Peter Boag

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WHQ online. About 645 words from this article are provided below; about 9637 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the Western Historical Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the Western Historical Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Western Historical Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Western Historical Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Peter Boag | Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.4 | The History Cooperative

Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman: Searching for the Trans in Western Gender History

Feminist scholars and popular writers of women's history have traditionally ignored the possibility of transgenderism among "female-to-male" cross-dressers of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century West. This article examines the multiple reasons for this, including the role that the taint of western myth and the frontier thesis had in coloring available evidence.

IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, the New York Tribune's Horace Greeley exhorted young American men bereft of family and friends to go west to build their homes and make their fortunes. In 1859, the journalist traveled to the region to observe the fruits of his advice. He did not necessarily find there what he had hoped. On the Great Plains en route to the Rocky Mountains, for example, he learned that hundreds of prospectors had recently gone bust at the Colorado gold-diggings, deserted the region in droves, and consequently faced unemployment and other sufferings. Yet Greeley reported his encounter with only one such individual, a young clerk with whom he had supped at Station 9 of the Pike's Peak Express and, who "having frozen his feet on the winter journey out, had had enough of gold-hunting, and was going home to his parents in Indiana...." The morning following Greeley's repast with the clerk, and only after they had departed in opposite directions, the New Yorker learned something astonishing about his new acquaintance: "I was apprised by our conductor," exclaimed Greeley, "that said clerk was a woman!"¹

This otherwise terse anecdote contains complex nineteenth-century ideas about sex and gender and their relationship to the American West as both place and process. In Greeley's telling, the story provides a parable to reassure that his advice "to go West young man" was still appropriate, for failure lay not in the journalist's instructions, but rather with the type of person who attempted to follow them. In this case, the clerk's origins, identity, support network, and sense of direction all ran counter to everything that Greeley laid out for the successful realization of his counsels. First, the clerk was not truly self-reliant, he had friends and family who might assist him. Second, he had chosen to return to them, fleeing the West for the East. But most of all, the clerk really was not a man. A deeper reading further reveals that when in the West, the clerk actually had a male identity and successfully fooled even a seasoned and worldly journalist who claimed to know much about American manhood, and then, at the very point when the clerk headed East to home and family, he literally became a woman.

Such a sequence of events undoubtedly helped Greeley reclaim balance in his sense of gender norms and sex roles which had recently been upset by encountering a "woman" dressed as a man in a region where, and at a time when, few women could actually be found. Moreover, the meaning embedded within this story about changing physical locations and gender identities anticipated a theme that decades of later regional historians and popular writers assumed as axiomatic: the West was a man's world, a place either not welcoming to, or simply devoid of, women—creatures best relegated to the more domesticated East. For years western histories revolved around the experiences of colorful men—cowboys, cavalrymen, bandits, prospectors, warriors, loggers, gunslingers, lawmen, and others of their larger-than-life ilk. At worst, even scholars ignored women; at best, they mentioned them merely as supporting characters. Only in 1980, and after years of labor, did feminist scholars transform western women's history into a legitimate field.² But a decade later some still lamented that even in the New Western history, while women had certainly made their appearance, the category "gender" yet remained the most invisible analytic category of all.³

. . .

There are about 9637 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.