9 Disgusting Truths of Being a Wife in the Wild West

PART 2:

A homestead wife who needed them was earning nothing. Under the law, every cent she touched belonged to her husband. Remember that. We are coming back to it. Number seven. Menstruation with nothing that exist to help her. Catherine Haun crossed the plains in 1849 and is one of the only diarists who references the subject at all.

She describes the difficulty of managing what she calls the monthly trouble on the trail. No privacy, no clean water, no product of any kind. Commercial menstrual products did not reach the American market until the 1890s. For 50 years of frontier settlement, women used rags, scraps of worn-out clothing, or nothing.

  They did this while hauling water, walking 15 miles beside a wagon, plowing sod, and nursing infants. Schlissel noted the near total silence on this subject across all 103 diaries she collected.  The taboo was so deep that women recording their most private thoughts still could not write the words. The silence itself is the evidence.

 The body did not pause because the culture refused to speak about it. Number six. The vermin that owned the house. Molly Dorsey Sanford kept a diary through the late 1850s in Nebraska Territory. She describes bedbugs falling from the sod ceiling onto sleeping faces in the dark, snakes nesting inside the dirt walls, centipedes dropping into the cook pot.

A sod house was not built. It was cut from the earth and roofed with grass. It was also a living habitat. Lice, fleas, bedbugs,  and rattlesnakes lived in the walls and the ceiling. When it rained, the roof turned to mud and dripped insects and filth into the food, the bedding, and the children’s hair.

A wife could sweep and scrub and boil the linens from dawn to dark, and by nightfall, the vermin were back. She fought that war every single day. She never once won it. Is the worst truth on this list a physical one? Or is it something else entirely? Keep that question close. We are not done. Number five. The chamber pot at 3:00 in the morning in a blizzard.

No indoor plumbing reached most rural homes until well into the 20th century. A chamber pot sat beside the bed. An outhouse stood 40 or 50 yards from the house. In winter in the northern plains, the walk to the privy was through knee-deep snow and below-zero wind. A wife emptied and scrubbed that pot for every member of the family every morning with cold water and bare hands.

At frontier army posts like Fort Laramie, officers’ wives wrote letters home describing the stench of the post privies as inescapable in the summer heat.  And those were the privileged women, the ones with orderlies and servants. The homestead wife had no one but herself. Number four, wash day was the hardest labor she did all week.

Monday, every  week, without exception. The process went like this. Haul water from the well or the  creek. At 8 lb per gallon, a single wash for a family of six required roughly 50 gallons. That is 400 lb of water carried by hand before the first garment touched the washboard. Heated over an open fire.

 Shave soap from a block of lye made from wood ash and rendered animal fat. Scrub every piece on a ridged board until the dirt broke loose. Wring it by hand. Hang it. Start again. 10 to 12 hours. The lye soap cleaned the cloth. It also ate skin. A washerwoman’s hands were cracked, raw, and bleeding by evening, week after week, year after year.

Hollywood shows a frontier wife in a clean dress. It never shows the 12-hour day that made the dress  clean or the hands that paid for it. Number three. Childbirth in filth alone with no one coming. Amelia Stewart Knight gave birth to her eighth child on September 17th, 1853. The day after her wagon reached the Columbia River in Oregon.

She had walked and ridden across the entire continent for 5 months, pregnant, caring for seven children. Her diary entry for the birth is two sentences long. Before germ theory reached common practice in the 1880s,  puerperal fever, what they called childbed fever, killed roughly one woman in every eight births in some frontier counties.

 The 1850 through 1870 census mortality schedules recorded as a leading cause of death for women of childbearing age in Western territories. There was no hospital. Often no midwife, no trained doctor within a 100 miles. The delivery happened on the same bed in the same room where the family ate and slept.  If the birth went wrong, a breach, a hemorrhage, there was no intervention.

She lived or she did not. Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair was married at 14 and bore a child at 15 in a remote Oregon cabin. She nearly died. Years later she became a physician specifically because of what she survived and what she watched other women go through. Today, about 700 women die in childbirth each year in the United States and that number is considered a crisis.

On the frontier, it was Tuesday.    Number two. She was not a person under the law. Sir William Blackstone wrote it into English common law and every American territory carried it forward. By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law. That is the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage.

That is not a paraphrase. That is the doctrine of coverture, word for word.    A married woman in the territories could not own property in her own name, could not  sign a contract, could not keep her own wages, could not sue or be sued, could not retain custody of her own children if the marriage ended.

Her husband owned her  labor, her earnings, her inheritance, in legal  terms, her body. New York passed the first Married Women’s Property Act in 1848. Wyoming territory gave women the vote in 1869.  But for the great majority of frontier wives between  1840 and 1880, coverture was the operating law.

A woman who fled a violent husband  had no legal claim to her own children. Every physical horror on this list, the teeth, the vermin, the childbirth, happened inside  a legal cage that said the woman enduring it was not a legal person. She could not leave. She could not own what she built, and she could not protect her children from the man the law said owned them all.

Number one, she buried her own children and then she did it again. The 1850 through 1880 census mortality schedules tell the story in numbers.    Child mortality under the age of five ran between one in four and one in three across many frontier counties. Cholera, dysentery, measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, a scratch that became an infection with no medicine to fight it.

Schlissel’s collected diaries contain entries that are among the most devastating primary documents in American history. A woman on the trail writes a single line, “The baby died this morning.” The next day’s entry records the miles traveled. A mother sewed the burial clothes from her own scraps of fabric.

 A father dug the grave if he was there. If he was not, she dug it herself. On the trail, the grave was beside the road, unmarked or marked with a board that would not last a single season. She walked away from it and kept moving west because the wagon train did not stop for grief. And here is  the truth that sits beneath every other truth on this list.

She was almost always pregnant with the next child while burying the last. No birth control existed, no legal right to refuse her husband under coverture. The cycle was pregnancy, birth, survival, or death of the child, and then pregnancy again. Schlissel found that the average frontier wife bore between seven  and nine children.

Many buried two or three of them before the youngest learned to walk. This is number one. Not because it is the most physically revolting truth on the list, because it is the one the movies could never touch. You can film a dirty kitchen. You can film a sod house full of snakes. You cannot film a woman walking away from a small mound of dirt beside a trail in Nebraska, knowing she will do it again, and  having no power on earth to stop it.

So, who built the legend that hid all of this? Three hands shaped it. First, Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose Little House books were published  in the 1930s and 40s, and edited by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane,    to remove the harshest material. The poverty, the near starvation, the infant death.

The books that taught three generations what a frontier wife looked like were deliberately, carefully softened before they ever reached a reader. Second, Hollywood. From John Ford forward, the frontier wife was a set piece, a face in a window, a woman pouring coffee. Even Gunsmoke ran for 20 years and never once showed what washday cost a woman’s hands.

Third, the culture itself, which decided that the toughness was the story worth telling and that the conditions which demanded it  were too ugly to remember. The sanitizing was not an accident. It was a choice made by publishers and studios and school boards who decided the audience could not handle what the women themselves had lived through and written down in their own handwriting.

So, here is my answer to the question I asked at the start.  The most devastating truth on this list was not the one you could see. It was not the teeth or the chamber pot or the flies in the flower. It was number one. The endless, inescapable cycle of birth and burial inside a legal system that said she was not a person.

That is the truth the legend never told because there is no way to put it on a movie poster or stitch it onto a sunbonnet. Somewhere in Kansas, in Nebraska, in Oregon, there are small graves beside trails that have been plowed under for over a hundred years. The women who dug them left behind a handful of diary pages that nobody was ever supposed to read.

Those pages are the only proof that any of it happened at all. Which truth would you have feared most? Tell me below. And if you want the real story behind another piece of frontier life the movies got wrong, the next one is already waiting for you.