Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Women of the Wild West

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

From a rifle-carrying brothel madam to missionaries walking for months on end; from the Native American First Ladies of settler outposts to the mormon pilgrim whose name meant ‘rotten vagina’: the women of the American West were a varied group.Usually when we talk about the ‘Wild West’ we think of men in cowboy hats, but today Betwixt the Sheets, Katie Hickman tells us about the women who are integral to the story of the great migration across North America.*WARNING There is some fruity language in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Seyi Adaobi.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.Vote for Betwixt the Sheets in the Listener’s Choice Award at The British Podcast Awards: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/voteBritish Podcast AwardsListeners' Choice Award — British Podcast AwardsVote for your favourite podcast in the Listeners' Choice Award supported by Acast+ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. This is Kate Lister, jumping in yet again to give you your fair-doos warning. This episode contains adult themes and some fruity language. And if you're all right with that, I'm all right with that as well. Let's do this. Well, howdy, cowboys and cowgirls?

What do you think of if I say the Wild West? Maybe tumbleweeds blowing across a desert plain, wide-brim hats, dusty bars and men. Men on horses, men in bar fights, men grogging whiskey, men everywhere, men, men, men. That can't be the whole story, can it? There must have been women there as well. So what role did they play in the Great Migration West? Today, betwixt the sheets, we are going to find out. So saddle up, and let's get to it.

What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs. by just turning enough and pushing the body. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Terry.

Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. From the Native American women living across the Great Plains, to the white missionaries accompanying their husbands on a six-month trek west, to the women who joined the movement west, just to take advantage of her...

at the new market. Women rarely turn up in popular images of the Wild West, except perhaps as books and barmaids, and even then, we don't know much about them. Today, though, I am joined for Twix the Sheets by Katie Hickman, author of Bravehearted, the dramatic story of women of the American West, and we are going to find out just who these women were. So I'm only joined by Katie Hickman. Hello! Hello, down the line! Oh, I'm so pleased to have you here. Thank you very much. I'm really, really happy to be here. Thank you for having me. There's nothing that makes me more excited than being able to talk about pioneering women, especially with somebody like you and the research that you've done on this is substantial.

Well, it was my lockdown book and how lucky is this? I did all the research and I just sat down to start writing it and a week later lockdown happened. If I'd left it any longer, I wouldn't have been able to do it. The British Library was completely closed. You weren't able to go in there. Then when they opened, you had a three-hour slot, which frankly was absolutely no good to anybody. So, you know, the timing of it, I kind of squeaked in. Then I was locked down at home and, you know,

I didn't come out again until I'd finished the book. So it was intense in a good way. That is intense. I don't think I'd recommend that to any aspiring writers. I definitely wouldn't. No, it was very intense. And, you know, it's a pretty... brutal story. So it was a powerful experience. I'm glad I've had it, but I was quite tired by the time

I'd finished. You know, I put a lot into that book, which is why I love it so much. And while the rest of us were trying to get fit with Joe Wicks and fighting for toilet rolls, you were researching the pioneering women of the Wild West. Well, I tell you, you know, it was a good comparison, actually. Every time I felt sorry for myself, I thought, at least I'm not a pioneering woman, going across the Prairie's having a baby in the middle of a thunderstorm, you know, with people wading up to their ankles, trying to get my baby delivered. I mean, they were such strong women. It's absolutely, you know, respect.

I mean, that is a hell of a way to ground yourself throughout lockdown, isn't it? Like, we just have to sit on a sofa for a while. I mean, you know, my children are grown up now, so I didn't have to homeschool. I felt very sorry for my daughter who had to homeschool her. I think anyone with children, I think that must have been really hard. Yes. Yeah, I don't have any kids either so. I was just looking at all of my friends as they just became more and more haggard.

Yes, right? Locked out. Oh, my God. I know. So this is your latest book. And what I like about your research is you do tend to seek out the unsung heroes, but who are absolutely central to our history. Your book on courtesans, I absolutely loved.

Of course I loved it. But I thought that was really good as well for pointing out these women for as much as we kind of, like, we might be a bit flippant about them, or a bit like, oh, ho, they were just silly whores or whatever it is. No, actually, they were integral, actually, really powerful. I love that. And you've done it again with these pioneering women. So what made you want to tell this story, the women of the Wild West?

Well, do you know what? It was kind of, I'm just going to say, I probably shouldn't admit to this, but I sold it as a two book deal. So I did this book. The previous one was about women in India, British women who went to India, but the really early ones. And then this was the second book, you know, women of,

so it was women of the wild east and women of the wild west, that's how I thought of it. And I had this idea that it was going to be like a kind of the real version of the Wild West film. I don't know about you,

but I grew up on, I think all of us grew up on, you know, watching Westerns, watching Cowboy films. And so there's a whole image that we have of what the West is all about. So I thought, well, it's very male. That's true, yeah.

It's incredibly male and incredibly white. And I best. there's another story underneath that, so that's what I'm going to go and look at. And then when I started to do the research into it, I realized that actually that wasn't the story at all. You know, it was the story is about where is the West? What is the West? You know, in 1836, so the year that my book starts, if you look at a map, unfortunately on the radio, it's quite hard to explain this without a map in front of you. But, you know, the United States of America was about a third of the size it is now.

and the whole of the rest of it, so if you can imagine in your mind's eye, the whole of the two-thirds of America, the western part of it, you know, the far west was not owned by America at all. It was disputed land or it belonged to Mexico. The whole of the southwestern Texas was part of Mexico. It wasn't part of America at all. And then that huge tranche in the middle, so roughly between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains,

was called Indian Territus. or unorganized territory. Even better. Well done. It was kind of claimed by the US, but nobody lived there. So they thought, in their mind's eye, they thought, oh, well, that's where all the Native Americans can be. And basically, no one really went there. And the frontier was down the Mississippi River. So in the minds eye of the Americans, the whole of that area was like a wilderness.

You know, there was nothing there. But, of course, there were plenty of people there. There were all the Native American tribe, something like 300 Native American tribes. American tribes, 30 million bison roaming these massive prairies. I mean, it was the most spectacular, beautiful place criss-crossed with all these ancient trading routes. All the Native American tribes traded between one another, but no whites. Within a 40-year period from about 1840, when the very first of those wagon trains started to go west, literally it started with, you know, one family in 1840, one family. Men went before, so traders and fire trappers would go, but it was

seasonal, so they didn't live there permanently. 1840, one family left, a woman called Mary Walker with her husband and, I think, three children. In 1841, a hundred people left. So they left the Mississippi River in their caravans, and they went across the prairies over the rocky mountains, and then they either turned right to go up to Oregon, which was not even part of the US then. It was disputed land between America and Great Britain, or they went left and they went to California, which was not American either.

It was part of Mexico still. And so they went either one way or the other way. 1841, 100 people, 1842, 200 people, 1843, 1,000 people. then gold was discovered in California in 1848. So in 1849, 30,000 people left the Mississippi River. The following year, 50,000 people. So, you know, it was this sort of growing, you know, from this tiny little trickle of people, it grew and grew and grew and grew.

And it seemed to me that that was the story. It was the story of these journeys that these women made, because you had to have women there. Women were central to it. it because without the women, you couldn't settle. You know, you couldn't put down roots. So you had to have the wife with you, you know, who had children. And then if you had a farm, it was the children who would inherit the farm.

The children always worked, you know, there was no messing around. There's no homeschooling then. Forget homeschooling. You'd be out in the allotment, digging, and killing the fields and learning how to shoot deer and things like that and skinning. I mean, were you brought up on Little House on the Prairie? Was that something that you read? Yes, I was.

And I used to pretend. that I was Laura Ingalls. And then I would see what they were eating and I wanted to try like beans, Boston beans, things like that. And that's kind of the image of the frontier that a lot of us have grown up with in the White West. And then I think all of us have to kind of then undergo this process of,

yes, that was one part of it, but there was a whole heap of other stuff going on. And I think it can actually be quite painful. It's like when you've got kind of like nice recollections of like, oh, it was all like a little house in the prairie. It was just like lovely. And then like the truth is, yeah, because they like eradicated indigenous people.

And, you know, it was brutal. It was horrendous. Where were the brothels in Little House and the Prairie? That's quite a difficult. It is. It is. And I never read the books when I was growing up. But I read them as part of my research.

And I can completely see why people get so fast. I mean, there's not an American alive. I don't think you didn't read them and love them. And they, of course, they are based on her diary. and absolutely autobiographical stories. But as you say, the Native Americans are pretty much excised from it. One of the many, many things that I was just kind of bold over by

was the idea that there were these people, and they were emigrants, they were going to this part of this continent that at the time didn't belong to America. They had no claim to it. I mean, they did later on, but at the beginning they didn't. And they were so scared. They were terrified of attack by what they called, you know, the Indians. They were absolutely terrified, in a way.

But the reality was that the Native Americans were quite pleased to see them because they could trade with them. You know, the Lakota people who were the prairie tribes were tremendous traders. So they saw it as an economic opportunity to trade stuff with them. But people had grown up on these stories of, you know, Native American attacks by the savages, attacks by the Indians. And it is true to say that some whites were taken captive. You know, there are stories about women.

I've got a great story in my book, actually, about a woman taken captive. We could go back to that later. We will. Not at all what you think. But if they survived a period of captivity, they'd come back and they'd write these accounts. So it was like their stories were told to the news of the world or something like that. So these really sensational accounts, my life amongst the savages. you know, this fiendish people who did this, that and the other,

totally often, not always, but usually very exaggerated, very racist, you know, painting this picture of these savage people. And these emigrants had all grown up on this literature. They were called captivity narratives. You know, actually, in my courtesans book, it's a sort of like a second cousin twice removed of the broadsheets that told stories about courtesans. You know, we all love a rogue, don't we?

You know, they were highway mayor. and pirates and courtesans. It's a sort of genre of literature. And the captivity narrative was very, very popular because it was sensational. It was thrilling and it was dark. But of course it gave people a completely warped idea of what they were going to find.

So they travelled in fear. They shot before asking questions. It completely sort of warped any possible relationship that they might have had with the Native American tribe. So having started off being quite optimistic and there were opportunities for the Native Americans and these white settlers to meet and come together, not always, but very often it ended very badly.

And there's a figure, you know, everyone was so frightened that they were going to be attacked by what they called the Indians. But there's a very interesting figure in the 20 years, between 1840 and 1860, which was the main thrust of this emigration, only 300 white settlers died from American Indian... 300? Only 300.

And out of the tens of thousands of people who were killed, it was disease, cholera, typhoid, camp fever, accidents shooting themselves, being shot by one of their own, dying in childbirth. They were, you know, starving to death. There were all sorts of reasons why they died. But being attacked by Native Americans wasn't one of them. And there were more Native Americans killed. by the white settlers than the other way around.

I think it was about 400. All those things were so interesting to read about because I was constantly having my own, the kind of Little House on the Prairie version, which I had as well, and the kind of Western version of what it was all about. It was constantly being jumbled up in this rather great way.

And I suppose that whenever there is atrocities committed against a people, something that's very important that has to happen is there has to be a dehumanising process. And if people are raised on the idea that they're savages and they're going to attack and they'll get you first, it creates a permission base, doesn't it, for taking the land and for everything that followed? Absolutely spot on. It makes them less than human. So if they're less than human, it doesn't matter what happens to them. And moreover, you have every right to take their land if you want it.

Because they're evil and wicked. Yeah, some of these captivity narratives are really quite something to read. You know, the rhetoric in them. devils, you know, less than men. And they've got very little alternative voices coming out, have there? So if that's all that you've got, if all that you're reading about them is that evil devils kidnap women. Your views are totally skewed.

And in some ways, it's not that you can't blame the white settlers. I mean, they should take responsibility for what they did, but you can understand. If you were drip fed that, you know, those stories from when you were a child, if you'd grown up on those stories, which lots of them had, you know, because they were exciting. Sit around the fire at night and oh my aunt's friend had someone, you know, everyone kind of knew somebody distantly to whom that had happened. You know, it would colour how you saw it. And I think that that is quite important. Like you said, you can't excuse it and you've got to acknowledge the awfulness for what it was. But I've always thought it's very important to try

and at least understand the rationale behind it. It's not rational, but like what were they telling themselves to make this okay? Because people don't generally do evil knowing it's evil. Even the worst people think that they're doing the right thing at the time. It's like what were they telling themselves to make this okay? Well, the main thing they were telling themselves is that the Native Americans by putting them in a category of being kind of subhuman or savage. So subhuman, it meant that they didn't really count. They could just be brushed aside with whatever means that took. Savages, you could shoot them on site. There was no moral conflict. But also I just think about the first women to make the journey west. Tell me about them because they have amazing names. Yes,

that's in 1836. So these two Presbyterian missionary women, Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding, and they managed to do the very fast overland crossing from the Missouri River all the way to Oregon. So it was very nearly 2,500 miles. It was a really long way. And no white woman had ever done that overland crossing before. So they attempted it and because they were going to basically proselytize to a tribe called the Osage in what is now Oregon. Had they asked them to do that? Actually, unlike I think a lot of missionaries, actually curiously they had. So Narcissus's husband had done this journey or done it halfway to this great trade fair called the rendezvous in the middle of the Rocky Mountains the year before. And the Osage and the Nespas people had

It's a sort of tragic cultural misunderstanding. So the Osage were really happy to have these missionaries because they thought that they were like their own medicine men. They thought that these missionaries had spiritual power, that they were going to go and live with the tribe and that the Osage would then benefit from these white people's power that they had. Not understanding, because it was obviously impossible for it to have made clear that the missionaries had a completely different idea

of what that was going to be. So Narcissa Whitman's letters are full of talk of the benighted heathen. You know, we're going to go amongst the heathen and save the heathen. So they were going to go to convert these people and therefore, you know, cut them off from all their own ways and all their own beliefs. I mean, obviously that was a recipe for disaster. And in fact, they made not one convert while they were there. Excellent, brilliant. Well done, guys.

Excellent. Well done, guys. But do you know, I have a real problem with the idea of missionaries. I mean, it just makes my blood boiled. It's weird, isn't it? How vastly attitudes shift, because, like, even in the space for a few hundred years, when you hear that, that just two women went, I think we need to go and convert them, all of them.

It's like, to us, that's just, sorry, pardon, what the hell? And again, it's like, what were they telling themselves? And I suppose if you absolutely believe in your Christian God, and you absolutely believe that if you don't do this, these people are going to go to hell. and I don't know, like, what was the thought process? That is exactly what they thought. They thought they were going to save them, save them from hell.

And that was their genuinely hell belief. And again, this is another thing that really surprised me in the research, because like I said before, I have a real problem with missionaries. I can't bear the idea. You know, I find it so offensive to the idea that you would try to go and interfere with someone's beliefs. And it's the superiority implicit in that. But these women, they were completely genuine in what they were trying to do. They both married men that they barely knew in order to be able to do this

because a single woman you wouldn't be allowed to go. So they got married to do this? They got married. It was essentially a business transaction that they had with the men that they married. But there was this extraordinary exchange when one man at this missionary board said, well, has anyone thought about the women, you know, what the conduct? are going to be when they get there. Has anyone thought about it?

And of course, nobody had. They had no training. You know, there was nothing. Literally nothing. I mean, that's quite wild. It was sort of a suicide mission. It's sort of like saying go to the moon. It's like it's hard to, because when you said that they're going to,

it was it Oregon that they were going to, there weren't nice roads or well mapped. This is like absolute wild terrain. And they're trying to do it with wagons and in corsets. And like that wasn't easy. whatever the hell they were telling themselves, they were really convinced by it. I think they were phenomenally brave.

I had much more admiration for them when I kind of knew the whole story. This is a real moral in this, isn't there? It was my own prejudice before. You know, they married these men they didn't know. They went to a place that was culturally as far away as China, or the moon, actually, as you're saying. They had to get a passport to go there.

Oregon was not part of the estate. This hideous journey, two and a half-thous journey, two and a half thousand miles, that's a long way and no backup, no backup. So they were going to have children, these women. They were going to have children, they were going to give birth to children. There was no companionship.

They founded separate missions. So this woman, Narcissa Whitman, she had no one. And her letters home, this is the thing I found so poignant, her letters home took two years. To get a letter from her mother, it was two years, because it had to go by boat all the way, right? I thought Hermes was bad. Wow. So I tell you, yeah.

And they knew they would probably never go home again. So when they left, when they left their home, she lived in New York State. So actually her journey was longer than that. She married this man, Marcus Whitman. And the day after she got married, she left home. And she knew that she would never see any of her family ever again. So it was like a one-way ticket to the moon. You're so right about that.

You know, it's a sort of a heartbreaking story, especially because it all went incredibly sour, and she made no converts. Oh, so it wasn't even a success? No, no, they ended up hating these missionaries so much that they eventually massacred them all, and she died. And you can't blame either side. So what happened? So she turned up and went, do you accept the Lord and Savior? Yeah, you must accept the Lord, your Saviour, and here are some hymns that I'm going to teach you. That was another thing, no training for the woman.

Well, if she could sing a few hymns and maybe do a bit of teaching. Oh, God. It's so wild. I think it was a suicide mission. How did they die? There was a terrible measles epidemic in which all the tribal children died. Oh, God. The measles were brought in by the white emigrants who kept going every year.

All their children died. And they blamed it on the white settlers coming in. And, of course, it was a white disease. they were deliberately trying to poison them so that they could take their land and one small group of sort of renegades broke into their house and literally took axes to them and chopped them up. It's a horrible story.

But if all your children have died, you're desperate and they had begged them to leave. They'd asked them to go. They'd said, we don't want you anymore. You must leave here. You know, you're making us all ill. You've got to go. You're settling on our tribal lands.

You know, we don't want you here. You must go. go now. And they refused to go. And instead, they helped all the white settlers who were coming in every year in increasing numbers. They were conspicuously helping the white settlers to come. So it went very badly sour. It's a tragic story in every way because it started off with such optimism on both sides, both sides thinking that they were going to gain something from this. But the cultural gulf was such that it was impossible. It's an extraordinary story.

Wow, that really is. I'll be back with Katie just after this break to hear intriguing tales of Olive Oatman, the so-called captive, and Sarah Bowman, the woman known as the Great Western.

Have you ever wondered if those pointy medieval shoes gave you bunions? Would you be friends with someone who had leprosy in the Middle Ages? And what on earth does that Bluetooth symbol on your phone have to do with the Vikings?

I'm Dr. Kat Jarman, on Gone Medieval, we find those answers for you, talking everything from saints to sacrifices, runes to relics, sex to science. Join me, Dr. Kat Jarman, and my co-host, Matt Lewis, for everything from berserkers to battles and runes to raids. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

It's very complex, isn't it? Because I look at what Narcissa and Eliza, I look at what they do, and I think it was spectacularly arrogant, but then, and stupid and killed people. but then also I look at what they did and the conviction that they had and what they went through to try and do it. And I can't help begrudge at least a kind of respect of like what they, I don't know what they thought they were doing,

but they must have really, really believed in it. But you said there that her letters took two years to get home. That's fascinating because one of the things that historians are always struggling with is the voices of women. It's really difficult, especially if you're dealing with marginalised voices because you'll get a lot of husband saying my wife thinks this, And then history is written by the victors. Where did you get these voices from?

What were your sources? It's incredibly well documented. I mean, really excitingly so, for exactly the reasons that you say, you know, when I've worked with women's stories in the past, you have to really drill down to find the sources. But there are these overland journeys. I think there are some amazing historian has done a survey to see how many. and I think there's something like 3,000 known personal accounts, personal narratives of the Overland Journey.

Get this, of which about 800 are by women. Almost a third of them are by women. So it's really, really well documented. And the thing that's most exciting about it is the range of women's voices that you get. So obviously there were some middle-class women who went and you would expect that they would keep a diary or write letters or something afterwards.

You know, there are wonderful, wonderful accounts, which are by women who I would call sort of they're literate, but only just. And so there's this fantastic woman who kept a journal from when she was 15 until when she died. So, you know, it's like a lifetime's work, and she called it her memorandum. Her name was Ketra Belknap. Excellent name. Another good name. Again, the Americans are very, very good on names.

And she did this overland journey very early on. So I think in 1846, so it's an interesting early journey. And she writes exactly as she would have spoken. So it's not much punctuation. Her capital letters are slightly kind of off-kilter. And it's like a stream of consciousness. And she was obviously sitting on her wagon because you go, you know, hours and hours every day trudging across the prairies. There's not much to do.

And now we're doing this and now we're doing that. And it's completely immediate and really, really nuts and bolts. So she gives this stunning account of how she prepared to go west because it was quite expensive. You know, these were not poor people who went. God, yeah, it would be, wouldn't it? You couldn't just backpack your way there. No, you could not backpack your way across.

I mean, later on, there were other ways of doing it. But at the beginning, you know, it cost between $500 and $1,000 to get together your outfit. That's a lot. A lot of money. Because you had to have your wagon, you had to take animals with some livestock with you, because you were going to farm when you got the other end. You had to take supplies for a six-month journey. That's quite a big outlay.

So this incredibly practical woman, and this is all written in her memorandum, she said, well, I better get going now. We've decided to go, and we're going to go next year. So I'm going to make the wagon covers, cloth covers on the top of the wagon. And I'm going to weave the cloth for the thing. But before I weave the cloth, I've got to spin the thread. That's the thing that you forget is like not only do they not have the supplies,

but they don't even have the basics to get, like if you want bread, you have to grow the dam corn to make the flour to, like, she had to make the fabric to put over the cheeses. She had to spin the thread and she'd be sitting at her husband would read to her by the farm and she would spin her flax and then she said, yes, now I've got enough thread, now I'm going to get the loom and she wove the material, then she made her top. and then she describes exactly how she packs her wagon. It's very little house on the prairie this bit actually because where the beans went and how many beans she took

and then the dry goods and they went there and then she was obviously a brilliantly practical housekeeper and there's this lovely detail at the end and she said, and I'm going to keep my lunch things in a basket at the front and toys are my little boy to play with and I'm going to have clean white tablecloths to put on my... table for when we're crossing the prairies and I stopped to give my husband his lunch.

He's going to have a clean white cloth on the table. I don't think it would have stayed clean for very long, but she did give it a hell of a good trial. But my kind of wider point is that those details stand the test of time so well. You know, in her own day, people would have thought, well, that's just women's business and we don't want to know about her white table clothes. but actually now 150 years later it's really fascinating to know exactly what supplies she took and it also kind of tells me that they really didn't have a comprehension of what was coming

their way like the idea that they could just kind of pack up and they would do exactly everything the same but they would just do it in a wagon down at the tablecloths it's sort of like really okay I mean I love that the kind of the slight optimism about it You know, there were no brochures. No, that's the other thing. It's like no one knew. No, no one knew. Well, except that you got, you know, there was more kind of communication between these places than you might think.

Because these mountain men, you know, these fur trappers lived in the rocky mountains and the west. And, you know, people connected up in unexpected ways. So information came back east. But of course, it was wildly exaggerated. So it was called Oregon fever. people caught Oregon fever because these few hundreds of people who went at the beginning

these accounts came back it's quite American this I think the land of milk and honey you know the grass is greener the weather is better there's no rain it's just gentle dew there were brilliant things about vegetables the vegetables grow to prodigious size

I saw a marrow the size of a wheelbarrow you know so these incredibly rather sort of almost charmingly, hugely exaggerated stories, that it was like this sort of paradise. That enthusiasm, I suppose, of the first people, they were so relieved to get there. And of course, Oregon is a very fertile, beautiful place.

And if you'd come, you know, there was a big depression in the east of America in the 1830s, which is why lots of them went to start again. So these exaggerated stories came back. And actually, Kettera Beltnap is the lady with the white tablecloth. She was one of the ones who describes Oregon, You know, and all their neighbours, she lived in Illinois, so the Midwest. All her neighbours were all going.

And it was almost, almost like, and I didn't put this in the book, because it's only really occurred to me later on, but it was almost like a kind of group hysteria that took over. You know, everyone else was going, so you didn't want to miss out, so you wanted to go to, which is why I think these numbers kind of grew so exponentially over the years. And, of course, the conditions in the cities at the same, time because they expanded rapidly as well is they would not have been lands of milk and honey and if somebody's writing back to go look how big my marrow is i've got my white tablecloths it's

absolute paradise i suppose that would yes it would it would and it wasn't free land but it was very very cheap land or at the beginning it almost was free in california they basically just you know took it but people went for other you know they went for all sorts of really interesting reasons so they went because they wanted land and they wanted to start again. They went for new beginnings, you know, starting over, all those sorts of things. But they went to find religious freedom. So there were a lot of Mormons who went along this route, not the whole way. They went as far as Utah. A huge number, 70,000 Mormons walked mostly that route. They went to sort of found utopias of very, you know, it was just this sort of, I mean, of course,

I was going to say it was this tabula rasa. It wasn't because it was full of Native Americans. But they imagined it to be somewhere that was right for them just to take for whatever. There was one woman who went on a sort of honeymoon jaunt. People went as a health cure. They soon found the era of that way. And it was in the gold rush, they went to find gold. There were a number of different gold.

There was a gold rush in California. There was a big, the Comstock silver load near Virginia in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. There were lots of different gold rushes. And whenever any mineral, were found, it was the kiss of death to the Native American tribes who were living nearby. One of the things that I do like about our American cousins

is they are much more optimistic than the Brits are. We have this kind of very sort of dry sarcastic sense of humour and Americans are genuinely quite upbeat and optimistic people. And I get the sense of like if that's part of what this was in a way, of like, right, just pack up the wagons and just head that way. Where am I going? Don't know. What's there?

Don't know. Why are we going? I don't know. Have you got the tablecloth? And it's just kind of like quite perky. I just don't think that the Brits would have done it. I don't know. I think that we might have just gone, sod off. Yes, because I wondered about this as one.

They were very, I'm tin. A lot of these people had moved multiple times. So Ketra Belknap, for example, she had moved at least two other times in her life, increasing, you know, from the East Coast. As a child, they went west one time and then as a young married woman, she went west again. So they weren't rooted

in ancient kind of societies in the way that we were. No, that's true. I think, you know, if you live in the countryside in Britain, I mean, in my mother's village in Wiltshire, for example, her neighbour, you know, who was an old countryman and he'd hardly ever been outside the village. You know, he was one of the old school. You were born and brought up in maybe a valley or within a small radius and that's where your parents have been, your grandparents, your people before that, that's not the case in America,

because it's such a young country. They don't have that root to us. And I think for us, if we wanted that adventure, we went, you know, to our, that's how we got an empire, unfortunately. But that's another story, as they say. We could talk about that another time. Tell me about Olive Oatman,

because this is a fascinating story of cultural clashes between the white settlers and the Native American. Who was Olive Oatman? So Olive Oatman was a young white American woman who in 1850 set off West. And her family were Brewsterite. So they were like a splinter group of the Mormon persuasion. So they'd been born Mormons following Joseph Smith.

When Joseph Smith died, it created a sort of gap in the leadership, Ringham Young came to be the leader of the main part of the Mormons, but the Oatmans were followers of such an odd story, of this 11-year-old boy. See, that's already no, that's lost myth. Me too, what can I say? Well, it gets better. He was 11 years old.

He did have a father standing behind him, kind of maneuvering, of course. So an 11-year-old boy who had visions allegedly like Joseph Smith, who was told allegedly, like Joseph Smith, he had to go and found his own kind of city of the saints. And of course, the main Mormons had gone and done that in Salt Lake City. And that's right, they were very against polygamy. So polygamy had started to raise its ugly head amongst the mainstream Mormons. And James Brewster, aged 11, was very against polygamy.

I doubt he even knew what polygamy was, but anyway. And he said, yes, there is the land of Bashan. It's so splendid. The land of Bashan is, you know, a... land of milk and honey in the far southwest, so effectively down in Arizona, and that was still part of Mexico. And so quite a few people kind of gained some traction, and he got together this group of followers, and they set off from the Missouri River in 1850 a few hundred of them, not to go west, but to go south-west, so right down to the very much more kind of desert part, which was much

more dangerous journey. Those western routes to Oregon and California at that point were relatively safe still. Later on there were Indian wars and it became very unsafe. But at the time, your chances of being attacked by a Native American were vanishingly small. Not so in the South. South was where the Apache lived and they were enraged by white incursions into their lands, not surprisingly. And it was known to be a very dangerous route. Anyway, so this group quarreled and split and quarreled and split and quarrel and split until eventually Olive Oakman's family were left travelling on their own in a parlour state. Their mother was nine months pregnant.

They had no food that Oxen were about to die of starvation. It was absolutely dreadful. They met a group of Native Americans who, to cut a long story short, asked them for food and when they refused to give them food, they massacred this family, all except Olive Oatman and her younger sister who was called Marianne. So Marianne and Olive were left their murdered family and were taken as slaves into this tribe called the Yavapai. After a year, they were sold on to another tribe called the Moheve, who lives in what is now Arizona, I believe. Anyway, the Mahave were completely different. The first tribe had treated these two girls rather badly, you know, really as

slaves. The Mahave took them into their family and sort of adopted them as their own children. They went to live with the head man of this tribe. And how old were they? Olive was 13 and her sister Marianne was about eight. Anyway, Marianne subsequently died. It's thought of starvation. But Olive continued living with them and was saved during this time of famine by the woman who'd adopted her, who gave her extra food and I mean really, really looked after her well. And as a sign of being part of this tribe they tattooed these two girls. So when you see pictures of Olive Oatman, you see that her face, she's got these extraordinary tattoos around her mouth

and on the lower part of her face. And she also had them on her arms. Although obviously in these photographs you can't see her arms. And that was a sign of recognition and acceptance and the fact that they've been completely embraced by this tribe. Meanwhile, back in California, it transpired that there was a brother who, the two sisters thought that all their family had died,

but in fact, one of their brothers, called Lorenzo, had survived amazingly. He'd survived and he spent about five years haunted by the thought that his two sisters were alive somewhere out there. It would make a great film. It's very similar to the story of the John Ford film, is it called The Seekers, which is also based on a true story, not this one, but it's quite a sort of similar tale. So Lorenzo spent five years trying to find his two sisters, who he was sure were out there somewhere. And eventually Word got back to the tribe and eventually this ransom was paid. And Olive, on her own, because Marianne was dead, Olive was taken to this very small, absolutely godforsaken American fort called Fort Yuma.

And exchanged for, I think it was a horse, three blankets and a handful of beads or something like that. So there she was. she barely spoke English anymore she was now 19 years old so this was five years she'd lived completely integrated into this tribe and she wore no clothes she was wearing a skirt made out of tree bark

she had these tattoos all over her she was obviously she had dye in her hair so she was taken into the fort and interviewed and there's a transcript which I've seen of the commander of this little fort interviewed her and said you know when were you taken I can't really remember.

And it says, and hardly speaks English anymore, were they kind to, yes, they were very kind to me, you know. And she gave the details explaining that she'd been adopted by the head man. They were very good to her. They saved her life during this famine. Anyway, she was reunited with her brother, and they went back to San Francisco, and the story got out and got into the papers.

And she became this media sensation, because her story was so extraordinary. Five years, a captive amongst the Mahave people. And also she had these amazing tattoos, and it's a very dramatic look. And so her picture was in all the papers, and she was interviewed multiple times. People flocked to the streets to see her.

In the days before, well, there was a very vigorous press in the States, but she became a celebrity in the days before there really were celebrities. Quite hard to handle. Can you imagine? It must be. The trauma. Can you imagine how hard that would have been? And there is some doubt as to whether she even wanted to be, you know,

I'm making inverted commasines rescued. You know, she was happy. She was clearly happy living with this tribe. And now suddenly she was catapulted back into her old like having to wear clothes again, corsets again, you know, behave in a completely different way than behave. Well, famously, very sexually, free in the way men and women behaved with one another. There were no

taboos against having sex with somebody if you wanted to. So all those kind of gear changes. But then the sort of end of her story is really quite extraordinary. I think she must have been quite traumatised and was not quite in her

right mind at the end. But she and her brother got into the clutches of this a preacher man, a sort of freelance preach a man in a way that they have in the States who agreed to write their story. And I think they probably thought they would make some money out of it. And, you know, they were two young people.

They didn't have anything. They needed to make a living. So this man called the Reverend Stratton took on the job of writing their story. And of course, the version of their story that he told was completely different to the real life version. And there are several versions of his story. wrote one version that was incredibly successful and it sold out like that, you know, within six weeks they'd sold 3,000 copies or something, which is a lot. So he rewrote it. So he kept

writing these different versions of it and each time he upped the ante. And by the end, it is the most horrible white supremacist bit of hideous propaganda in which the Mohave were hideous fiends and devils and less than humans and they'd horribly. mistreated these two girls and I mean because there are accounts in her own words of what the true story was so this whole story was completely twisted round olive went on the road with this man who trotted her around on a kind of lecture tour and so the photograph there's a photograph in my book of her looking and if you look in her face she looks sort of haunted I'm looking at it right now as you say that yeah that's a good word and if you can see on her dress her dress her dress is

designed to imitate those lines on her dress, as supposed to reflect the lines on her face. And this man, Reverend Stratton, made a fortune out of her, sort of outing her, prostituting her, really, as a kind of peep show. And so later on, carnival shows and fairground attractions started to have attractions which were the tattooed lady. People would have these tattoos.

So she started the tattooed... Wow, I didn't know that. She was the original. tattooed lady and people would queue up and pay money as they would, you know, the bearded lady and the fat man, whatever, to see the tattooed lady. Oh, Alice. What happened to her? Do you know what happened to her? Yes, I do. She finally got married. She married a man, a Texan, quite a well-off Texan rancher, and I think he would have none of that. And I think he tried to buy up all the books and burn them and sort of, you know,

try to sort of annihilate all that side of her life, which kind of in a way. I don't know if that was the right way to do it because needed to at least acknowledge what she'd been through, but it's a kind of subtext to all of this is how the truth of these things could be subverted to make, first of all, entertainment and secondly, to make money. Fake news. Fake news. Absolutely. I tell you something that I did know that I learned in your book, and please explain this one to me. She wasn't known as Olive, was she, when she was she?

was living with the behave people. Her name was Spancer. Spancer, yep. And what does that mean? Okay, Spancer means rotten vagina. Now that... This was not going to make the Reverend Stratton's book. So rotten vagina.

So there's been a lot of speculation as to why she was called that. And it's thought that either she had a lover who was a very vigorous lover who kind of wore her out, or that she had multiple sexual partners because she was really into sex. And she was a young girl living in this tribe and the men were famously beautiful. So the clear implication is

that she had a good time when she was living with them. I hope she did. I mean, the literal translation might be rotten vagina, but we lose nuance in translation, don't we? I think we do. It could have been like, like sore vagina or... I don't think it's necessarily

perjurative. I think you're exactly right. And in their language, it probably didn't sound quite as kind of in your face as rotten vagina does. It just probably meant someone who was quite sexually active and enjoyed the company of men. Why not? But you can see that when she went back into white society where that kind of behaviour was absolutely not acceptable,

it would be very confusing. Yeah, no rotten vaginas here, Oliver. And of course, part of the kind of thrill that she provided for the white consumers of her story was there was always women had been taken into captivity. There was always a kind of salaciousness about it. People wanted to know had they been raped, had they had children, had they been forcibly married of. And of course, sometimes that was the case. But mostly it wasn't.

Mostly it was white men raping Native America. women not the other way around. And there are some really, really, really, really agonising stories of that happening in the book. You know, the white Americans really did behave badly. That's not to put too fine a point on it. No. Before I let you go, just because this is a subject that's very close to my heart, speaking of rotten vaginas, but so much it's just such a man named.

But fine, fine. One of the things I think is always really important when we're talking about the Wild Westerns, America and colonisation and all those things is the role that sex workers have in it because they were absolutely there. They were pioneers. They were pushing West with the men because there was money to be made, etc., etc. Have you in your book encounter? Because some of these women got to be very famous and very wealthy and very influential. Yes, they absolutely did. No, I agree. It's a subject that's close to my heart as well. And I was disappointed initially because quite a few of those women whose names we know,

it's really hard to pin them down in real life because they'd become so mythologised that you can tell a lot from that, but only up to a point. And so I found that getting the source material for the successful madams, for example, was quite tricky. And I also think that it's important to make the point that prostitution,

as a whole was pretty brutal and awful in the West. You know, these were women who were scratching a living. Often, it wasn't a binary occupation. You know, they would do a bit of that on the side and then they would do some laundry or they would open a boarding house. They were women trying to get by, often with children doing whatever they had to do

as all of us would, as I would, as you would. If that's what you had to do, you'd do it. But there was one woman who I did find the source of, and who is so fabulous. She's one of my favourite women in the book. She was called Sarah Bowman. She had lots of nicknames. So the Great Western was one of her nicknames. The Great Western being a British steamship because she was so big. She was six foot two. She was a large lady. And she had a really extravagant dress style. So there are descriptions of her wearing these velvet, men's Hazard jackets and often I think they're probably quite exaggerated. But, you know, she was a really

exotic, larger than life character. And people were completely fascinated by her, which is why the records about her are quite good. Because whenever anyone met her, they would write down, oh, I met the Great Western. And she'd started off being army camp follower in the Mexican-American War and had diversified in a brilliant, she had a really good business head on her. So she worked herself as a cook, various things, a prostitute on the side, obviously, if she needed to. But then she started these various places of resort, they were called, which is a euphemism for a brothel. And so mostly for the US soldiers, so they would be a place you could go and have a drink, you could eat, and then there would be girls there who she would source as well.

And so she, interestingly, what I loved was finding these odd correspondences across the material. Sarah Bowman ended up in Fort Yuma, which is where Olive Oatman was brought when she was first ransomed. And no one knew what had really, because there was a gap between when she came to this little fort and was interviewed, you know, the interview she gave, what happened to you and so well,

between then and when her brother arrived to be reunited, there was a period of a few weeks when she was sort of acclimatizing to this new world. and it turns out it was thought that it had been the wife of one of the other officers there who'd looked after. No, it wasn't. It was Sarah Bowman. It was Sarah Bowman,

the madame of the local brothel. Isn't that a great twist? It was Sarah Bowman who took in this traumatized she was 19 by that point, this traumatized child who couldn't even remember how to speak English properly and Sarah Bowman was kind. You know, she was a kind woman.

She adopted Mexican children and helped them. She was a good practical businesswoman. She ran a brothel really efficiently. But at the same time, she did good in the world. And she took Olive Oatman in, looked after her until her brother came along. And then later on, there's a wonderful story about her later on, she went to the spot where Olive Oatman's family was massacred all those years before and gathered the remains together and made sure that.

that they had a good burial. And when she, Sarah Bowman finally died, I mean, she was an army camp follower all her life. And she, I think during the Civil War, she moved back east again to be nearer the action. When she died, they gave her a military funeral. And they honoured her with the military funeral. Isn't that great?

So she really was the whore with the heart of gold. Mostly, I don't think they were. But she really, really, truly, truly was. And she's such a vivid figure. I write about her at quite some length and I had so much fun. Wow, that's an incredible story. Sex workers, man.

They are everywhere. They are in the background of all of our history and that I loved hearing about her. Katie, if people want to learn more about you and more about your research, where can they find you? Or Katie Hickman.com is my website or, you know, buy the book. Buy the book and read it.

It is absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for just. joining me and my rotten vagina between the twigs the she. It's been absolutely fabulous. Thank you so much. I've really, I've loved talking to you. I've loved talking to you. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Kate. All the best. I hope that you like this episode with Katie. I had so much fun. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you can spare us a minute,

why not vote for us in the Listeners Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards in the link below. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.