 in County Cork, Ireland and, like many poor Irish Catholics at the time, emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts sometime between 1850 and the early 1860’s. As an adolescent, Nellie worked hard as a bellhop in one of Boston’s hotels. So hard, it is said she caught the eye of patron Ulysses S. Grant who urged her to head west because, “The West needs people like you.” (American Cowboy Magazine, June-July 2008, p. 124) (more…)
by Molly Owen | Dec 7, 2012 | Anne Carrole, Blog
Though the battle of Gettysburg ended on July 3, 1863, the suffering did not. Over 33,000 wounded, 21,000 of those seriously wounded, needed care and attention. How could just 106 Union doctors and a handful of Confederate surgeons in a town with a population of just 2400 minister to this multitude? Where would they put them? How would they feed them?
“To all this was the great tax upon the people of providing and caring for the wounded from the bloody battle-field of Gettysburg…People threw open their private house; the churches, the schoolhouses, the public halls, and even the bars and stables, rang with the groans and agony of the shot, maimed and mutilated, that filled apparently every place, and still the field of death and agony could yet furnish more victims.” Bradsby, H.C., History of Cumberland and Adams Counties…p. 171. (more…)
by Molly Owen | Nov 7, 2012 | Anne Carrole, Blog
We hear a lot about the strategies, the skirmishes, and the troop movements of the important Battle of Gettysburg, but what about the aftermath of a 3-day conflict that left over 7,000 bodies to be buried and over 33,000 wounded to tend to? What did it mean to the sleepy little hamlet of Gettysburg, PA, population 2400 at that time, most of them women, children, and elderly men, the younger male population having gone off to war?
In June 1863, the town of Gettysburg boasted 3 weekly papers, 2 drugstores, one bank, a college, two marble works, one savings institution, seven attorneys, and several doctors who were going to be overwhelmed when the troops moved on and left their dead and wounded to the care of this little town.
On that fateful day of July 1, 1863 Federal Troops numbered 85-88,000 with 70-75,000 Confederate Troops in opposition for a total of between 155,000 and 163,000 Americans on the fields of Gettysburg. 7,058 were killed of which 3,155 were Federal and 3,903 Confederate. Wounded, including those who may have subsequently died of those wounds, were a whopping 33,264 with 14,529 Federal and the rest Confederate. Total casualties, including those who died, those wounded, and those missing, were estimated at over 51,000 in the three day battle. Contrast this with about 55,000 dead and wounded in both Afghanistan and Iraq over the last 11 years (Huffington Post 9/30/12) and you get an idea of the magnitude of the Battle of Gettysburg’s three day conflict. (more…)
by Molly Owen | Oct 7, 2012 | Anne Carrole, Blog
It’s where trials, town meetings, and elections were often held. Where men could test each other’s mettle. And it held the promise of luck and good fortune even if the results were often the opposite. In the West, no enclave would call itself a town without boasting a saloon, and usually several of them. Some had finely crafted interiors, some were mere tents hastily put up, but all called themselves saloons if they wanted to attract the attention of the male population
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One’s local saloon could be counted on to serve various types and quality of alcohol, often the house’s own concoction of alcohol mixed with burnt sugar and chewing tobacco (see Legends of America) or cut with anything from turpentine to ammonia or even gun powder. Needless to say there was no ATF back in the day. Once the customers were liquored up, saloon keepers provided plenty of ways to throw away money in games of chance. Some even offered entertainment to keep their patrons playing or paying.
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Popular legend casts Calamity Jane as a tough character who chose to live her life more as a man than a woman. The question is why and the truth is much more nuanced.
